The screenshot below will highlight a few key elements of the Meet Members page, which you can access from the home page at http://LeadingCoachesCenter.com anytime.

I recorded a super short video message for you.  You can access it at the link below!

How to Meet Other Leading Coaches at the Leading Coaches’ Center

Please watch this recorded message:  http://proclaim.netbriefings.com/flv/trial/mueae/trialmueae100022/

Guest Post provided by Leading Coach Michael Bungay Stanier

You’re FABulous

You’re a senior coach, wise and subtle, well trained and with many hours of coaching conversations under your belt.

It’s both a rewarding and comfortable place to be, and we do good in the world. (I’m taking the liberty to count myself as one of your peers.)

And I suspect you don’t need me to stroke your ego. We get our share of that already.

Hence the title of this post – I think the interesting place is when we can stir things up a little and ‘pop the trunk’ to see what’s really going on.

Let’s get juicy

The question I started with was how do I take my coaching from Good to Great. (You’ll see why in the bio below.)

That led me to ask about further tricks and tips and techniques, further ways of knowing more and more about less and less until I knew everything about nothing. (I stole that line from a t-shirt I saw a PhD student wearing once.)

But the question I ended up with, which I found more useful and is somehow related, is this:

Let’s assume that in some ways I’m sabotaging my clients. If that was true, how would I be doing that?

Mmmm. Interesting. Here are three things that come to mind for me.

1. Loss of focus

I show up with the best of intentions, and our early conversations are fantastic. We talk big picture, we tap into values, we plan change.

But then the mist of familiarity swirls up and gets in my way. And I lose sight of why I’m doing this coaching. Is it just for the money? How does this work shape me and change me? Does it? Do I want it to?

2. Loss of courage

I talk about the “fierce love” I have for my clients, and by that I mean a willingness to challenge them and provoke them, support them and push them when fear or comfort or trumps the desire for change.

And then I find myself colluding in the conversation. Going “u-huh” rather than “really?” Accepting it as true rather than asking, as Byron Katie would, “is that really true?”

Perhaps the opposite of courage isn’t fear but comfort.

3. Loss of resilience

Mary Beth O’Neill in her terrific book Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart talks about the importance of presence, the ability to retain your sense of self in the midst of ambiguity. And I think that requires resilience, an ability to keep going.

A mentor once said to me that the longer you can hold your breath underwater – swimming through ambiguity – the more interesting a place you tend to pop up.

But sometime my needs for certainty gets in the way, I push to make things real that aren’t, push to pin things down and find the answers (through cunningly directed questions of course – I wouldn’t be so foolish as to appear to give advice.)

Is this Good Work? Or Great Work?

It seems to come down to this question after all. If I say coaching is Great Work for me – work that stretches and inspires, work that has meaning, work that makes a difference – how will I step up the edge of myself and stand in the ambiguity and discomfort of it all, the same discomfort we expect our clients to embrace.

What about you? How do you limit yourself? Or perhaps, if you’re circumspect about publishing what’s in your shadows, let me ask how you manage your way through it?

Thoughts in the comments below…

Michael Bungay Stanier’s new book is Do More Great Work: Stop the busywork and start the work that matters. As well as providing 15 practical, coach-based exercise to find, start and sustain Great Work, it has guest contributions from people such as Seth Godin, Dave Ulrich and Leo Babauta.  The first edition was enthusiastically endorsed by 11 Past Presidents of the ICF. Michael is the Senior Partner of Box of Crayons, a company that helps organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work. He was the 2006 Canadian Coach of the Year and was a Rhodes Scholar.

I always love to share great finds with our Leading Coaches’ Community, and I’ve been talking with the CEO of a great little company called Netbriefings. We will be featuring him as Faculty in the Leading Coaches’ Academy in the near future, but for now I wanted to share with you this treasure trove of material for your own learning and for your clients!

Netbriefings has a Multimedia for Business Blog which is jam-packed with good stuff. Here are just a few of the topics they cover in webcasts and podcasts that are available FREE for you to access anytime!

Building Relationships for Life: Networking Secrets from Harvey Mackay : Join New York Times #1 bestselling author Harvey Mackay as he provides sound advice on growing your network for business. Central to Harvey’s message is the ability to stay competitive in the often cut-throat world of business, to ’swim with the sharks’, without sacrificing one’s personal integrity or doing it at the expense of other people.

Master the Law of Attraction and Attract Higher Sales Nicholas ‘Coach Nick’ Papadopoulos, founder at Sky’s the Limit

Pay-Per-View Webcasts as a Revenue Model Interview with Dr. Michele Petry, president of the Glia Group, an Internet consulting and web strategy firm, and editor of BankersOnline.com, an onsite training resource for the banking industry.

