In 2008, I spoke with two groups of business leaders that I coach on the topic, “What should we be doing now to weather the down economy?” Seven ideas received broad support:
Stay in touch with your center and manage your outlook.
Get busy with personal, executive-to-executive selling.
Why plan? So much changes, so many things are unforeseen. The world is unpredictable and out of our control. The people we depend upon are fallible and have free will. There is no telling what they will do, how they will react to us.
Any airliner spends most of each trip off course and pointed in the wrong direction. Wind, weather, and traffic are constantly diverting the vessel from the perfect path. Rather than being discouraged by the impossibility of staying on course, the pilot and the instruments are continually working to compensate for these random and unforeseeable influences. After a trip of “unplanned” but expected diversions, airliners almost always arrive at their intended destinations. What would be the result if the pilot did not declare where and when he would land? How would he react to the distractions and diversions? Would you buy a ticket on that plane? Rather, could that pilot enroll you in his project?
You have many choices each day–even if they don’t seem like choices–and a consistent target will give you a ready reference for making those choices. Your plan is useful not because it is a description of what will happen, but because it provides a reference point to evaluate and respond to the inevitable circumstances that differ from the plan.
Planning is not Predicting.
The value of a plan is not as a guarantee that things will happen exactly as you expected, but that when the unexpected does -inevitably- occur, you can notice and respond to the deviation.
The following is an excerpt from: STARTUP by Jerry Kaplan
…I first learned the truth about scientific progress from my Ph.D. dissertation advisor at the University of Pennsylvania.
A shy Indian man with a shiny, balding head and an occasional stutter, Dr. Joshi was widely known for his brilliant work in artificial intelligence. Our weekly meetings to help me find a thesis topic were more like therapy sessions than academic discussions. Most of the time he would (more…)
Most of my CEO executive coaching clients have detailed, measurable goals. We use them as navigational aids, comparing interim results with plans and expectations, to help the client make adjustments to their attitudes and activity. I was in the midst of one such review when the client took the conversation in a novel and fruitful direction.
I asked, “Have you looked into that club for sharing exotic sports cars we discussed?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, ” he responded. “Why (more…)
My executive coaching clients often ask how to translate their new insights into regular practice so that the benefit of the coaching is integrated into their lives. This is crucial since the adult executives I coach have well established and largely successful habits that are expressed automatically.
How do we make new strategies and methods just as habitual? One of my favorite techniques is the traveling pennies.
Is there a practice you and your coach have developed that you want to make a part of your life? Perhaps you choose to center three times per day, express gratitude more often, or ask a clarifying question before responding to an inquiry. Here’s how to “operationalize” your good intentions.
I developed this talk for the initial meeting of executive coaching groups to prepare them for the slow, sometimes difficult aspects of their work. I have used it many times to great effect when launching teams into other long-term projects. Some of my coaching clients have even adapted it for their own presentations.
I found more evidence of just how much we lost when Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch died. Today, while revising my executive coaching materials on goal setting and time management, a colleague mentioned that Randy Pausch was most proud of his talk on time management.
We are in the midst of a famine,
a prolonged, widespread deficit of a resource
essential to life: productive time.
Pausch’s talk is a thorough and entertaining presentation of the essentials and I highly recommend it for my executive coaching clients (though I can not agree with every suggestion). You may have heard much of it before, but Professor Pausch’s celebrity, good humor, and excellent example give it tremendous impact. You will do something different and better as a result of watching.
Highlights
• Record and priority rank your tasks to reduce stress
• Batch your tasks, questions, and communications by person
• Schedule blocks of time adequate for the task
• Avoid interruptions and distractions
The video and the PowerPoint slides, along with lots of other Pausch material, are available here.
Watching this talk may leave you with a big question, especially if the advice is familiar. “Why am I not doing these things despite the knowing that they work?” That gap, the mystery between what we know and what we practice, is my domain: executive coaching.
Reason is what tells us to ignore the present and live in the future. So all we do is make plans. We think that somewhere there are going to be greener pastures. It’s crazy. Heaven is nothing but a grand, monumental instance of the future.
A wonderful–and apparently unique–skill we humans have is the ability to weave the recalled events of the past and the imagined events of the future into a meaningful story. Tragically, we are often the victims of this skill though we could be its master. Most of us spend more time in this story of memory and speculation than we do in our present experience. We overlook “now” as we endlessly evade the present by engaging in regret, worry, or hope.
I saw a small example of this recently in my CEO executive coaching group. One member mentioned that (more…)
When the same topic comes up during two teleclasses for executive coaches, I give it detailed consideration. What are the ethics of coaching a client toward producing a specific result that will have direct, significant impact on the coach’s personal finances. At first, I felt okay making an agreement to share in my client’s increased sales, profits, stock price, etc. I was also comfortable with making my fee contingent upon the client producing a particular result.
I am now sure that is a bad idea.
“…to make a statement about ends that do not justify all means is to speak in paradoxes, the definition of an end being precisely the justification of the means”
I shifted my opinion during the second teleclass. I saw that if I, as an executive coach, become attached to a particular tangible outcome, whether it affects my compensation or not, I will be taken away from executive coaching toward some sort of manipulation. The coach would (more…)
I have been repeatedly surprised to hear from many of my CEO executive coaching clients that, of all the many skills needed for the top job, one area where they often readily admit weakness is in financial insight. They rely on their accountants or a “numbers geek” to watch and even interpret company results. A fundamental reason for this blind spot is, I believe, that so many CEOs are highly visual, intuitive thinkers. Rows of precise digits are not their preferred form of communication. It is essential, therefore, to display financial and quantitative data visually to have it used and absorbed by these executives.
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