Business Coaching Worldwide
http://www.wabccoaches.com/bcw/submissions.html

Coaches attend to both the process and the content of how a leader can be more effective. Process coaches help leaders by observing behaviors, encouraging them to face weaknesses, and helping them learn to change. Content coaches help leaders to define the results they need to deliver for themselves and for their stakeholders. We have labeled content oriented coaching results-based coaching because it answers the question: What outcomes does the leader need to define and deliver for his organization?

In our work on leadership, we have identified five outcomes that coaches might help leaders deliver, each woven around a role that a leader plays:

• Strategists: effective leaders develop a point of view about the future
• Executors: effective leaders build disciplines of getting things done
• Talent managers: effective leaders engage others in their agenda
• Human capital developers: effective leaders prepare the next generation of employees
• Personal proficiency: effective leaders have personal skills and abilities that enable them to lead and others to follow

While we have identified and taught the skills and actions of these five outcomes, we recognize another dimension to leadership. Leading others is not just about the actions or motions of leadership, it’s also about the emotions.

Motion focuses on behaviors and actions; emotion focuses on passion and meaning. Motion is what we do; emotion is why we do it. Motion gets things done; emotion sustains what is done. Leaders in motion differ from leaders who care about emotions because the second leaders are meaning makers.

Coming out of a severe economic recession, many leaders continue to struggle with an emotional recession. While leaders may go through the motions of leadership, some of their actions lack emotion. For example, leaders may dutifully do a strategic analysis with strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) and with plans to identify and serve customers in the future. But, when these plans are either abstract aspirations (vision, mission, and values) or detailed analytics (data laden presentations), they remain sterile. When leaders bring emotion and meaning to their strategic deliberations, they tell a story that captures imagination and passion.

Coaches can help leaders become meaning makers by shifting coaching attention from the cognitive (how you should think as a leader) and behavioral (how you should behave as a leader) to the emotional (how you should feel as a leader and how you creating positive feelings among those you lead).

In the last few years, we have worked to discover how people create meaning in their personal and professional lives. Combing the insights of a psychologist (Wendy) and organization theorist (Dave), we have written The Why of Work: How Great Leaders Create Abundant Organizations That Win where we synthesize volumes of thinking and research about meaning into seven disciplines or drivers of meaning. In this work, we discover that many are in search of meaning at home, in relationships, and through hobbies. We suggest that work is a universal place for people to find meaning, and that leaders who are meaning makers help employees create meaning which then leads to increased customer share and investor performance.

Coaches who help leaders become meaning makers will be directing leaders to infuse positive emotion into their leadership actions to create abundant organizations. To become meaning makers, coaches may help leaders they coach answer seven questions for themselves, and then help these leaders pose and answer these questions for those they lead.

1. Identity (Who am I?) Coaches may help leaders gain clarity about their signature strengths so that they can use their strengths to strengthen others.

2. Purpose (Where am I going?) Coaches may help leaders match what motivates them (insight, achievement, connection, or empowerment) to the aspirations of their organization so that they can create purposeful organizations.

3. Relationships. (Whom do I travel with?) Coaches may help leaders develop their relationship-building skills (making and receiving bids, managing conflict, apologizing) so that they can create high-relating teams throughout their organization.

4. Work culture. (How do I build a positive work environment?) Coaches may help leaders establish positive routines through attention to workplace values like humility, selflessness, order, and workplace practices of communication, accountability, and workflow so that employees feel a sense of well being in their work setting.

5. Work challenges. (What challenges interest me?) Coaches may help leaders learn how to customize the work that they do so that they can help employees in turn personalize their work and become more engaged in it.

6. Change. (How do I learn and grow from change?) Coaches may help leaders positively respond to change by enabling them to learn and grow from both positive and negative experiences so that they can help employees become more resilient in the face of constant change.

7. Civility and delight. (What delights me?) Coaches may remind leaders what gives them delight and joy so that they might civilize the world of work for their employees.

Leaders who create meaning for themselves and those they lead will shift from going through the motions of leadership to bringing emotion and thereby meaning into their organization. When leadership actions are infused with meaning leadership roles evolve:

• Strategists: sterile strategies become ardent stories
• Executors: plans for execution turn into impassioned causes
• Talent managers: talent is not about just about competence and commitment of employees, but also about feeling a sense of contribution
• Human capital developers: future employees are attracted to the company because of its capacity to do good in the world
• Personal proficiency: leaders will bring not just their skills and abilities to the work setting, but their passions.

Coaches who help leaders with the content of becoming meaning makers will help those leaders build sustainable and abundant organizations. These are the organizations employees want to work for, customers want to do business with, and investors want to support. Results-based coaching is not just about leadership motions and actions, but bringing emotion and meaning to the task of leadership.

Dave Ulrich
(dou@umich.edu)

Wendy Ulrich
(wulrich@rbl.net)

Norm Smallwood
(nsmallwood@rbl.net)