Webinar 101: Generate Leads and Tell Your Story, Your Way Wayne Turmel, author of “6 Weeks to a Great Webinar.”

Just When you Thought it was Safe to Google by my friends, Michael Benidt and Sheryl Kay of Golden Compass, a computer training company.

Sherpa has released their fifth annual Executive Coaching Survey and I encourage you to check it out!  This survey identifies changes and trends in industry practices with over a thousand participants from forty-six countries.

The 2010 report answers critical questions:

• What is executive coaching?
• Who gets a coach?
• How are services delivered?
• Who becomes a coach?
• How do coaches get their training?
• Do coaches follow a published process?

Download yours here: SherpaExecutiveCoaching2010Survey

Leading Coach Steve Eanes is sharing free information with our community!

Steve invites you to experience the ChangeGrid™ a client-driven, activity-specific coaching and management tool designed to help you not only gain more clients but also enhance your effectiveness and revenues within your existing client base.

Experience the ChangeGrid by going to http://www.tinyurl.com/leadingcoacheschangegrid

This should take no more than 5 – 10 minutes.  After completion he will contact you to provide a free debrief and more beneficial information.
If you have any questions, contact Steve either on his LCC page or here:

Changing Matters LLC
704-491-3939
http://www.changing-matters.com
http://www.freechangegrid.com

Leading Coaches Toni Reece and Viki Winterton of the Coaches’ Concierge organized a telecall with the remarkable and inspiring Jim Stovall, who spoke about overcoming extreme adversity and gives insight to coaches from his place in the client’s seat.

If you don’t know who Jim is, here are just a few highlights:

• National Champion Olympic Weightlifter
• Author of Bestselling book, “The Ultimate Gift” (which is now a major motion picture)
• President of the Emmy Award-Winning Narrative Television Network
• Highly sought-after keynote speaker
• Entrepreneur of the Year
• International Humanitarian of the Year
• He made television accessible for our nation’s 13 million blind and visually impaired people

Jim says that “obstacles are an opportunity to learn a new way to do things” and he talks about making “the goal on the other side bigger than” the obstacle so that we don’t just seek to overcome the obstacle.  “When the dream is big enough, the facts don’t matter anymore.”

Jim, more than most, understands the importance of vision, since he went blind at age 29 when he was a pro football player. He talks about vision as a precious commodity…more important than sight.

The video below is Toni Reece talking about the call, and the link to where you can listen to the recording is below the video.  Enjoy!

Click here and scroll down to find the yellow player buttons to listen to the recording of Jim’s call.  It’s a real treat!

The Coaches Concierge Teleconferences are extraordinary in interaction, exchange of vision, and providing valuable solutions.

Guest post by Dr. Laurie Weiss

You may hate confrontation. Someone raising his or her voice may make you want to run and hide. And it certainly seems safer to freeze into nothing and wait till the situation burns itself out. But sometimes that’s just not an option. So here’s the plan you can prepare in advance so you’ll know step by step what to do to be able to salvage most situations — and you may even come out looking like a hero.

Here are the steps you need to take next time someone appears to have lost emotional control and verbally attacks you. You can take these steps even if you feel like you’re a deer in the headlights.

1. Take a deep breath yourself and calmly look directly at your accuser.
2. Say his or her name aloud and if you understand what she is upset about restate it. E.g. “Jim, you seem (angry, worried) because the package hasn’t arrived yet. Is that right?” Or
3. Say his or her name and asked for a clarification. E.g. “Jim you seem (angry, worried) but I’m not quite sure I understand why. I think it’s something about the package. Can you tell me what the problem is?”
4. Once you do understand, restate the problem just as in step number two and ask if you have it right.
5. Sympathize with a hard time the person is having. “I’m sorry it’s so frustrating for you either done everything right and it’s still not working” or
   Empathize: “Wow that happened to me, I’d be (angry, worried) too.”

You may be finished at this point in the other person has calmed down and is ready for problem solving, or you may need to take another step. This step is necessary if you are in a position to help solve the problem.

1. Offer to help or at least to do something that is within your power to ease the situation. E.g. “What would you like me to do to help?”
2. Either take the requested action or offer a substitute.

By this time you’ve almost always a achieve your objective.

These steps work because they help someone who’s lost emotional control to slowly calm him or her self with your help. Often all that’s needed is to help someone who is upset feel seen heard and understood.

That person will be grateful to you for your help and you’ll learn that the monster behind the raised voice is really just a frustrated or confused real person.

Many of the lessons in The Integrity Course discuss practical ways to identify and resolve conflict.

