2
DEVELOPING A STRONG SIGNATURE PRESENCE
The business arena has risks, opportunities, dangers, and dead-ends that can make any leader flinch. Not surprisingly, dealing with organizational change and dilemmas is not for the faint-hearted. Coaches are colleagues to executives at exactly those times when leaders may flinch, fight back, dig in, or react in an unpredictable manner. A coach is likely to show up in the executive’s office when the client is reacting on a visceral level, which is often not the most effective response to a dilemma.
Having signature presence is critical for coaches. A coach must bring her own presence to bear in order to be a contributing partner with her client. Otherwise the client’s interactional force field of dilemmas can pull in the coach and neutralize her work with the executive (interactional fields are covered in Chapter Three). When the coach succumbs to the same dilemmas as the client instead of helping, the coach may well contribute to the problem.
Your Central Tool
Presence means bringing your self when you coach: your values, passion, creativity, emotion, and discerning judgment to any given moment with a client. Your resourcefulness and authenticity are crucial dimensions of your work. Coaches must build skills in two arenas when developing their clients: the courage to speak and command attention and the ability to take a back seat.1
Presence means developing and sustaining your tolerance for a host of situations many people actively avoid: ambiguity, daunting challenges, the anxiety or disapproval of others, and your own personal sources of stress. Coaches with presence stand fast in the midst of all these challenges and face them head-on rather than retreating. In the face of internal or external resistance, you refuse to back away from the challenge at hand. Signature presence is moving through these moments in your own unique way, thus making the most of your own strengths, interests, and eccentricities.
If you do not develop yourself enough to withstand a client’s stress, you default to actions that handle your own discomfort but are not useful to your client. The worst-case scenario occurs when you are unaware that you are in this state and you run your client through a methodology that rings hollow to the dilemma your client faces.
If you do not develop yourself enough to withstand a client’s stress, you default to actions that handle your own discomfort but are not useful to your client.
When you realize that you have absorbed the anxiety and feelings of responsibility from your client, there is a glimmer of hope. When you can say to yourself, “I’m stuck. I’m as anxious and ineffective as my client is,” you begin to find your way back to equilibrium. Questions to ask at these times are:
• Why am I doing what I’m doing?
• Is this truly in the best interest of the client?
• Am I doing this only to lower my own stress, even as I imagine that I act in the client’s best interest?
The more you maintain your presence, the more you assist the client. You can clearly get at the core of your client’s issues when you both successfully challenge the client and offer genuine support. Presence is easy when you are not anxious and elusive when you are. The problem is how to regain your presence when you have lost it.
Self-Differentiation
One of the keys to maintaining presence in anxious moments is the process of self-differentiation.2 It strikes a balance between two major tasks in working relationships. First, you must clearly articulate where you stand regarding your position, your judgment, your decision, or a limit you set (backbone work). Second, you must stay connected and tuned in to those with whom you take a stand or decision (the work of the heart).
An image I find useful for representing self-differentiation is that of a gyroscope. It constantly tilts, moves, and rolls with outside forces, yet the inner mechanism stays level, no matter how topsy-turvy the whole system becomes. Interactional equilibrium is the ability to maintain yourself and your relationships while being pulled by the forces of fear, conflict, and anxiety.
To coach without a fair degree of self-differentiation can lead to a state of reactivity in which we lose our balance internally and respond in an automatic, ineffectual way. We become reactive when we cannot tolerate feeling our own anxiety about something at the moment. Reactivity manifests in many different ways. It throws backbone and heart out of balance. We may alienate others or have a posture that is excessively timid. We may cave in on a position, or become overly rigid and closed to influence. We might cut off the relationship and distance ourselves from others, or pay too much attention to other people’s moods by smoothing over rough spots.
No one achieves self-differentiation 100 percent of the time. In fact, even 70 or 80 percent of the time is rare. To achieve this balance a simple majority of the time is a feat. Most of us constantly fall into reactivity, then pull out of it and face the next challenge. Our goal should be to minimize how often we are reactive and recover equilibrium more quickly. With practice, coaches learn to take stands while staying connected, which increases the chances of being effective with clients.
If you learn to recover from your reactivity with less damage to yourself and your relationships, you will become more valuable to those with whom you work. Examples of actions you could take as a coach to maintain the balance of backbone and heart include the following:
• Disagree with a specific process the client is using (backbone) AND continue to understand and support the client’s larger goals (heart).
