Fast-paced, funny, and smart. This novel puts you into the world of a young MBA striving to succeed at a famous high-tech company. Brash and confident yet comically inept, Tony clashes with colleagues, clients, and even his biggest supporters.
He fires his most loyal employee, derails the career of his only friend, and nearly destroys his young marriage before transforming from chilly corporate collaborator to empathetic executive coach. Laugh and learn as his clients turn criminal, corporations collapse, and compassion triumphs.
It should be as much the aim of those who seek for social-betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence.
–Theodore Roosevelt, 1901
A veteran executive coach draws on his years inside Arthur Andersen, Wall Street, and MCI to share a moving story that explains why your 401k shrank, your house is underwater, and your job stinks. The comedy and conflict illustrate management methods and personal practices that can improve your career and deepen your personal relationships.
I was very pleased to see an international expert on software development express the following clear insights into the types of workplaces my executive coaching seeks to foster.
Visionaries are designing organizations for collaboration. These firms remove the bottlenecks imposed by the strict hierarchies of the past. [In hierarchical firms] no one was being rewarded for taking the kind of risks that lead to innovation or other breakthroughs in performance which thrive in a climate of collaboration.
Knowledge workers spend a large proportion of their time seeking information, much of the rest making sense of what they’ve found, and relatively little time in applying what they now know.
Transitioning from a hierarchical way of working … requires letting go of habitual behaviors that may have worked well in the hierarchy, but no longer serve anyone when collaboration becomes a critical part of the work process. …
[The result is] … humanized work with an emphasis on mastery of our craft, a focus on rapid learning and feedback, delivery of business value (sooner not faster), and close connection to customer needs (even ones the customers’ haven’t noticed yet). …
— Diana Larsen on Agile Fluency, Barriers to Agility & the value of Open Space Technology in InfoQ
Participating effectively in trade shows and conferences requires significant investment of time and treasure. I always encourage my clients to do only as many as they can afford to do thoroughly. What does “thoroughly” mean?
Essentially, have a plan and a purpose. Start early, months before the conference. Have the right people at the conference with the time, attention, and resources necessary to work the plan. Be ready to follow up after the conference. Everyone returns from these with lots of ideas and good intentions that whither the first day back at the office. It’s up to you to pick up the thread and maintain the momentum.
Have a clear goal or purpose that is consistent with your marketing message and sales targets. One way to formulate the goal is to answer the question, “If I (more…)
From the moment I could talk,
I was told that I should listen.
–Cat Stevens Father and Son
I assume that you already know and do not need to be convinced that:
Your most profitable sales and easiest growth come from existing clients.1
Unhappy customers are 5-20 times more likely to tell others about their bad experience than satisfied customers are to spread good news.2
A simple, high-return method of learning from your happy and unhappy customers, of knowing your customers better while making them more loyal to you is to listen to them. Customers are people and people love being listened to.
If you listen closely enough, your customers will explain your business to you.
The problem is that consumer recording equipment is unshielded; cell phones, fluorescent lights, etc. radiate energy that can induce a current that becomes noise. My solution is to use professional equipment with laptop recording software. It is more money and trouble, but the quality is very high.
Step 1: Get a mic mixer for the PC, so that you can use professional mics. I prefer the ones that plug into the USB or FIREWIRE port so that I can bypass the internal sound card. Others connect to the “LINE IN” jack of your sound card, if it has one (not the computer’s MIC jack).
I no longer use the M-Audio MobilePre USB – 2 Channel USB Mic Preamp with XLR and 1/8″ Stereo Miniplug Mic Inputs
I changed to the Lexicon Lambda just because it works under Vista and Windows 7 (and, WIndows 10).
Here is a complete toolkit for implementing one of my most powerful and versatile techniques, The Conversation Contract™. Leading psychologist Thomas Harris, author of the bestselling I’m OK–You’re OK, developed the basic process to help people conduct the most important and stressful conversations in their lives. I have refined it over the past fifteen years in my work with salespeople, managers, government officials, and CEOs to its present form. You can use it for better meetings, telephone calls, and family interactions.
Start with this video and reinforce your skills with the printouts linked below. You may also want to use my 12 Step Program for productive confrontation by clicking here, Conversations that Make a Difference.
For a group of people to work smoothly together, each member must understand what constitutes agreement. This understanding is often left in the background, unexamined, as everyone assumes their standards match those of other people. Fundamental to the success of the executive off sites I conduct is helping the group make these assumptions explicit so that everyone is playing by the same rules. If, in fact, everyone has the same standards, we finish this step quickly. If not, time invested early to clarify the ground rules saves a lot of time (and upset) later.
There are two essential parts: clarity and verity. First, everyone must be clear on what is being agreed. Second, the group needs a way to know if agreement has been reached.
I heard one CEO executive coaching client summarize the tremendous value of his coach’s listening and probing by saying, “This is where I come to get my answers questioned.” Top executives, especially those operating in a strong corporate culture, can find themselves in an echo chamber where everyone seems to be saying the same thing, thereby confusing their mutual agreement with reality. It is the most “obvious” assumptions that most severely constrict our thinking.
Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here,” he started, and everyone nodded their heads in agreement. “Then,” he went on, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until the next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement, and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”
An executive coach once asked me, “Is it ever appropriate to interrupt while your client is speaking?” My response is, “Yes,” for the following reasons:
There are some clients who just will not stop. If I do not interrupt they will talk to exhaustion. Often, they are talking about or around the issue and filling the bandwidth to subtly avoid dealing with the issue.
Sometimes I sense that the client is so immersed in the minutia that they have lost their point–and, often, are boring themselves, too.
The client may be demonstrating exactly the behavior that is keeping them locked in the situation we are working to release, so an interruption pointing to the behavior is the way to free the client. My interruption sometimes takes the form of, “You’re doing it right now.” or “Do you recognize that speaking in this way is exactly what keeps it the way it is?”
Still, I am certain that a big part of my value is intense, patient, appreciative listening. I can’t go too far wrong by listening a little “too long.” For coaches, silence really is golden. As one client told me, “I appreciate the way you let silence do the heavy lifting.”
Solid, basic advice on better business meetings from a business psychologist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business is here in a column Reid Hastie wrote for the New York Times. Key pointers:
Set Explicit Objectives
Consider Opportunity Costs
Grade the Convener
I would add:
Use a Professional Facilitator (If the stakes are high enough).
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I assume that you already know and do not need to be convinced that:
An executive coach once asked me, “Is it ever appropriate to interrupt while your client is speaking?” My response is, “Yes,” for the following reasons:
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