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This short podcast describes an important step in the growth of business owners and other leaders, moving beyond the urge to control and micro-manage every action toward acting with confidence in your team and your own ability to respond to every eventuality.
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Facts are useful. Opinions help, too. Knowing one from the other will help you get more work done with more people. Here’s why.
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A quick message from an executive coach on how to get people to follow you and take appropriate actions.
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Click here for links to the companion articles mentioned in the presentation.
The following transcript is included mostly for the search engines. If you want to read along with the video, just turn on the YouTube subtitles.
Watch me lob a softball question to Steven Pinker at the Mercatus Center. I come in after just a few seconds…
[J. L. Austin speech acts, John Searle social world, Whorf hypothesis]
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
Only one but the light bulb must truly want to change.
How many executive coaches does it take to change a light bulb?
Executive coaches know better than to change anyone. Clients don’t need more changes. They want more and better choices.
The distinction between therapy and executive coaching was established early and is important to respect. The International Coach Federation states it clearly, “Coaching is forward moving and future focused. Therapy, on the other hand, deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or a relationship between two or more individuals.” Therapists discover what’s wrong and fix it. Coaches nurture what’s right and unleash it. Fundamental to my executive coaching is, “The most powerful stance for effective action is: I’m fine and I choose to try something else.” As Carl Rogers emphasized, growth requires a safe environment. If the adviser’s job is to find the client’s flaws and errors, he must adopt an attitude of detachment and superiority. On the other hand, great executive coaches have so much respect and admiration for their clients that I can’t help loving mine.
The differences between fixing people and respecting them, between finding problems and generating possibilities, between change and choice, between labeling and loving, between consulting and coaching make all the difference in the world.
The new chapter is a simple, practical guide to building better relationships at work and at home. The focus of the book is the importance of compassion and authenticity, while this new section is all about implementation, with specific advice on how to be compassionate and authentic in your day-to-day life.
This expanded edition also includes links to recommended books and articles for further study and practice.
Audio version read by Tony Mayo also available.
Comments from Listeners
“Powerful, simple message we can all immediately apply to our lives.”
“More of an invitation than a sermon, the message is not religious in nature and the message is universal. Tony leaves us with an opportunity to live richer, more expressive lives.”
“Covers a lot of meaningful ground in a handful of pages – brings together courage, bravery, belonging, acceptance, compassion and more–and backs it up with insights, experience, resources, and references!”
“You did not speak just to fill the time; each sentence added to the whole.”
“Tony, I have it on good authority that your sermon this last Sunday was about the best ever.”
“We were inspired by what you shared and how you shared it. Thank you.”
by Tony Mayo
The word courage originally meant “to speak and act from the heart,” or cour in Latin. Courage is required to express our deepest and most authentic selves because we so often fear judgment, rejection and exclusion. How do we balance the universal human needs of authenticity and acceptance in our personal lives? How might we foster communities where others have the courage to be truly themselves with us?
Executive Coach Tony Mayo drew on the research of Brené Brown, Joseph Campbell, and others to compose this enthusiastically received non-sectarian sermon. Originally delivered to the Unitarian Universalist Church in Reston at their Sunday services on January 26, 2014, it has now has been revised and expanded for publication.
Crimes of Cunning exposes the roots of the worst practices common in today’s big company cultures. Enjoy the ride as his characters cope, complain, and —ultimately— grow.
– Robbe Richman
Co-founder of Zappos Insights
& author of Culture Blueprint
“Give as few orders as possible,” his father Duke Leto had told him… once… long ago. “Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.”
—Dune by Frank Herbert
p. 628 Penguin Publishing Group
Here is a simple habit that can boost productivity in your organization. One client credits this technique for an 18% increase in annual revenue with a reduced headcount. It takes practice but quickly becomes second nature.
I brought this method into the workplace from my flight training. Pilots and air traffic controllers (ATC) must communicate precisely and briefly while also executing specialized tasks. Misunderstandings in aircraft can have horrible consequences, so specific communication techniques are required. Many of the most serious accidents are caused by failure to follow these practices, including the 1977’s Tenerife Airport Disaster, commercial aviation’s deadliest incident.
Talk may be cheap but miscommunication is costly.
Have you ever listened to the (more…)
Too many jobs are perfectly constructed to elicit inhumane behavior. Read my book to learn how it got this way.
The most fundamental lesson of our study:
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.
Even when asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
—Professor Stanley Milgram, PhD
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View
Perennial Classics 2009 p. 6.
Professor Milgram was responsible for two psychological studies that became well-known by the general public while having almost no positive influence on government or corporate structures, the “administer a painful shock” compliance experiment and the “Small World” six degrees of separation demonstration.
Tony has been instrumental in my transition to a department head. His guidance and support has helped me better structure my department, and become a better mentor and leader for my team. I would highly recommend Tony and look forward to checking in with him throughout my career.
—Anais Eslami
Marketing Manager
Apex Home Loans
I am pleased and flattered that my clients, Chris Haddon and Jason Balin, gave specific, detailed credit to me and some of my techniques in their new book, The Whiteboard: Go From Blank Canvas to a Productive, Leveraged and Highly-Profitable Business. Here is just one paragraph.
We sought out our executive coach, Tony, to show us the most strategic, effective way to design our success. A business coach will help you make the right moves at that right times consistently; it’s a precise recipe for getting ahead. Our decision to partner with an executive coach has been a very fruitful investment. By working with Tony, we were able to meet our ten-year business goal in three years. That’s the power of having an expert help you structure your decisions and career movements on a regular basis. Having a career coach isn’t a luxury; it’s smart business and smart living.
Does your job trigger primitive survival instincts? My book presents alternatives.
Those best equipped to compete mercilessly for food, ward off any threat, dominate territory, and seek safety naturally passed along their genes, so these self-centered impulses could only intensify. But sometime after mammals appeared, they evolved what neuroscientists call the limbic system, perhaps about 120 million years ago. Formed over the core brain derived from the reptiles, the limbic system motivated all sorts of new behaviors, including the protection and nurture of young as well as the formation of alliances with other individuals that were invaluable in the struggle to survive. And so, for the first time, sentient beings possessed the capacity to cherish and care for creatures other than themselves.
Although these limbic emotions would never be as strong as the ‘me first’ drives still issuing from our reptilian core, we humans have evolved a substantial hard-wiring for empathy for other creatures, and especially for our fellow humans.
–Karen Armstrong
Fields of Blood and the History of Violence
Knopf, 2014 page 7
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