• Show how clearly you see a boss’s need to develop his direct report (heart) AND refuse to sell a coaching service to an executive, if the potential client is not mobilized to learn (backbone). Offer to help the boss learn how to address his direct report’s lack of commitment to higher performance (heart).
• Offer the client help to become more consistent (heart) AND challenge the client’s commitment to a planned course if her actions continue to contradict that commitment. Be clear that you will end the contract if the inconsistency continues and is destructive to the planned outcome (backbone).
Any coach who brings this kind of balance to her work will be in high demand. An effective coach is not intimidated by the client and does not embrace the client’s viewpoint too quickly. However, the coach can grasp the client’s position and convey understanding and compassion for the client’s dilemmas. In other words, the coach has the ability to be an independent thinker while working interdependently with the client.
So, you may ask, how can I coach with both backbone and heart? Is there a way to strengthen my presence? Are there ways to regain this balance?
Strengthen Your Presence
Learning to regain your presence in the moment and with creativity can propel you along the path to coaching excellence. The following four approaches promote a healthy resilience in your work with your clients:
• Identify and sustain a goal for yourself in each coaching session.
• Manage yourself in the midst of ambiguity.
• Increase your tolerance for the reactivity within you and in others around you.
• Bring immediacy to the moment.
These approaches are not techniques, and it would be foolish to assume anyone could attain them merely through insight and understanding. They demand a willingness to enter into a maturing process that builds resiliency. They require you to take action, learn from the experience, and set new goals for action that maintains a balance between backbone and heart. A lifelong commitment to honing these actions can lead to a stronger sense of presence. The stronger your presence is, the easier it is to access these approaches. Mastering them is a lifelong process. 3 All four approaches recur continually in the coaching method outlined in Chapters Five through Eight.
Identify and Sustain Your Goal
In some ways, having a goal for yourself in coaching sessions sets the stage for the other three approaches for strengthening your signature presence. Coaches cannot proceed without a goal. When a coach becomes reactive, it is harder to hold on to that goal or even to remember it. It is important that coaches remain mindful of specific goals for themselves in coaching sessions with clients.
What? you may be thinking. Have a goal for myself! Shouldn’t I be helping the client with HIS goal? Of course, you help the client with his goal. Nevertheless, the clearer you are about what you want to accomplish in the session while you work on the client’s agenda, the more valuable you will be to your client. When you are with a client, you have only yourself to rely on to stay on course. If you don’t pay attention to what you are doing, who will? You can take the following steps to identify and sustain your goal:
1. Choose content and process goals for each meeting.
2. Know your vulnerability in a reactive system.
3. Remain focused on your goal.
4. Remain more committed to attaining your goal than to easing your discomfort in the moment.
The content goals define what is to be accomplished in the coaching session—the business task. The process goals describe how you want to conduct yourself in the session. Content goals could include any of the following:
• Gain the commitment of the client to a coaching contract.
• Help the client establish outcome measures for her change initiative.
• The client ends up with a prioritized list of the issues that she needs to address.
The following goals demonstrate a focus on a relationship process or on parameters for conducting yourself as a coach:
• Show understanding for the executive’s world and challenges.
• Stay on track in the session, even if the client grows impatient.
• Give the tough feedback that until now you have been withholding.
It is one thing to establish goals and another thing entirely to sustain those goals. You must become familiar with your own areas of vulnerability within a reactive system. By vulnerability, I mean the triggers that can jump-start your knee-jerk, subconscious response and cause you to abandon your goals in the session. Triggers differ for each person, but here are some common ones:
You must become familiar with your own areas of vulnerability within a reactive system.
• Being challenged by a dominating person
• Facing high rates of change
• Receiving requests for help from a highly dependent person
• Having a client who rushes from one activity to the next, including the coaching sessions
Reconnecting with your goal when you become reactive goes a long way toward lessening the effects of your anxiety. First, realize that you will go on automatic when your stress is high. Adrenaline responses easily take over. Once you acknowledge this without berating yourself, you can get back on track. Here are some clues that you have let go of your goal: either your spine dissolves into jelly or you become as rigid as a stone wall; either you completely lose empathy for your client or you begin to see the world only through your client’s eyes. These and other extreme responses indicate reactivity.
After you realize you have gone on automatic, remember your goal in the heat of the moment. (What was it I said I wanted to accomplish in this session? Oh yeah!) Once you recall it, be more committed to your goal than to fighting or fleeing from the intense discomfort you feel in the moment. Then act on that commitment. This is the big one! Everything in you will want to give up your goal to regain feeling more comfortable. We have been trained to avoid discomfort, but in the people development world, discomfort is a sign of something new happening. Hang in there through the discomfort! To the extent that you thoughtfully identified an appropriate goal before the session, you can still trust that goal when you temporarily lose sight of it. Regaining a hold on it and proceeding provides the anchor that steadies your boat in stormy seas.
