What is Leadership Coaching?

Leadership Development happens in many ways...training, on the job learning, mentoring and increasingly, through a personalized style of learning called executive or leadership coaching. Coaching is a tool that helps leaders develop and hone their ability to learn. It is about meta-learning or learning about our own ability to learn.
Learning refers to the concerted activity that increases the capacity and willingness of individuals, teams, organizations, and communities to acquire and productively apply new knowledge and skills. The ability to learn increases our capacity as individuals to grow and mature and to adapt successfully to change. Learning empowers individuals and organizations to make wise choices about the world around them, to solve problems, and to innovate. It is this kind of learning that is a sustainable, lifelong, renewable process for people, for organizations, and for the communities they serve.
Coaching for leadership development focuses on the discipline of personal mastery. Peter Senge, renowned author, educator, and speaker on learning defines personal mastery as” ...continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience and of seeing reality objectively.” Coaching is a systematic, effective methodology to increase personal mastery, awareness, and performance in leaders. Coaching explicitly supports the learners to help them understand their own learning style and to observe and reflect on what they are learning. Coaching is a collaborative, results-oriented process that engages the learner in identifying their own learning gaps and in finding systematic solutions to address them.
People are primarily engaged in the process of making meaning of the world around them. This effort to understand or make sense of the world is extremely useful. It enables us to understand the past, make sense of the present and, to a degree, predict the future. As we mature, we adopt certain filters, or ways of seeing the world. These ways of making sense or making meaning are useful in some circumstances and potentially limiting in others. Coaching helps to highlight the ways in which we filter information and actively encourages us to incorporate new and diverse perspectives. Coaching helps a leader to consciously nurture meaningful experiences and as a result take meaningful action.
Learning about our own learning requires the active collaboration of both the coach and the leader. The coach’s role is to listen deeply, to encourage, to inquire and to empower leaders to reach their fullest level of capability. The leader’s role is to bring all of their experience and knowledge to the relationship, to be open, and to be willing to make change through deliberate and planned action. Coaching is a powerful tool for people who want to take their leadership to another level...

Do we Need Leaders who Focus on Engagement rather then Vision setting?

In preparation for some upcoming work, I am revisiting my favorite sites for literature and other resources on facilitation and the art of conversation. This has led me through a number of sites and postings that discuss dialogue, conversation, engagement, and whole system processes as approaches to changing the conversation and the way that we make meaning so that we can be open to new possibilities for the future. Many of these articles reflect the belief that the intractable problems of today cannot be solved by the same frameworks that caused these problems in the first place.
In my journey, I happily stumbled upon a document by Peter Block - a well known organizational theorist. In this article (Civic Engagement and Conversation - http://www.peterblock.com/assets/Civic.pdf ) the author states that we need to "...shift our thinking of leadership. The dominant belief system is that the task of leadership is to set a vision, enroll others in it, and hold people accountable through measurements and reward. The shift is to believe that the task of leadership is to produce engagement. To engage groups of people in a way that creates accountability, which is to care for the well being of the whole, and commitment, which is to make and fulfill a promise without expectation of return."
It seems to me that this is a substantial change in how we think about leadership as our society/ culture today is not fond of personal accountability and commitment (we do like these concepts for others though). While the article presents a stirring perspective on engagement and provides many ideas on some tools for engaging, I am left wondering how this shift in viewing leadership would shift our perceptions of the core competencies for a leader who chooses to lead from the place of engagement. My thoughts are that listening (deep listening), being open to what unfolds through the conversations, personal accountability and commitment, deep curiosity, and a rare ability to stay open to what may emerge would be some of the competencies. In fact this seems to be a good fit with Theory U (Uncovering the Blind Spot of Leadership by C. Otto Scharmer) as he writes on the importance of a leaders ability to operate from the future possibility that emerges. It sounds generative and hopeful for those of us who are ready to shift and scary for anyone that has been mentored and is comfortable in an authoritative and command style of leadership.
I am curious to hear from others as they reflect on their assumptions, practices and hopes for their own leadership and the leadership of others.

Complex Challenges and the need to Transform our Thinking

As I read different materials for work that I am engaged in, I am often struck by how the different ideas complement one another. A friend of mine recently sent me some material from a book (Community Conversations by Paul Born). In an introductory paragraph, the author names a challenge: the issues facing communities and those at risk are complex - and yet the system yields simplistic solutions. In a textbook for executive coaches ( Ed. Fitzgerald and Garvey Berger, 2002 Executive Coaching Practices & Perspectives) an overview is given of Robert Kegan's adult development model and summarizes its essence as follows: "Kegan distinguishes between informational learning, which is new knowledge added to the current from of one's mind, and transformational learning, or learning that changes the very form of one's mind, making it more spacious, more complex, and more able to deal with multiple demands and with uncertainty...transformation occurs when we develop the ability to step back and reflect on something that used to be hidden or taken for granted and make decision about it....transformative learning happens when someone changes "not just they way he behaves, not just the way he feels, but the way he knows - not just what he knows but the way he knows". "
My conclusion is that transformational learning will prepare our minds for the complex challenges we are facing. To address the complex challenges that exist in our world, in our communities, and in our organizations, I need to be open to transformative learning experiences. The question then becomes how do each of us do this - find and engage in transformative learning experiences. The imperative certainly seems to be present!

Employee Engagement and Corporate Social Responsibility

The following is an excerpt from this weekend's Globe and Mail (October 31, 2009, The business section, page B18).
...More than half of Canadians would be willing to accept a pay cut or a lesser job title in order to work for an organization with a sound corporate reputation a poll by staffing company Kelly Services has found. A company’s ethical behavior was cited as an important factor in deciding where to work by 97% of the 7,000 surveyed (!), with 53% saying they would take a pay cut to work for an employer with a reputation for caring about employees and the community. And 91% per cent said they would consider an employer’s efforts to reduce global warming when choosing a career. The percentages were nearly identical in all age groups. The findings indicate that “employees take pride not only in what they do while at work but in what they do while at work, but in what their organization stands for and how it is perceived by the entire community”, says Kelly vice-president and Canadian managing director Karin French.
It appears to be increasingly critical for an organization to examine it's business practices and the alignment with corporate social responsibility in order to be attractive to employees. Success in this area, we believe, is linked to the development of the organizations leaders.
What is your experience - does your organization retain you because of their corporate social responsiblity?