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Progress! First-Class Leadership E-Zine - Issue No. 1/ January 2006

Dear Reader,

What are your New Year's resolutions?

This year I purposely didn't make any. Instead, I followed the advice of a marketing specialist to develop a compelling vision for 2006. He suggested asking yourself two questions:

1. How do you want to feel about 2006 by the end of the year?
2. What will you have by the end of this year?

I decided to do this exercise with my associate, Sebastien Henry, and it was indeed a very encouraging two hours of work.   Still, we could hardly finish the exercise in the given time and therefore decided to refine it further over the next days.

Then, a few days later, I read the suggestion of a fellow coach here in Hong Kong. She also suggested not to make New Year's resolutions in the traditional sense, but to ask yourself this question: "Who do you want to be in 2006?"

Indeed an interesting approach and perhaps more difficult to determine than the more hands-on suggestion of the marketing specialist. Of course these approaches are not mutually exclusive, so I decided to keep thinking about the coach's question also.

Who will you be this year? How will you feel and what will you have ?

Let's keep progressing!

Charlie Lang
Executive Coach and Founder of Progress-U Ltd.
Author of The Groupness Factor

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Series: The Purpose of Executive Coaching [Part VI of VI]
By Charlie Lang

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Making Great Choices and Decisions - Every Day

If you are a senior executive, you probably reached this level because you are a person who is willing to make decisions...and perhaps you are rather good at it.

So take a minute or two to think about how you generally make decisions.

Ask yourself the following questions. How willing are you to take risks? How much time do you spend in analyzing facts? How often do you involve other people in your decision making process? Who are the people - if any - you typically involve? Colleagues? Subordinates? Your superior? Perhaps even outsiders like your spouse or trusted friends?

Thought about it?

The higher up you are in management, the more difficult it seems to let other people get involved in your decision making process. This is true for several reasons:

•  The higher your position, the higher are the expectations of your own ability to make good decisions;

•  The higher your position, the more you might feel that it is your duty to make decisions by yourself and that it is not acceptable especially for major decisions to involve your subordinates; and

•  The higher your position, the more complex the criteria to be considered in the decision making process, i.e. less and less people will actually be competent enough to understand this complexity. This could be true for peers as well as for outsiders like friends or partners.

It is easy to anticipate that if one person needs to make decisions largely by herself/himself, the quality of the decisions becomes harder to maintain. Bias and blind spots combined with a lack of reflection with a competent 'mirror' often lead to poor decisions, especially by top executives.

What can be done?

If you lack reliable feedback and feed-forward partners, a competent and experienced executive coach can help. Provided that the coach has sufficient corporate management experience and the necessary coaching competence , options for important decisions can be discussed with and challenged by the coach.

Let me give you an example. One of my clients, the managing director of a medium sized company, was struggling for several months with the performance of one of his managers, a single lady in her mid-30's. While she had a lot of good qualities, like excellent product knowledge and the ability to build good rapport with colleagues and customers, there was a problem with her working attitude. She left the office everyday at around 6.30 pm, i.e. the end of her regular work time.

While this company does not have a culture of requiring its employees to stay very late, it is expected especially from the managers to stay longer occasionally if the business requires it.

Several discussions with the manager didn't lead to any substantial change. The managing director started to fear that her behavior would impact on the overall morale of his organization.

So the question was: do we keep her or make her redundant?

During our coaching session we further analyzed the issue and the behavior of this manager. While in the beginning it seemed that this attitude was rooted in her belief that working longer hours wouldn't bring any benefits for her, it later turned out that having sufficient free time for private activities was a core value for her. Any incentives to stay longer were not effective in changing her attitude because her personal values were much stronger.

It also turned out that other related values like "life should be easy at all times" were not exactly aligned with the corporate values of this company, to say the least.

Since changing someone's personal values is a very difficult task, almost an impossible one in a corporate setting, the answer to the question of whether or not to keep this manager became crystal clear.

Summary: Continuous coaching is particularly useful for executives in top management positions as they often lack any effective feedback systems. An experienced and competent executive coach can help such executives avoid or at least minimize wrong decisions that can prove expensive.

For more information related to Progress-U Leadership Coaching please visit click here.

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Charlie Lang is an Executive Coach and Trainer who founded Progress-U Limited in 2002. His mission is to develop his clients to become First-Class Leaders. He is a passionate and professional Executive Coach, Mentor Coach, Trainer, Public Speaker and Author of articles related to leadership, change management and innovative sales. In 2004, he initiated the Master Coach Alliance in Hong Kong, a network of professional Life, Business and Corporate Coaches. End of 2004, he started authoring a book on First-Class Leadership which was published in August 2005. Copyright 2002-2006 Progress-U Limited