Here is an example of what identifying and sustaining a goal can look like.a
Luke
Luke was in a tough position, and I was in a tough position with Luke. His boss, the president, “suggested” that he develop his staff into a stronger team in order to operate more efficiently. Luke would not have chosen to initiate this work. He responded to the president’s recommendation because he felt pressured to do it.
After I spent some time with Luke and his staff, three things became clear: (1) the staff was not sure about the purpose of the team development and whether the president truly backed it, (2) Luke needed to have a frank conversation with his boss about issues that festered between the two of them, for example, whether the boss truly supported the department’s work, and (3) Luke needed extensive development for himself as a leader in order for this team to take any significant step forward.
My anxiety increased because I sensed Luke’s passivity in this project; he was mainly just going through the paces. I believed that to move ahead without a higher investment on his part would accomplish nothing and only waste time and money. Worse, it would damage the morale of the department if they experienced one more false start in a long line of half-baked change efforts. My track record of coaching for successful change efforts was on the line as well.
I established three goals for myself as I went into a critical meeting with Luke: (1) proceed only if he commits to working on his relationship with his boss as it relates to the department (content goal), (2) proceed only if he commits to developing himself as a leader (content goal), and (3) while working on the first two goals, offer support as well as challenge to Luke during this meeting (process goal).
Luke started the meeting with his usual passive affability. As I talked about what I viewed as necessary changes, his demeanor changed dramatically. He grew silent, then became argumentative: “I don’t understand what this project has to do with my relationship to my boss! Why are you making it so difficult to proceed?” We came to an impasse: he was unwilling to commit to the two bottom lines I had established, and I was unwilling to move ahead without them. I was within five minutes of ending the contract.
My bottom lines were extremely challenging to Luke. For a long time, he had avoided dealing with the expectations and judgments that his boss had of him, but I continued to highlight the need for it in this project.
I said, “Luke, I don’t think a boss has to be involved in every team development project. But on this one, it is critical, a make-or-break issue. Part of the team development work is to clarify the goals for the department. You are telegraphing to your team deeply mixed messages about what you expect of them. That’s not just because you are unclear but because your boss is giving you mixed messages. It’s time to clear them up with him. Otherwise you waste this team’s time, and we might as well call it off.”
Throughout the meeting, I also continuously offered Luke support for his efforts to work on his relationship to his boss should he choose to move in that direction. I let him know that because this step would be so challenging for him, most of our coaching work would focus on that relationship. I was there to help him if he wanted it.
Although he resisted the issue for a long time, Luke understood the stakes were too high for him to do nothing. He found a way to articulate the clarification work he would do with his boss to get the project under way. I decided that was an adequate commitment, and we could proceed with the team project.
These issues continued to be part of the fabric of my work with Luke. This was no magic bullet conversation. However, we had more effective sessions because I kept sight of my goals for the duration of my work with Luke. By sustaining your own goals as a coach in your sessions with the client, you will have more focus, particularly in ambiguous situations.
Manage Yourself in the Midst of Ambiguity
By ambiguity, I mean the business situations that are by nature unclear and murky. It’s not like people have suddenly lost their intelligence or problem-solving ability. Rather, the issues never seem to sort themselves out. Many leaders try to suppress ambiguity rather than acknowledge it, even to themselves. Others give up in the face of it, believing that choosing a next step may be too treacherous. During times of ambiguity, people fill in gaps of information with rumor, fears, assumptions, and paranoia.
During times of ambiguity, coaches can also lose their bearings. This can be a humbling experience. The root word of humble is humus—ground, compost, soil. When you are in a reactive mode, you are not grounded. To reground yourself, you need to assess the lay of the land and see your circumstances for what they are rather than what you either wish or fear them to be.
How you manage yourself in ambiguity is the key. Here are five actions you can take, and suggest that your client take, in these kinds of situations:
1. Acknowledge the ambiguity.
2. Distinguish for yourself where you are clear and where you are unclear about the situation. (an internal process)
3. Articulate to others the boundary between your clarity and your lack of clarity. (an external process)
4. Say what it is you want to do, given the situation.
5. Tell others what you need from them, and ask what they need from you.
With this approach, you can cultivate decisiveness even in the midst of confusion. How refreshing it is to acknowledge both your clarity and your ambiguity rather than hide it or become victimized by it. You can be clear about what you know and what you do not know. This allows others to come forward, seeing their part of the conversation as a contribution rather than an indictment of their inadequacy. Then you can fill in the perceived gaps with real information and discover the remaining actual gaps. Building on this dialogue, you can articulate what you want to do and what you need from others, ask what they need from you, and transform the discussion from free-floating anxiety to collecting information and taking action.
