as a life coach. He is expert in helping leaders in any industry – from sports to corporate boardrooms – tap into the mental aspect of high performing teams.
I am very confident that if you are in a leadership role of any kind – community, organization, corporation – that clearly you will be enriched and will benefit from Commonsense Leadership.
PREFACE
Who are you today and who do you want to be tomorrow? This is a question that you need to answer every day for both your professional and personal life. Even though leadership is the focus of this book, it is virtually impossible to be a leader until you conduct a thorough self-examination. Instead of having others define you with the theoretical stuff of leadership books or seminars, you need to define yourself.
Looking at most leadership guides today, it's easy to get so obsessed with counting things that we lose track of commonsense answers. What are the seven habits of leaders? What are the 14 tips for winning? I don't know the answer to either question. Structured theories like these rob people of their identifying characteristics. You must use a commonsense approach to every day, both professionally and personally, to determine who you are and what works for you.
If you want to be a leader, first define what a leader does and how a leader is defined by colleagues. We typically define leaders by position or title, but this is misguided. I think that the majority of CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and chairpersons are not leaders. They are coaches and managers who create environments in which leaders can lead.
Leaders are most often team members, and some of them are even reluctant to lead. They lead through performance. Remember the old adage “What you do speaks so loudly people can't hear what you say.” The most effective leaders understand this and lead by example. Others try too hard to be leaders and end up seeming like all talk.
I worked with a major-league baseball player a few years ago who was really struggling with his on-field performance. He was very talented offensively and defensively, but he wasn't able to channel any of his skill on game day. The general manager called me, a sports-psychology consultant, because the team was concerned about the player's performance.
I called the player and asked him a critical question: “How do you want to be perceived on the team?”
His response was that he wanted to be a team leader.
My next question was, “How do you lead?”
His answer was, “I talk with players, try to get them pumped up.”
That was the source of his struggles. Instead of talking, he needed to act as a leader through his performance. To do that, he had to play the game with emotional intensity every day and let his skills, passion, and behavior send a message. We talked several times a week and his performance picked up. In fact, he went on to win the Silver Slugger Award, which is given to the top hitter in each field position, and he made the All-Star team. More importantly, his team began to see him as a leader, and he has kept that important role every season since we had our initial phone call.
In another case, I worked with a player who was a classic reluctant leader. In fact, he was committed to not taking on a leadership role. Despite this player's reservations, his character, work ethic, and talent ensured that he became the leader – and he will always hold a prominent place in his team's history.
The bottom line is that leaders come in many forms. We often talk about natural leaders, people born with the talent and personality traits to blossom when given a positive environment. The fact of the matter is, great leaders are not born, they are made, whether it happens on a ball field or in a conference room.
This book provides commonsense solutions to issues often perceived as major problems in the corporate environment. Too often we muddy the water by combining coaching and training, neglecting the difference between these two activities. Training is teaching work skills. It usually focuses on processes, procedures, tools, and technology. Coaching is harnessing those skills to best fit the work environment. Coaches create an environment in which leaders can lead. It's about putting skills in context – the key to cultivating a strong leadership at every level of your organization. In short, leadership is learned. It emerges through trial and error, which is made easier when you adhere to commonsense approaches to the work process.
This book guides potential leaders through the process of self-evaluation to determine if they have the tools to succeed. If you decide to become a leader, then you are supported through a process to develop the necessary skills.
Remember, it takes more than a title to make a leader. True leaders are defined by their performance and by how they touch people's lives every day.
CHAPTER 1
LET COMMON SENSE BE YOUR GUIDE TO LEADING
I was invited to speak at an international life-coaching convention a few years ago, and asked the person who had contacted me by phone, “What do you do?”
She said, “We certify corporate coaches and life coaches.”
I was curious so I asked her, “What do you personally do?”
She said, “I'm a certified life and corporate coach.”
Her voice and enthusiasm had given me the impression that she was quite young, so I asked her how old she was. “I'm 21,” she said.
That fact alone gave me some reservations about this young woman's organization. After all, experience – both in the workplace and life in general – is crucial to coaching. Before declining, I decided to get a second opinion. I called a friend of mine who was a corporate executive and I asked, “What are some criteria you use to hire life coaches and corporate coaches?”
He laughed and he said, “Their hair has to be grayer than mine.”
That made the decision for me. There are so many organizations that make money off coaching certification programs without setting clear standards for the people they claim to serve. They plant an idea in the minds of these young people, leading them to believe they can be successful when they're not really qualified to coach. That's not to say that someday they won't have enough experience under their belts to be effective coaches, but certifying recent college grads who have spent limited time in any professional situation sends the wrong message about what coaching entails.
I think leadership falls into that same category. There are obviously many types of leadership: the inherited leadership, especially in family-owned businesses; corporate leadership, where board members talk about who is next in line to be CEO or chairman; and there are top performers, especially in sales where it's easy to set up a leaderboard and compare numbers. In most cases when we talk about leadership, we're thinking about people in the context of being the next leaders of the company. But this perspective has some serious drawbacks.
For example, many times in sales-oriented companies it can really hurt the sales force when the person with the best sales numbers is promoted to a management position. I've known a lot of salespeople who have told me that they hope they don't get promoted to sales manager because they love selling. Well, the next thing you, know they're promoted to manager and don't sell anymore. The problem is they're not management people – not coaches. As salespeople, they may have shown true leadership and carried themselves in such a way that it motivated other people. Top-performing salespeople have a few things in common: They talk to people. They consult with their colleagues. They create a positive environment for sales. But when you make those people managers, you take them out of the sales force, which hurts the company in two ways. First, they are no longer in a position where they sell well, stay happy, and naturally emerge as leaders. Second, they are unhappy and often ill equipped to manage the team.
It's always been my rule of thumb to tell people in the corporate world that it's up to the executives to create an environment and let the leaders lead.
One night at midnight my phone rang. The caller was a general manager of a Major League Baseball team; it was the first time in 45 years I had been called by