Posts from — September 2007

Some people in leadership positions, especially when they are relatively fresh in the role, wonder how they can become a better leader. The other circumstance for those that are at it a while longer is the frustration or lack of satisfaction you get when things don’t work the way they should or you expect them to. There is a fundamental tendency to look for outside causes or reasons before looking at ourslelves. Recently at a seminar in Ohio, Antonio Thorton said something very profound that fits really well for leaders and individuals in authority positions:

“If you want to keep getting what your’re getting, keep doing what’ you’re doing!”

This goes for the performance results of your team members and those you lead, the work product, the participation in class, or during meetings, - pretty much every walk of life or work you encounter. If you really want to be the role model and the leader you are capable of, you need to ask yourself what you have been doing to cause the results you are getting.

In my experience there are two main areas to look at:

1. Skills
2. Attributes

Skills is something you have learned and keep applying and refining. Most of the time your skills are not what causes the results to be as they are (unless you are in a profsssion that depends on your manual skills, like a carpenter, tile setter, etc.)

Attributes is where it is. How ambitious are you? How confident can you be about yourslef and your team? How much of a role model have you been, and most importantly, how clearly have the visions, strategies, and goals been developed and communicated among those from who you are getting what you’re getting?

The Performance IQ system I use for assessments and coaching is a great first step to explore and discover what your own Performance IQ actually is and how you score across 12 drivers which determine your attributes for success.

Soon there will be a place on the internet where you can go and test yourself. In the mean time, try this:

“To get what you desire, change what doesn’t work today!”

Axel Meierhoefer

President, AMC LLC

Can our wake improve your wisdom? 

When we ask ourselves how to react to events that happened in the past, we often seem to look for two options:  

1. What can we learn from what just happened?
2. What do we need to do based on what just happened, either to avoid it or to profit from it.

Dr. Henry Cloud, in his book Integrity (2006) teaches us about the values of trust, leadership, character, and self-development. He looks at aspects of wisdom and knowledge in the context of issues and problem solving. 

Neil Fleming came up with a nice way to describe in his model, how wisdom actually develops from Data. With that in mind, when we look at the question of how to react to events in the past, Cloud offers a nice metaphor that I like to encourage my readers to follow why they continue forward on their path to wisdom. 

This metaphor compares the events that happen to us in life to a ride on a nice powerboat in the Caribbean. You should imagine yourself standing on the boat, close to the steering wheel looking back towards the wake. We will see more or less white water and foam, depending on the speed of the boat as it drives us through life. Typically we will not see a straight line and there are waves of different height. We remember how the boat jumped when it took these waves and how it leaned into the turns that we can now see in the wake. 

Yes, we learned from it and over time we became wise to the point to find a balance and alignment between the speed and the radius of the turn our boat in its current configuration, taking wind, waves, and weather into account. 

Most importantly, what this story tells us is that we can’t really change the past. We can look at and admire our wake or the one of others boats around us. We can recognize the bumps and turns, but all we can really do is turn around and look forward into the future, making sure that the turns, the speed and the way we take the waves is in line with what we are trying to achieve for us and everything around us. 

If you like to learn more about your wake and how you can shape the future based on the wisdom derived from the past, then go and discover your Performance IQ. Just put in AMC LLC as your point of contact and I will be in touch with you, offering you the keys to success based on your assessment results. 

Axel Meierhoefer, President, AMC LLC

The Trust Equation 

In the constant attempt to deepen knowledge and understanding of coaching, helping other people, and fulfill the motto of AMC of providing the ‘Keys to Success’, I have read the book “COACHING AND FEEDBACK FOR PERFORMANCE”, which is part of the a series of books titled “leading from the center”. It’s published by Duke Corporate Education. One area that I am often running into as coaching becomes more used and better understood is the question of internal versus external coach. The group of authors who created the Duke book try to make a clear claim for the benefits of coaching from the inside, actually going as far as suggesting that every leader and manager should be a coach for his team members.I agree with some of the arguments made and the methods suggested, but still strongly believe that an external coach is a much better change agent for the company that hires him or her (or me). 

When looking through the book for the arguments for and against internal versus external coaching, I ran across the Trust Equation.  I am sure everybody reading this blog is probably in agreement that trust is the fundamental and most important issue in coaching, period. What was interesting when reading the book was that the authors actually point to the creators of the Trust Equation to show the importance of trust in the coaching relationship without ever realizing that by highlighting it they provided the best argument not to have the internal manager or leader become the coach. The equation is shown below. If you look at the parts and the explanations you will see that the driving factor is actually the level of self-orientation. The lower that level is, the higher the level of trust will be. The big, even huge, benefit of the external coach is that he or she is not part of the internal politics, wrangling, history, posturing and all the other internal fights and issues every organization experiences. That allows the external coach to have very little to almost no self-interest, other then providing good service to help the coachee.

With that factor going towards zero, TRUST can become almost infinitely high. Thank you very much to the promoters of internal coaching from Duke Corporate Education for providing such a great argument for external coaches. I knew we did something right. I guess it goes to show that you can find friends in the strangest places.

T = C + R + I

                          ____________________________      

                                             S 

Credibility has to do with the words we speak. In a sentence, we might say, “I can trust what she says about intellectual property; she is very credible on the subject. 

By contrast, reliability has to do with actions. We might say, for example, “If he says he’ll deliver the product tomorrow, I trust him, because he’s dependable.”  

Intimacy refers to the safety or security that we feel when entrusting someone with something. We might say, “I can trust her with that information; she’s never violated my confidentiality before, and she would never embarrass me.” 

Self-orientation refers to the focus of the person in question: in particular, whether the person’s focus is primarily on himself or herself, or on the other person.  Increasing the value of the factors in the numerator increases the value of trust.Increasing the value of the denominator—that is, self-orientation—decreases the value of trust. 

Be content – don’t press your luck!

A little bird was flying south for the winter. It was so cold the bird froze and fell to the ground into a large field. While he was lying there, a cow came by and dropped some dung on him. As the frozen bird lay there in the pile of cow dung, he began to realize how warm he was. The dung was actually thawing him out! He lay there all warm and happy, and soon began to sing for joy. A passing cat heard the bird singing and came to investigate. Following the sound, the cat discovered the bird under the pile of cow dung, and promptly dug him out and ate him.

Morals of the story:

(1) Not everyone who sh… on you is your enemy.
(2) Not everyone who gets you out of sh… is your friend.
(3) And when you’re in deep sh…, it’s best to keep your mouth shut!

Axel Meierhoefer, President AMC LLC