Obviously clients need to learn how to manage themselves in the face of ambiguity. But how is it useful for coaches? Isn’t any lack of clarity in the coach detrimental for the client? In fact, it can be good modeling for clients to experience a coach’s acknowledging areas where she encounters the deep ambiguity of the client’s situation. In the following story, after feeling rather humbled myself, I followed the steps for managing myself in ambiguity. You may notice they do not necessarily follow a sequential order because managing ambiguity is not a linear process.
Bill
Bill was the leader of two departments that had recently merged. In addition, the organization had a new CEO who indicated that the company would be reorganizing sometime next year. Bill had formidable tasks at hand, including coordinating new job expectations within the consolidated department, maintaining the same level of productivity that the company needed from them, and responding quickly to any imminent reorganization even though there was no established structure or start date for it. The situation was deeply ambiguous by nature.
Bill wanted help to organize his own people so they could function in the midst of all this uncertainty. The first step he identified was the easier one. Since he wanted to integrate the two departments as one, he decided he would not figure this out on his own, or leave it up to the half of the department that historically took on problem solving. Instead, he engaged the best thinking of his people throughout the whole department.
Bill invited me to join him and his team on a retreat where they addressed these issues. My role was to coach him during the meeting while they designed a process they could use to achieve greater clarity.
The retreat started off well enough but hit an inevitable snag when no one saw a way through all the unknown factors facing them. I did not know how to proceed either and silently berated myself for not conceiving of a clear way out. I was the coach, after all! Bill and the team were all looking at me expectantly. (Action 2: Distinguish for yourself where you are clear and where you are unclear about the situation.) I was clear that this ambiguity was inevitable; Bill and his staff had not missed anything. There truly were many unknowable factors in play. It was also clear that they did not need to be stymied by the innate ambiguity. The design of the retreat was not to blame for the ambiguity of the situation: the right people were in the room; they had all the information that was available from the CEO; they were looking at current realities, future opportunities, and obstacles; they held discussions in matrixed groups; and they were a highly creative group of people.
The ambiguity debilitating their progress occurred because there were true unknowables. I have come to appreciate what they experienced much more now than I did then: the chaos preceding the emergence of a new way of thinking. They were in the position to discover a new way to organize, but they could not see it because this new way did not exist apart from moving through the ambiguity itself.4
Bill, continued
All of us were trapped in a patch of deep fog. (Action 1: Acknowledge the ambiguity.) I told Bill and his team that it was time to name what was clear and unclear, and what they needed from themselves or others. I also said that it felt uncomfortable not because they were doing anything wrong, but because the situation was by nature unclear. It could also mean that they were on the verge of a burst of creativity because original thinking could start when they were willing to stop hanging on to the familiar territory and start moving out into the unknown. I told Bill to hang out in the confusion and hold less tightly to their need to have clarity quickly. (Action 4: Say what it is you want to do, given the situation.)
If this had been a pep talk, I would have failed miserably because I was unable to offer a clear path toward resolution. The team continued to struggle with the issues. After a while, however, one of the team leaders thought of a way to arrange the department into groups so that they reenergized their creative thinking around the issues. They discovered how to lightly organize themselves into a fluid matrix so that they could work on current demands from the rest of the organization and also identify internal issues related to reorganization.
I shared with Bill and his team what I knew: no matter how they organized themselves now or identified the issues for restructuring, they needed to find a way to specifically clarify decision-making authority and task responsibility. (Action 3: Articulate to others the boundary of your clarity and your lack of clarity.) Otherwise their quick-response mechanisms would fail at the time they needed them the most and their planning efforts would prove futile. Bill then recognized that it was his responsibility to ensure decision-making clarity. The team members also realized that they needed to insist that Bill be clear with them about what authority they had for which specific issues. (Action 5: Tell others what you need from them.)
I admired their development of a fluid structure that anticipated and serviced changes. I was also glad that we all had managed the ambiguity by staying in conversation, distinguishing what was known and not known, clarifying plans to move ahead, and sharing all team members’ expectations of others.
