As a result of the chaotic and transformational business environment of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, the art and science of management has also been radically transformed. Consequently, executive coaching has become a highly valued resource within corporate life.

Regardless of how you look at it, you are your primary instrument of interpersonal influence, organizational impact, and personal accomplishment and fulfillment. So, elevate your game. Get a coach.

The Management Landscape Has Undergone a Sea Change

In the prior Age, management skills stemmed from a heroic military model — plan, control, delegate, coordinate, and motivate. As the Information Age hurtles forward, we will find that within a business environment characterized by permanent whitewater, the high impact leadership competencies are now dramatically different:

• The Explorer: Forges a vision and is an agent of change
• The Beacon: Instills trust and inspires passionate commitment to the vision
• The Advocate: Clearest voice in support of visionary, strategic, and values-driven behavior
• The Facilitator: Creates a consultative and teaming workstyle within the culture
• The Partner: Encourages a collegial, supportive, and collaborative workstyle
• The Coach: Brings out the best in the organization’s people, in terms of their aspirations, potential, performance, and contribution

This set of six leadership roles, when used, creates extraordinarily powerful leverage for the executive. Do you know how far from criterion you are on each of the six? Do you know the best ways to close the gap?

Well, just as in sports and in the performing arts, it’s now increasingly becoming the case in business that the more successful you are, the more likely it is that you will use a coach to deepen and extend your success. Tune up your game.

High Performing Executives vs. Under Performing Ones

We now actually understand a great deal about what differentiates the successful leader from the under-performing one. Successful people are aggressive learners. They are individuals who:

• Constantly seek feedback and are extremely analytical about their successes and failures
• Possess a finely tuned capacity for self-reflection and self-awareness
• Seek a wide variety of experiences, out of both a sense of curiosity and the sense that experience is the best medium for self-discovery
• Constantly strive to learn something new and different by searching for comparisons, contrasts, and insights
• Find ways to apply new learning to new situations
• Use strengths to modify weaknesses

The bad news is that only about 10% of us are by nature active learners. The good news, though, is that much of what it takes to be an aggressive learner is coachable.

So, What Does It Take?

Much of what our coaching model focuses on is building a set of skills that helps the candidate become a more agile learner. Increasingly greater agility is pursued in four different spheres, each having a marked influence on a person’s learning curve and performance as a leader.

1. Mental Agility. The candidate discovers ways to more consistently:
   • embrace complexity
   • confront ambiguity
   • expand their interests and perspectives
   • pursue complexity out of heightened curiosity
   • view penetrating questions as more important than answers
2. Interpersonal Finesse. The candidate develops more techniques with which to:
   • self-reflect and augment self-awareness
   • catch their own counter-productive behavior and modify it
   • vary their role and style to the situation
   • embrace conflict and harness it for creative ends
3. Change Mastery. The candidate’s executive repertoire is broadened when s/he:
   • learns how to behave as strategically as possible
   • employs hypothetical modeling in her/his thinking and problem-solving
   • embrace the underlying spirit of continuous improvement
   • come to understand how critical tenacity is in any change initiative
4. Goal Orientation. The candidate hones a high-impact results orientation by adding or refining the following capabilities:
   • create a presence and inspire others by consistently acting “on purpose” (i.e., acting strategically)
   • address his/her own performance and others’ in a systematic, developmental, and strategic way
   • differentiate among the various levels of priorities and act accordingly (i.e., the two-by-two matrix of Urgent x Important)
   • deliver on promises and expectations

Final Thoughts

As a leader in your organization, you set the tone for how each employee is expected to perform. If you don’t follow-through on what you say you are going to do, they won’t feel compelled to do so either. If you aren’t seeking feedback and continually trying to improve the way you lead, others won’t be motivated to improve their performance. If you don’t communicate information that is mission critical on a regular basis to your managers, they will not be able to communicate that mission critical information to the rest of the staff.

Successful leaders are aggressive learners who constantly seek feedback. They engage the services of an executive coach in order to develop the interpersonal finesse, change mastery and goal orientation necessary to move their businesses forward. It can be lonely at the top, but it doesn’t have to be. Improve your competitive advantage. Get a coach.

Read more on this topic in our coaching section and our case studies titled: Recognizing and Developing Strengths and Does It Have To Be Lonely at the Top?