Susan

I have recently updated The Coaching Project website.  I’ve put it off for a long while as I anticipated it would be an onerous task.  The difficulty is that to change the website, I had to ask myself: Who am I now as TCP’s leader?  And how can I best tell TCP’s story?  These are never easy questions.  Although we are in the business of change, none of us is immune to the resistance that inevitably accompanies it.

When I looked at the existing content, I realized that over the past few years I have expanded my concern to include both global and personal leadership perspectives along with our current Leader Coach focus.  For example, from a global perspective, I am engaged with the leaders of several small nonprofits working in the poorest countries of the world.  On the personal side, I am involved with a colleague facilitating individual leadership development using story to explore limiting beliefs.

This broader vision has unfolded gradually as these things often do, in my case through becoming inspired at a conference, attending a university program, writing, speaking, and now practicing from this new worldview.  TCP’s current work in coaching and developing leaders is ongoing and exciting.  However, it doesn’t include the larger context of my own emerging direction.   As the leader of the organization, I want to include our evolution and present offerings but embed them within a more expansive framework of opportunities.

It was not until I began working with the web designer that the extent of this shift became clear.  He asked some powerful coaching questions about who I was and how I wanted TCP to be portrayed publicly, not only on the website but linked to other social media.  He asked for the headings that would shape the main pages of the site.   What were the main themes of our story and how would they be represented and arranged to reflect who we are now?  I pondered these questions for several days while I worked with a collection of about 25 post-it notes each titled with an aspect of our current and emerging work.  I found the process a very challenging inquiry and invite every leader to try it, something akin to writing a corporate job description.

One of the hallmarks of leadership is the ability to authentically express who we are to others, whether it is a website, a blog, a speech, or a simple email.  Kevin Cashman actually defines leadership as “authentic self-expression that adds value”.   Clear and consistent communication generates trust and loyalty.  How often do we consider who we are as leaders and how we can best communicate about ourselves and our organizations in a way that adds value?   It was certainly time for me to take stock – you can judge the results at www.thecoachingproject.com.  It’s a work in progress and I continue to ask the questions:  Is this mirror a true reflection of who we are now?  Does it portray clearly how we want to be perceived in the world?

If you haven’t reflected on the question, “Who Am I?” lately, here’s an invitation to do so.  I know this sounds a little like existential navel-gazing but it is in fact a very practical process of aligning who you are with what you do and say, so your communication is powerful and clear.  You are your brand.  You shape it every day in every conversation and decision.  Walking the talk has long been a leadership injunction because it is a critical competency that most of us could do well to improve.

The first step is a backward one, to reflect on the elements that make up your life and decide what to hold onto or let go of and what new dimensions you would add.  It becomes a bit of a personal strategic plan for your best life.  Although you can purchase card decks that are either professional or personal in focus, you can also just sit down with a pad of sticky notes as I did and create your own so they represent you exactly as you are and wish to be.

Here are the instructions:

1.  Sit in a quiet place with a pad of post-it notes and a pen.  Be still for a few moments as you think about your life right now.  When you are ready, write down all the aspects of your life you can think of, each one on a separate note.

2.  Don’t forget the non-work aspects of your life – your friends and family, sports and recreation, fitness and health, travel, reading and hobbies you enjoy, even though you may not spend a lot of time on them.  Include everything that is part of your life.

3.  Spread your notes out on a large table or the floor so you can see them all at once, preferably in a place you can leave them for a few days.  Take a good look at what you’ve got.  You may want to add a few or change the headings as you look at the total picture.

4.  Begin to look for themes in the headlines you’ve written.  Your family might be a theme category, for example.  Arrange the notes into piles under no more than 5 or 6 themes.  The title of each theme may be one of your notes or a category you create to capture a set of activities.  The categories don’t need to be an activity – Meaning in Life may be one of your categories for example, and under it you might put the notes you created around volunteer work, spending time with elders, or travel abroad.

5.  Work on your themes over a period of days.  It’s best to arrange them to suit you and then leave them for a few hours or a day and come back to them to see what you feel about them.  As you work, consider eliminating the activities that don’t fit your values or purpose at the moment, and add any you feel are missing from your picture.  Play with the titles of your categories until you feel they express the person you want to be now.

6.  It’s a good idea to review your categories with a partner or close friend to give you an opportunity to talk about your choices and get feedback from someone who knows you.  Depending on the degree of change you anticipate from your current roles and activities, you may also want to test your choices for feasibility and timing.  If you’re going to do more reading, you can build that into your day.  If you’re renovating your home or changing jobs, that may take more discussion.