Increase Your Tolerance for Reactivity
In some ways, having tolerance for others’ anxiety and reactivity is the essence of presence. In addition, you must deal with your own anxiety about external or internal resistance and rise to the challenges of the moment. We all have our own tolerance levels in uncomfortable situations and our own individual reactive responses: fight, flight, save the day, placate. The list is endless. These responses can prevent us from helping a client or a system regain maximum functioning. Our automatic responses to an overload of input can short-circuit our own resilience like a blown fuse shuts down a fuse box.
When I am in an anxiety-producing situation, I sometimes feel helpless and inadequate. I ask myself, “What good am I doing at this point?” My feeling of helplessness can draw out responses in me that in retrospect seem inappropriate and ineffective in the situation. I turn to the first thing I can think of just to find an expedient resolution. It is not the client I am fleeing; I am fleeing the discomfort I feel. The best way I can help my client is to become more tolerant of my anxiety so that I can truly be with her instead of being distracted by my own reactivity.
To contrast the tendency to be reactive to one’s own anxiety with a completely different kind of response, remember back to the kind of learning that we were all capable of in our first years of life. I call it toddler learning or Toddler Mind. We and our clients can work to regain some of the attitude and drive of toddlers in our own learning to become better coaches while helping our clients become better leaders.
When infants are on the verge of becoming toddlers and learning to walk, they have a ferocious drive for competence. Very little distracts them from the goal to walk. How many times have you seen babies endlessly work to get themselves up to stand, then take a step, then tumble and fall, and then start the whole process over again? It is downright inspiring if you think of toddlers as models for how to learn. Here is their approach, which, of course, is subconscious:
1. I must stand and walk.
2. I will get myself upright no matter what it takes.
3. I take a step. The risk of falling does not deter me.
4. I fall. Falling happens a lot.
5. I get up and do it again.
6. Falling is sometimes frustrating. I cry in frustration. Crying is like a rainstorm that passes through quickly and is gone. I’m not embarrassed by my frustration or my tears.
7. I have no negative judgments about falling. Falling is part of this magical thing called walking. I only know to do a continuous set of experiments, to try again. And again. And again. And again.
8. I walked! I took three full steps this time before falling. Yay!
9. Repeat steps 1 through 8.
We all did it this way. It is time to access that early virtuoso learning methodology when it comes to increasing human interaction skills, whether as a coach or a leader.
Learning new skills or learning to contain one’s own reactivity is awkward, and no one is great the first time out. I tell my clients to expect to do “100 reps” before even beginning to presume that it will feel like second nature. You can remember Toddler Mind when you feel embarrassed by frustration or anxiety or failure. There was a time when we all learned without negative self-talk as we took risks, failed, added more repetitions, and gradually became competent walkers.
Executive coaching skills and leader interaction skills are no less complicated than the art of walking. It is the repeated experiments of a highly mobilized and motivated person that lead to mastery, whether in walking, leading, or executive coaching. If you can help yourself and your clients recreate the high competency of toddler learning—that feelings of frustration, anxiety, and awkwardness are survivable, expected, and not enough to deter one from one’s goals—you will have made a great contribution to this world.
It is the repeated experiments of a highly mobilized and motivated person that lead to mastery.
Increasing your tolerance for your own anxiety is by nature a nearly unbearable experience because the pull of the old reactivity is so strong. However, you can take steps to help yourself arrive on the other side. In some ways, these steps are the adult version of the single-mindedness of toddler learning:
1. Identify the trigger to your reactivity.
2. Learn your typical reaction to that trigger.
3. Choose an alternative response to pursue a different path.
4. Stay on track with the goal you have set for yourself in the meeting.
These are necessary conditions, but taking them without the essential mind-set is not sufficient to improve your tolerance for reactivity. You must also be willing to enter the emotional void inherent in reaching beyond your current abilities. Increasing your tolerance means strengthening an emotional muscle that can hold on in that void.
Tolerance can grow with exposure to the situations themselves, just as an emergency room physician’s comfort with trauma is higher than that of a medical student’s. Of course, education and practice with the methodology help foster greater tolerance and the ability to cope with your anxiety and the anxiety of your client. You can also examine and alter your reactions to stress by revisiting the first “organization” you participated in, your family.5 Whatever it takes, and it may take all of the above, your job is to strengthen that muscle so you can remain present with your clients.
Although they do not offer a comprehensive solution, these steps act as a potent set of tools. Once you are ready to increase your tolerance, you need to identify the triggers for your reactivity in specific situations. Your particular trigger can be anything: your client’s tone of voice, a particular subject matter, or a challenge to your competence, for example. The content and the context of the triggers are unique to you.