Laurie Weiss, PhD. has just launched her new course called The Integrity Course, a new self-study course ideal for your coaching clients in which Dr. Weiss shares fascinating stories of how more than 20 people tactfully solved problems relating to defensive behavior that we’ve all encountered and can relate to. This is a goldmine for use with your clients!

Here’s a great new article from Charlie Smith that explains Why Things Work. Charlie’s a genius when it comes to helping leaders navigate innovation breakthroughs, and what organizations are not seeking innovation these days?

Here are a few quotes from the article, and I definitely recommend downloading the whole thing:

“The world is littered with examples where once promising opportunities became a
source of ongoing disappointment and loss.”

“What organizations want (and what they need) is a better way to anticipate and address
impending challenges BEFORE they create disaster. With this in hand, they have the tools
to minimize gaps, achieve breakthroughs, sustain momentum and create success.”

“…success in organizations is a matter of integrity.” He goes on to address integrity in these key areas:

1. INTEGRITY IN PERFORMANCE
2. INTEGRITY IN RELATIONSHIP
3. INTEGRITY IN INVENTION AND CREATIVE THINKING
4. INTEGRITY IN HONORING PRINCIPLES AND VALUES

You can access the full article here: Why_Things_Work._XONITEC

In their third and final article on findings from their research into corporate
values, Andy Boddice and Peter Robinson conclude that leadership and
culture are critical factors for an organization’s success or failure. They explore the critical distinction between management and leadership and the importance of clarity of common purpose in an organization.

“We can identify that many CEOs do not have a frame of reference in which the ‘soft’ side of the
organization is adequately represented”

You can download the PDF of the article to read it in full here: :

Leadership VALUES SURVEY pt3

Leading Coaches Sheila Maher and Suzi Pomerantz have been brainstorming about what advice we’d give to those executives in organizations who have the job of hiring executive coaches.  We’ve put together a rating scale and we’d love your feedback and input, from your own experience, about the hiring of “individual coaches of excellence”, whether they are solopreneur coaches or chosen from among a cadre of coaches in a coaching company.

We assert that it is not useful to shop by price.  The cheapest coach is not the best coach.  Shopping for coaches on price, comparing rates per coach, is not how to choose excellence.  It is impossible to compare the hourly rate per coach in a coaching company with the hourly rate per coach as an individual solopreneur due to cost factors such as overhead, marketing, and mark-ups for profit margin in a coaching company.  In other words, the organization may hire a $400 an hour coach from a coaching company, but may actually be getting the services of a coach who is only being paid $80 an hour by the coaching company that subcontracted them out.

Thus, we offer this template for hiring executive coaches of excellence so that you will have criteria to use besides pricing:  the hiring executive can use this for interviews or in an RFP process for executive coaches.

Criteria for selecting coaches

While designing this list, we allocated points for each item, thinking that the hiring executive would then be able to determine based on weighted criteria whether or not the coach being interviewed is a coach of excellence.

Executive Experience:  total points: 30

1. Do they have management, leadership, or boardroom experience?  — 10 points
2. Experience at the executive level: Have they coached executives or worked as an executive? — 20 points

Coach Experience:  total points: 50

1. What led you to become a coach? — 0 points (this is just about hearing their story to determine if their journey is relevant to your coaching needs)
2. What was the most valuable “take away” from your coach training?  –  5 points
3. How much of your coaching has been done in organizations? – 10  points if over  70%, 0 points if below 50%
4. How do you integrate your coaching into organizational systems?  –5 points
5. Have they had experience coaching executives at the same level for which you’re hiring?  (i.e., have they coached CxO’s or high potential leaders before?) – 10 points
6. Do you have any “specialty” areas that you like to coach or have significant background in, i.e. diversity, conflict, leadership presence?  — 1 point
7. What results do your clients report from their work with you?—10  points if their executive client references confirm these results OR if the results they report are aligned with what you are looking to hire them to do.
8. What is the coach’s philosophy?  Does it align with the organization’s mission, objectives, values and culture? – 5 points
9. Do they have a coaching credential from ICF or IAC?  — 4 points

Using Coaching Tools Effectively:  total points: 20

1. How have you measured the success of your coaching? Has the coach successfully used metrics to measure results and demonstrate behavioral change? — 4 points
2. Has the coach had experience using the organization’s metrics to measure the results of the coaching program?  360’s, employee satisfaction, leadership survey, already existing tools in the org. — 4 points
3. What assessments has the coach used? How has the coach used assessments within the coaching engagement? — 4 points
4. What leadership model(s) and organizational theories has the coach utilized and how have they used it in their coaching? –  4 points
5. What coaching methodology has the coach utilized and why is it appropriate for this executive, this organization, this engagement? — 4 points

Do you agree with these criteria?  What are we missing?  Are these weights aligned with your thinking about what’s important to consider?

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