Executive Coaching, Leadership
Welcome to our series: Executive Coaching . The Inside View with Barry Pogorel
Promoting from within has its own pitfalls for all concerned, especially so for senior management, charged with leading a company full of uniquely gifted and challenged people.
Must those pitfalls trap you? This case study may echo one you’ve seen up close… or lived yourself.
A CEO’s Dilemma
The Chairman of a global company contacted me. He said that he was looking for the company’s next President.
His top performing executive had asked for the job. This man was his most effective EVP, however, at the same time was a significant liability. The executive produced outstanding results in developing new business. When developing a project, however, he would do whatever it took to make it happen internally.
Although many people appreciated him, and were even in awe of him, they also feared him. He would threaten, cajole, pressure, force whomever and however across the company to get what he wanted. He moved quickly, decisively, and was frustrated and impatient when others didn’t do the same or had objections or issues with what he wanted. Finally, and this was the last straw, he told the Chairman that if he wasn’t made President in short order, he would leave the company and go to a competitor.
The Chairman told me that if he promoted this man, many people in the company would call and say, “Are you out of your mind?!” The Chairman asked me if I could “make him into a president.” I said that that depended on whether he was coachable and willing to deal with the issues the Chairman and others saw and wanted resolved. I proposed to meet with the man and find out.
In our first meeting, I instantly liked him. I could see that his commitment and brilliance was dimmed by his forcefulness and impatience. He told me he was interested in executive coaching and was open to discovering how he could function differently. He expressed genuine excitement to have the opportunity to develop himself as a leader. Although he didn’t entirely agree with the Chairman’s assessment of him, he saw there were some points that were valid. We began to work together.
Can You Tame a Talent from Rough to Ready?
In the course of our coaching sessions he discovered something profound in looking at his past. Oftentimes the biggest barrier to achieving what we most care about is our own past and the life-altering decisions we’ve made (and now are unaware of).
In looking at the origins of his impatience and forcefulness, he remembered a morning when he was a child. His mother sat him, his brother and sister down and cried for a few moments, and then said that she and their father were going to divorce, that their dad had a new job in England and would be living there. He recalled being shocked, scared, and confused. He also remembered thinking to himself: “I don’t have a dad anymore. No one’s going to protect us. I have to do things all by myself.” He became a solo force in the world. To others, this manifested as a one-man, independent power with great impatience to get things done.
This was the origin of his bull-in-a-china-shop behavior.
Some insights are merely theoretical. Other insights gained through self-reflection are deep and life-altering. This insight produced a breakthrough and he felt released. His effectiveness in producing results was undiminished, while at the same time he began collaborating with people, listening to others, inspiring and moving people into action rather than threatening/forcing them.
A Revolutionary Result:
Within 6 months, the Chairman appointed him President.
Out of our work together, my clients gain the key insights required to liberate them from whatever is constraining or limiting, and they achieve what they aspire to.
Your comments and questions are invited. about this post or any issues you’d like to see in the series.
You may also want to visit “How to Choose the Right Executive Coach” for a winning approach to selecting the right coach for yourself.
Executive Coaching
Welcome to the first post in our newest series: Executive Coaching . The Inside View with Barry Pogorel
Every executive wonders whether they can achieve what they are expected to accomplish.
Expectations come from others — a board of directors, shareholders, the senior management team as a whole, employees, even the public—, and can be very specific.
Expectations also come from within oneself, though these are often elusive and not easy to identify, yet powerfully present as well.
For both new and seasoned senior executives, the mountain gets steeper and more challenging the higher they climb. This often brings up the question of whether coaching, and outside perspective and expertise is what’s needed.
In this series, we will explore real life examples of people and circumstances that Barry has coached. Yes, names and organizations will remain confidential, as all of Barry’s clients enjoy, yet you may often recognize yourself vividly throughout the series.