Reactivity is a response that happens automatically and subconsciously. Your reaction may be taking control before you notice it. What are typical reactive responses on your part? Do you feel guilty and skulk away? Do you get angry and lash out? Do you feel defensive and explain your position? Get to know your habitual responses. Once you understand what causes your response, you can learn to link your reaction to a specific trigger.
Plan and choose an alternative response. It gives you time to think before acting. You will rarely be able to plan in the heat of an automatic response, so knowing your own habits is critical. You can see them in the moment (“there I go again”) and have something in mind to break the trance. As an example of a planned response, you could deliberately pause, break the chain of reactivity, and give yourself time to think. Or plan to ask about the position and concerns of the other person. Or remember to keep working toward your goal.
Staying on track with your goal is the central point of transforming yourself into a less reactive person because reactivity leads you away from your goal.
Thankfully, the mere fact that you have established and remained focused on a goal can calm you in the midst of your reactivity. Choosing a worthy goal is a necessary condition of signature presence.
I personally experienced the far-reaching impact of reactivity and developing tolerance to it with a long-time client in the following situation:
Annette
Annette, a client with whom I had a collaborative, long-term working relationship, would periodically ask me to take on a role that was not appropriate to my coaching role as stipulated in our contract. This time, she wanted me to manage a committee on human resource standards with her staff. However, there were people in the organization who were much more appropriate than I was for the role. This was a role for an employee to staff, not a role for an external person to take on, which would create undue dependence on an external consultant. My management of the committee would undermine the skill development of others who reported to her. Annette did not see it that way. She knew I was a good facilitator, and she just wanted the job done.
Because everything else in our contract worked well, it was personally difficult for me to refuse her request. Yet I was very sure that saying no was the best response for the organization—and ultimately for Annette. On other occasions in which I had agreed to activities that fell outside the bounds of my role, I always regretted it. I saw that I contributed to a continued weakness in her staff and resented my own compromise. Whenever I found myself in Annette’s office in the middle of this conversation, I could feel the internal pull to acquiesce to her request. My anxiety grew as I imagined the degree of disappointment she would have in me if I refused.
Finally, I understood my discomfort: I found it hard to sit in the midst of her disappointment in me and her irritation. Period. Sometimes I flinched in the face of it and would agree to do something just to avoid her disappointment. When I realized this, I resolved to hold my ground no matter what the consequences. One way I thought I could endure her reaction was by being prepared to say, over and over again, “I know you find it disappointing, but I am not able to do it.”
In our next meeting, Annette spent twenty minutes cajoling, flattering, threatening, and bargaining with me. For twenty minutes I repeated my mantra: “I know you find it disappointing ...” It seemed as though it persisted for an eternity. Time can really slow down, almost unbearably, when one is in the void, totally out of one’s comfort zone, and continuing to hang on anyway. She finally stopped. I left the meeting convinced that I had broken my relationship with her.
She never asked me to take on the task again. One of her managers did this work instead, and it helped him develop further in his job. After some initial awkwardness on both our parts, Annette and I resumed our productive working relationship.
The amount of time you spend confronting and tolerating your reactivity can vary: twenty seconds, or two hours, or two months. Think of it as increasing the strength and stamina of your tolerance muscle. Investing in gaining greater tolerance for moments of reactivity can lead you to discover a more rewarding coaching experience instead of the same old action-reaction-counterreaction. You experience yourself as an adventurer in a land few travel by enduring reactivity long enough for the new moment to occur. You cannot have this breakthrough by repeating the same old responses.
Like standing on a windy hill in a hailstorm, the process is sometimes bracing and also daunting and a bit nerve-wracking. However, even an incremental increase in tolerance can provide a geometric gain in bringing novelty to a situation, either as a dramatically different form of resistance from the client or a breakthrough with the client, or both.
Executive coaches need this kind of tolerance because in many ways, we are like horse whisperers to our clients. Horse whisperers work with horses that have lost their trust in themselves and their ability to work in concert with humans. One kind of horse whispering literally puts the horse in an extremely confined space (like swaddling an infant) until the horse settles down enough to rebuild its self-trust, resourcefulness, and cooperation with humans. I often think of my work with clients as similar: by being unintimidated by and able to tolerate my clients’ anxiety, I show my clients it is possible to hold and tolerate their own anxiety. Over time they learn to trust that they can in fact tolerate their anxiety on their own.
I show my clients it is possible to hold and tolerate their own anxiety. Over time they learn to trust that they can in fact tolerate their anxiety on their own.
