Preface

In my years in leadership development-first in traditional corporate training, then as an early practitioner in the emerging field of leadership coaching, and ultimately as an entrepreneur working to make leadership coaching accessible at much greater scale-I've seen and experienced a lot of change.

And I've encouraged change, too. Today's work world is so different from the one I started in that it requires an entirely different and much more dynamic mindset to succeed. If you try to develop leaders the way it was done 30 years ago, you won't get far.

Everyone knows this. But to a shocking degree, many organizations and managers stick to old assumptions and practices. Maybe most of all, they still assume that there is some single answer or set of answers that will work for every developing leader, in every context. It's an almost industrial-era mindset that's completely out of sync with the modern world. Yet it stubbornly hangs on.

But part of what drew me to coaching in the first place was the realization that this isn't true. An effective coach doesn't tell you what to do. Rather, an effective coach functions as a sounding board, or what I sometimes call a thinking partner, who helps you decide what to do, based on your context, by offering fresh and often challenging perspectives. An effective coach is not focused on procedure or applying the same leadership approach to every client. An effective coach is focused on outcome and results that coachees arrive at in their own way.

There's an art to this, as you'll see in the pages ahead, but for now just know that it goes beyond a one-size-fits-all methodology following prescribed steps in a certain order. By design, this approach is much more fluid-almost a conversation of thinking.

This willfully flexible, responsive approach is exactly why coaching has proven so effective. For years, top executives knew that effectiveness, because they were the only ones with access to it. But that's changing. In fact, that's the change I'm encouraging, through my career and, now, through this book.

The Spirit of a Coaching Engagement

There is most certainly a tried and tested methodology guiding the arc of a successful coaching engagement-and I've built this book to reflect and echo that arc. Think of the 12 chapters as 12 coaching sessions, each building on the last.

To help capture that flavor, each chapter/session begins with a snippet of coach-coachee dialogue that sets up what's about to be explored. And each ends with a set of provocative suggestions for further exploration. That reflects the way I conclude a session in real life: We cover a lot of territory, but it needs to end with what you make of it, discussing what's sticking, how it's shaping your point of view, what you are going to do about it.

This may sound like an untraditional approach for a book-but that's the point. I wrote this book because it is time to break with the old assumption that what works for one emerging leader works for all emerging leaders. We can't keep doing things the way they've "always" been done in an environment that has not only radically changed but that will keep on changing. What we need is not another prefab set of supposedly universal "rules," but, rather, the nimbleness and openness to respond to an environment in which the rules are changing all the time.

That's why this book is intentionally shaped so that it speaks to, and can be read from, multiple perspectives. Ideas about this new thinking on leadership development are examined, and their implications and opportunities explored, from several angles: a coach's point of view, an employee's point of view, and an organizational point of view.

Depending on who you are, where you are in your career, and what your context is, this book will-like a good coaching cycle-engage you in different ways. I hope you'll embrace that. What we're offering here is not a presentation; it's an informed and challenging conversation. That's where leadership development is headed, and there's no turning back.

This book is intentionally shaped so that it speaks to, and can be read from, multiple perspectives.

Coaching is not only about doing, and it's definitely not about following a universal series of steps. Certainly coaching is focused on results and outcomes, but it's also about helping people to increase self-awareness, as well as coaxing them into new ways of thinking, all the while modeling how to deal with the unknown, with ambiguity, with the undeveloped space that leads to innovative thinking. In this book, sometimes I am telling and explaining, sometimes I am coaxing, and sometimes I am just helping people get comfortable with an unpredictable world. It's a balance, because this is not a self-help book. Yet sometimes I can offer ideas that can help people help themselves.

In that spirit, I'll sketch where we're headed from here.

What's Ahead

A productive coaching engagement starts with identifying the Big Leap that the coachee wants-or perhaps needs-to make. This is counterintuitive to some, who expect things to start with a lot of delving into what got the leader to this point. But it's actually better to focus on the future, and set the stakes, right away. Often, coachees are taken aback at the immediate challenge. And that's the idea.

Getting clarity on the Big Leap is a vital step, but of course it's only the first step. It's seldom, if ever, possible to offer a specific roadmap for the arc of a coaching engagement, but the rest of Part I of the book follows the theme of this chapter: figuring out how to make a Big Leap that is personalized to the individual and uniquely theirs, and still appropriate to the twenty-first-century workplace.

So, far starters: Out with the old. Breaking out of old patterns is always key to real change, so we'll delve into what that means for cultivating leaders at all levels, whether at big, established firms, or brand-new start-ups. Too much management practice today is based on thinking developed as far back as the 1950s. It's time to figure out what to hang on to-and what to discard.

The next step is to confront an eternal theme that's often ignored: Chances are, what you are doing now isn't creating what you want. That's why you-whether you're in HR, a manager, a CEO, a coachee, or a coach-need to focus on sorting out what you want. What you really, really want. And that may well mean embracing unpredictability and ambiguity.

This means learning to deal with resistance: from your organization or from yourself. Everyone is familiar with the feeling (or the colleague's excuse that "This always worked for me before" or "I don't know what else to do!"). The key is breaking through to new ways of thinking, and one framework for doing so is learning the difference between horizontal and vertical development models. You'll learn why to seek community-not "family." And you'll see why what matters is alignment-not uniformity.

The book's second section echoes the middle sessions of a coaching engagement: a crucial period, when the coachee can fall into the trap of feeling they've made changes, but most of those changes are (so far) superficial. It's in these sessions that the engagement must deepen, recommitting to a true Big Leap.

This flows directly into cycles of new actions and new behaviors that result in real impact and real growth. The specifics depend on understanding the culture and context in which you're operating (one size does not fit all!), and by learning to differentiate among diverse possibilities, you'll learn how to focus on (and achieve) real payoffs.

These middle sessions of a coaching engagement-and the middle chapters of this book-face down the real challenges of making true progress. This includes learning to confront and to break down failures and faulty steps. For individuals and organizations alike, taking novel steps and actions is risky, but that's okay: While difficult and messy, it's the only way to find the answers that lead to real progress. And as the coachee gets comfortable with this new way of thinking, breakthroughs follow.

For organizations, this can entail a similar embrace of new thinking around how leaders are developed and evaluated. It means less emphasis on the safe and familiar practice of cultivating "skills," and the more challenging practice of cultivating the leadership "capacity" for coping with the unpredictable (which is central to effective leadership). The middle sessions of a coaching engagement involve facing hard truths about making genuine change. But there are no easy shortcuts to real progress, and eventually that sinks in.

The book's third section reflects the home stretch of the cycle: As the pieces fall into place, the engagement becomes more and more forward-looking, building momentum toward a fresh mindset. Similarly, the last chapters address how our company, Sounding Board, is making the coaching-led development practice that has previously been accessible only to top executives much more available to a wider swath of management and aspiring leadership. Along the way, we've built our own...