7.  Finally, look at the plans or activities that are different than who you are and what you do now.  For each new or changed commitment, make a “what by when” statement.  For example, “I will get to the gym 3 times a week for a 30 minute workout.”  You may have more than one activity (or perhaps passivity if one of your categories is Stress Reduction) associated with a new direction; just be sure they are SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely).

As adults, we continue to develop through life, very often without noticing the changes taking place.  Every few years, it is important to revisit who we have become and to make any changes necessary to living our best life.  Whether you are updating your website, writing your resume, or considering a change in some aspect of your life, this exercise will be of great benefit.

Leadership Alchemy in Spanish has just been published by UPC in Lima! See Carol and I talking about the book and its history. Thanks to our Lima Associate Oscar Osorio for making it happen.

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Susan Wright, TCP President

Sometimes revolutionary changes take place without us really paying attention. For me, this has happened with online education. A major transition has taken place over the past few years away from traditional classroom and face-to-face leadership training and development. The reasons are easy to see: lowered budgets for attending leadership development programs, fewer in-house resources to deliver the content, and generally less time and capacity to fit into the fixed schedules face-to-face learning requires. Enter online education, which has seen exponential growth over the last decade with insiders predicting the trend will continue and expand over the next. SRI International just completed a 12 year study from 1996 to 2008 and found participants engaged in some or all of their education online actually outperformed those using traditional classroom instruction. “The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing – it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.

Traditional universities are now clamoring to add online curriculum to their degree and non-degree programs, and online universities including doctoral programs have experienced tremendous growth. Private firms offering leadership development are moving to webinars, audio and video programming, and coach-supported learning modules as part of their services, and TCP is one of them. Social networking contributes to the viral marketing of interesting new offerings that are then evaluated by program participants in public domains for others to see. Education is becoming transparent, cheap and accessible, at least in the developed world. Google for example has decided they need no additional content – it’s all there and growing continuously.

Wow, that’s a revolution! Which begs the question, how do leaders and their organizations now choose from the wide array of development alternatives, and what makes online learning most effective? In my experience and from what I’ve researched, here are some of the benefits and best practices so far:

• Asynchronous Access: One of the primary benefits to leaders of online education is that it can be accessed on their own time and with their favourite technology. Some listen to podcasts while working out, others access audio/video material through their mobile devices while on the go, still others spend a couple of hours in the evenings after the kids are in bed. The best practice here is to be creative in finding your own grooves, the way you work most effectively and flexibly to take advantage of the material. Most learning programs require reading, reflecting and posting responses within a limited timeframe. This structure can be helpful in keeping on track and preparing for the interactive aspects like a call or coaching session.
• Learning by Doing: Most online education is designed to incorporate the new awareness or skills into your daily life and work. There are often assignments where you apply the content and share your learning with others. You can of course ‘fudge’ this aspect and probably no one will know or care, but you will be shortchanging yourself and your outcomes if you do. When time is short and you must choose where to put your energy, step into the friction. In other words, do what seems the most difficult rather than the least – that’s where you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck.
• Technical Innovation: If you’re going to take the time to learn something new, be sure you get the most variety, complexity, challenge and support possible. Some online programs are simply reading and listening on your own, and perhaps asking a question or making a comment in a distance format – hard to see the transformative potential in that. Rather, look for a learning platform that includes audiovisual content, workbook support for making sense of it, a chat room to share your views with other learners, and a clearly structured process that moves you along within a given timeframe so you can see your accomplishment. Best practice is to have a coach guide the learning process and provide challenge and support as needed through routine calls and online contributions.
• Built-in Discipline: A more sophisticated platform has other benefits for the learner and the organization as well. Using a structured agenda over a series of weeks means your individual contributions to the learning community are time and date stamped – each time you log on, or don’t, your coach and fellow learners know it. You can’t just sit at the back of the room, work on your blackberry and get credit for attending. Not only your level of participation but the quality of your reflection is evaluated by the group in your posts. For the organization sponsoring the program, this ongoing assessment provides an immediate ROI on investment. For the learner, it provides a structured discipline to motivate performance.
• Learning in Community: There are times when being face-to-face is the best way to learn, particularly when personal behaviour is the subject matter. We need to practice in front of fellow learners and get feedback about how we show up and how we might be more effective. Online communities have many advantages and can become very strong teams. However, best practice here is to have some ability to connect in person from time to time. The combination of online and onsite learning is most powerful. Even a learning partner makes a significant difference, someone in your area with whom you can periodically share experience. Peer learning groups are also influential in sustaining commitment and embedding the learning into your organizational context and culture. It also just makes learning more fun. The truth about traditional classroom education, that it’s all about what happens after the event, is also true of online learning – we need a variety of communities to make it stick.