Bring Immediacy to the Moment
Immediacy means that you notice a relationship between what the client talks about “out there” and what actually happens in the moment between the two of you. When you notice this parallel occurrence, you can report your experience of her directly in the here and now. Rather than see yourself as outside what the client describes, you put yourself within it. This gives the client a clearer picture of what happens with her in her organization. How you interact with the client and your internal reactions to her can provide her with useful information. She can assess the effectiveness of that particular interaction and identify a potential area for change.
During your coaching conversations with a client, you can increase immediacy by doing the following:
1. Look for parallels between the client’s actions at work and in coaching sessions.
2. Identify your internal and external reactions to the client’s actions.
3. Speak directly to the client about your experience of her.
4. Make the connection between your experience of the client in the moment and the ways she may be acting similarly elsewhere.
Over time, you will begin to notice parallel occurrences. People often act consistently across contexts, including in their coaching sessions. The key is to hone in on the occurrences that have the most relevance to the business issue at hand.
There are plenty of ways that we as coaches miss opportunities to be immediate with our clients. You can tell that you are not scanning for parallel occurrences when your mind wanders while you listen to a client’s story and you think it is a waste of time. You miss it if you are thinking, “Okay, so what has this story got to do with anything? She’s mentioning her victories again.” You do start to scan and hone in on parallel occurrences when you think, “Am I the only one whose mind wanders off when she talks? How often does she list victories with her team, and how does it affect them?”
Identifying your personal reactions is crucial for immediacy. A here-and-now conversation with your client requires that you mention your reactions because your reactions reveal useful information. Here means focusing on what is going on between you and the person you are with, not you and someone else. And now means this very moment, not the past or the future. Here-and-now means that you talk about what is going on right now between you and the person you are with. Here-and-now conversations often get lost in the organizational world because we focus so often on “there”—everyone and everything else—and “then”—any moment besides now, either the past or the future. Here-and-now conversations have a lot of power because people do not usually get such direct feedback.
Your internal here-and-now reactions in the situation mentioned earlier of the client recounting her successes might be described like this: “So how am I reacting to these stories? I’m not seeing the connection to the topic we are discussing. At first, I resist them and wander off mentally. And now I wonder why she does it.”
Once you have identified your internal reactions, you can follow steps 3 and 4 listed above, telling the client your direct experience and linking it to her work world. You might say, “I hear you talk about your successes, but I’m not seeing the connection to the topic we’re discussing. Frankly I’m starting to wander off. Then I start guessing why you’re doing it. Maybe your team tries to second-guess you sometimes too.”
Of course, there are risks involved in accessing and using immediacy with a client. You could be way off—or so directly on target that your client gets defensive. You could scare her off by getting too intense too soon. In the best case, however, you command your client’s attention in a new way. She may ask you for more of that kind of feedback from you.
Without using immediacy, it is impossible to get to the heart of some issues. Immediacy helps a client identify her knee-jerk patterns and helps her make new choices. It takes tremendous presence to do this as a coach because you must observe patterns of interaction in your client at the same time you are participating and interacting with her.
When you do have the presence to stop your conversation in order to report your observations and reactions, you evoke more presence from your client. The trance of her habitual way of doing things may break long enough for her to see herself in a new way. This can be a tremendous gift to your client. It requires that the coach have the courage to speak directly and that the client have the courage to listen to direct feedback.
I experienced the power of using immediacy with Matt, a prospective client:
Matt
It was early in my coaching career. Matt and I were talking about the successes and challenges he felt as the leader of his department in a large national corporation. I admired his strategic thinking as he applied it to every example he gave. I also saw that he seemed relatively satisfied with his efforts in his department, but he sought some indefinable improvement among the people who worked for him.
After probing in several different ways about the changes and possible outcomes that he wanted, I fell into my own pit. It seemed I had nothing to offer this man, not even a decent diagnosis, because I could not get a handle on what it was that he wanted to be different.
There was a ten-minute stretch when it may have looked as though I was listening to what he was saying, but I was actually berating myself, thinking, “You are so green. You call yourself a consultant and coach? You can’t think of a thing to offer him! What business do you have taking up this man’s time? How can you gracefully end this appointment?” In other words, I surpassed my tolerance level in my discomfort with his vagueness.
Then I paused to regain my bearings. I began to realize that I already was having a significant experience of this leader and could give him feedback about a pattern I was noticing. It might clarify where he wanted to go next. Giving feedback would be somewhat risky because I did not know him well. It could either end any chance I had of working with him, or catapult us to a higher degree of interaction and productivity in our prospective working relationship. Since I was not currently getting anywhere, I took the risk, and I brought my presence to bear on the next moment with him.