Let’s begin with this group…
The Wild Bunch
This team was like The Wild Bunch. 90% of the team were PhD’s in computer science. They were bright, fiercely independent, loved computer science, didn’t fully trust others on the team although they generally liked each other, prided themselves in listening to others and didn’t really hear others without judging and evaluating, and were fixed-opinionated about most topics. Eight were men, two were women. The women felt a bit marginalized and discounted and that they didn’t have the room to fully express themselves. The men (secretly) considered themselves superior to the women, more logical and practical, and less emotional which they considered a good thing. Everyone was extremely busy and felt they could never catch up.
The leader of the team looked like he had his hands full: a bit disheveled, worn out, and worried. Every team member liked him, respected him. He would walk into a meeting with his team with a fully prepared agenda and timeline. Rarely was the agenda met or the timeline kept. Team members often left meetings a bit frustrated, some wondering why they had to be in that meeting since topics discussed didn’t pertain to them, or why it took so long, or wondering what was accomplished. The leader was generally in a state of frustration.
I coached them as a group. We explored: listening powerfully, letting go of and being free from the past, self-reflecting on their automatic responses to real or imagined threats and their formulaic solutions and approaches versus real freedom to be and create, integrity, authenticity, straight talk that made a difference, what it took to trust each other, the protocols for effective and efficient meetings, how to create a shared future with goals and milestones that they were all inspired and excited by, and how to interact across the organization with other groups to gain their cooperation and collaboration. Every member felt respected, heard, appreciated, and of equal value, men and women alike.
A Revolutionary Result:
The team was transformed. They became a team of aligned, collaborative leaders. They produced the highest level of results they’d ever achieved. The CEO acknowledged them as “a seamless team, the star of the company, and the engine of the company’s growth”.
Your comments and questions are invited. about this post or any issues you’d like to see in the series.
You may also want to visit “How to Choose the Right Executive Coach” for a winning approach to selecting the right coach for yourself.
Corporate Consulting, Executive Coaching, Leadership
I just typed in “leadership” on amazon.com and found over 200,000 entries! Google has over 4 million.
It seems that everyone has something to say about leadership. And yet looking at the world today, from business to government, leadership is missing. What’s more, it is missing that it is missing. More information, strategies, characteristics, styles to copy don’t make a leader. A new approach is required.
From the content of our “Being a Leader” Course Part I:
The Four Foundational Factors of being a leader are
- Integrity
- Authenticity
- Being up to something bigger than oneself
- Cause in the matter
We promise
You will leave the course being a leader and exercising leadership effectively as your natural self-expression, in any leadership situation and no matter the circumstances.
Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership
An Ontological/Phenomenological Model
- Ontology: study of the nature of being
- Phenomenology: study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience.
— Los Angeles, August 2018 *
* Please inquire for upcoming dates.
Corporate Consulting, Executive Coaching, High Performance Teams, Leadership
WHAT YOU MASTER | From Idea to Impact: Inspiration in Action
In our work together, you discover the levers and dials of creating Revolutionary Results: the science of translating an idea, even an Impossibility—a breakthrough—into reality.
This begins with a Reinvention of yourself in the following sense: What got you to where you are now—your legacy ways of thinking, planning, and action—circumscribe the domain of “what is possible” for you. How strange that your greatest strengths are at the same time your greatest limitations!
Reinventing yourself means to identify these habitual approaches, putting them aside, and discovering a world of new of possibilities and actions that enable you to produce something Revolutionary. Suddenly the present and future become malleable and the scope of what can happen expands.
And, the Reinvention of an organization, of a team, begins with the Reinvention of its leaders first. The next level repeats the individual Reinvention at the level of group and organization. What are the legacy, cultural ways of thinking, planning, and acting? Identifying and then putting these aside, what Impossibilities will you take on as a team, as a company? Imagine releasing the brilliance of an entire group or enterprise, aimed at some Revolutionary result?
We call this a Science for this reason: my approach is a rigorous, reliable method for accomplishment. After we put aside the past-based strategies that you/your team/your organization have used, we then discover the tools, principles, and laws of Revolutionary Performance.
We use the word Discovery in this sense: what you discover for yourself belongs to you. It has a different value, utility, and power when it is yours.
So our method, our approach is the Discovery of the Science of Accomplishing the Revolutionary.
— Barry
Let’s talk about your own possibilities. Remember, your inquiry is always confidential.