By Susan Wright, TCP President

This is the time of year when most people reflect on where they’ve been and where they’re headed.  It’s a time to ask, What’s My Story?  Stories have always been central to our lives but they seem to be enjoying a particular popularity these days.  For example, Fortune recently reported that there were an estimated 728 corporate storytellers in 2010.  These are experts who make their living by helping leaders create stories that are compelling visions for their organizations.  There are many books and workshops on story, what accounts for a good story, how it is structured to hold our interest and deliver a strong message.

From a personal point of view, our story is our current understanding of who we are, what we value, and how we see the world.  It is the authentic expression of our experience.  Our stories develop through fairly predictable stages just as we do.  When we are starting out, our stories are about establishing a career, a home, partnering and children, a mortgage.  As we mature, our stories change to reflect our degree of success at work and in relationships, our achievements and disappointments, our interests and causes.  As we age, we begin to tell stories about health and fitness, leisure and travel, grandchildren, a condo in the sun.  Have you noticed that conversations with friends center around these topics at different stages of life?  Robert McKee, a famous Hollywood screenwriter says, “Stories are a metaphor for life.” Story is how we make meaning out of life.  It is how we choose to see ourselves in our unfolding journeys.

The fact there are universal themes to our stories doesn’t mean we are passive participants in them.  We create our own stories, each a unique pattern within the whole cloth of society and culture.  We write our stories moment by moment through life, sometimes consciously enacting them but often just allowing them to drift by.  Think about New Year’s resolutions – they are often things of memory soon after they are voiced, stories lacking the passion and commitment required for change.  Which brings us back to the original question: What is your current story?  Is it one that excites you?  Are others interested in it?  Is it a familiar, same-old story or a new and vital expression of who you are now?  What wants to happen in your story right now?  What change, if you made it, would be a turning point in your life story?

• What one story about you would reveal your essence as a leader right now?
• What story would you tell about a major change you made and helped others make with you?
• What story would reflect a turning point in your career and what you learned from it?
• What story would you tell about a major challenge you are facing and how you intend to overcome it?
• What themes would you say recur in your stories and what do they tell about you?

If these questions, or your answers to them, interest you in further exploration, I encourage you to consider a workshop on your story, how to tell it and how to change it if you wish.  Leader Coaches tell compelling stories to build trust with those around them, to build awareness of key values and experiences, and to build an engaging vision of the future.  As McKee says, “Stories are equipment for living.”

An Interview with Dan Petersen, Life and Story Coach

How did you become interested in story?

I first got interested when I read Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind, where he lists story as one of the three forces nudging us into what he calls ‘the conceptual age’. He describes how organizations like NASA, 3M, Xerox and the World Bank are using story to help understand and manage change for this coming age. He mentions another book by Robert McKee called Story. I was fascinated by what he said.  He confirms what I know through coaching which is that the most effective teacher or teaching always creates the conditions for people to learn rather than be taught. Stories are a powerful tool to boost this self-learning dynamic.

How do you see story as a catalyst for change?

I am an admirer of Robert Kegan’s Immunity to Change process. He proposes that we have a psychological immune system that is designed to protect us, a kind of committee in our heads that resists change. The problem is that it was created around fears in early life that no longer exist, such as the fear of being rejected by our peers. That can be a problem in adulthood since all creative leading edge thinking invites rejection. Through stories, we can help people bypass their limiting beliefs and interpret new ideas more objectively. This can make a huge difference in life and in organizations where new ideas are what keep us at the top of our game. With a psychological immune system as mature as we are, our new learning is optimized. I like the adage that says, “We see the world as we are, not as it is.” We see the world through the stories we tell about ourselves, so it is important to get our stories straight and up to date.

How have you used story in your own life to understand and make change?

I find using the principles of story I am able to make better choices in the moment because I am aware of my immunity, or resistance, to change in some areas of my life. Understanding my addictive tendencies, for example, allows me to choose how to act to generate the kind of story I want to be able to tell about myself. And beyond the personal, I am also applying the principles of story in the workshops we are doing together, creating the environment I spoke about where participants can accomplish sustainable change by freeing up their capacity to learn. One of my favorite philosophers, Eric Hoffer, sums it up pretty well when he says, “In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. Those who have finished learning find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

How might leaders use story to be more effective?

We know leadership is a practice, one of acting and reflecting at the same time as we go along, both generating our story and learning from it every day. Story is a tool leaders use to reveal hidden assumptions, both to themselves and to others. Telling stories engenders trust, expresses wisdom, and builds resonance among those we lead. By telling stories about ourselves, we also encourage others to reflect on their own stories and share them. So storytelling is a key leadership skill.