I said, “Matt, I find your strategic thinking quite valuable. It matches much of my own experience, and therefore I trust your instincts about your company and your department. If I were a direct report of yours, I would like your thinking and be ready to follow it. But I also find that throughout the conversation, I am repeatedly having a second reaction to your strategic thinking. You give no goal, no direction, no action to take after you express your opinions. So I find myself ready to follow, but I don’t know where to go.”
This was a moment of truth. I didn’t know whether Matt would bring his own presence to the moment or defend himself against it. In this instance, I was fortunate enough to be with a leader who responded to the invitation to engage on a deeper level.
He hesitated, with a puzzled look on his face. Then he said, “Actually, I probably don’t take that next step. It’s a bit of a risk, and I don’t get around to it with either my boss or my staff.” Throughout the rest of the conversation, he was able to engage more specifically about this challenge with his department and his boss. This allowed us to forge ahead into a potential area of coaching work with him to leverage both himself and his department to greater results.
This kind of immediate speaking and listening can foment a daunting yet exhilarating moment. When you do the hard work of bringing your presence to the conversation and the client responds with openness, you break the ground for a strong partnership. When you do not bring your signature self to these moments, you will have the uphill task of trying to leverage change in either stubbornly resistant or overly compliant clients.6
When you do the hard work of bringing your presence to the conversation and the client responds with openness, you break the ground for a strong partnership.
Parallel Journeys of Executive and Coach
Besides working on bringing more of your presence through these ways, one of your greatest contributions is helping your client find more of his own signature presence. His presence is the most powerful tool that he brings to his leadership.
Leaders are not immune to losing their effectiveness. When they become reactive in a situation, it can take on a variety of forms:
• Becoming impatient and demanding when people are resistant to dramatic change
• Giving up their agenda whenever a particular staff member challenges their position
• Endlessly seeking more information when facing competing factions
• Vacillating between being a rigid dictator and an overly relaxed observer
A client who exhibits any of these kinds of reactivity has lost the backbone and heart balance between being clear about where he stands and staying connected to those who work with him. When he remains unconscious of this reactivity, he does not seek help but tries the same thing over and over again. If he becomes aware of the futility of his efforts, that is the time that he could learn with a coach.
Your job as a coach is to help the client strengthen his presence and lessen his reactivity. To the extent that you struggle to manage your own reactivity and achieve greater presence, you will understand what the client faces in bringing forth his signature presence. You will be familiar with the journey, and its roadblocks and opportunities. The client increases his presence by focusing on the same four approaches to presence that a coach uses: (1) identifying and sustaining a goal, (2) managing himself in ambiguity, (3) increasing his tolerance for anxiety and reactivity, and (4) using immediacy. You can help your clients assess their strengths and challenges in these four approaches and incorporate them into their leadership. The next chapter explores executives’ reactions to stress and how to help them regain their resilient effectiveness.
Chapter Two Highlights
Signs of Signature Presence
1. Bring yourself to the moment with your client.
2. Increase your tolerance for uncomfortable situations.
Self-Differentiation
1. Work to maintain a balance of backbone and heart in your work.
2. Develop quick recovery from reactivity.
Strengthen Your Presence
1. Identify and sustain a goal for yourself in each coaching session.
• Choose content and process goals.
• Know your vulnerability in a reactive system.
• Remember your goal.
• Be more committed to your goal than to easing your discomfort in the moment.
2. Manage yourself in the midst of ambiguity.
• Acknowledge the ambiguity.
• Distinguish for yourself where you are clear or unclear about the situation.
• Articulate to others the boundary between your clarity and lack of clarity.
• Say what it is you want to do, given the situation.
• Tell others what you need from them, asking them what they need from you.
3. Increase your tolerance for reactivity within you and around you.
• Identify the triggers to your reactivity.
• Learn your typical reaction to specific triggers.
• Choose alternative responses to get you started down a different path.
• Stay on track with your goals in the session.
4. Bring immediacy to the moment.
• Scan for parallels between the client’s actions in her world and what the client is doing with you.
• Identify your reaction to the client’s action.
• Speak directly to the client about your experience of her.
• Make the connection between your experience of the client and how she may be doing the same thing elsewhere.
Parallel Journeys of Executive and Coach
1. Be a resource for the strengthening of the client’s presence.
2. Help the client assess his strengths and challenges in these four approaches to presence.
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.