Yet when we think about coaching, especially “life coaching,” we sometimes think of ineffective, New Age-y, faux guru types who sit with their clients and channel spirit beings. And that doesn’t sound like something that would be a good fit for a high-powered organization that really wants to move numbers forward and achieve proactive success.
But good coaching does just that. In fact, the word coaching comes from the world of sports. A world of performance and numbers. Therefore, sports provides a perfect metaphor for what good coaching is in an organization. The first thing a masterful coach does is decrease the fearful emotional charge inside the person being coached. As the great football coach Vince Lombardi said, “It’s hard to be aggressive when you’re confused.” So, if you’re coaching me, you first bring your positive attention to my situation. Soon my negative feelings start to lift. I was working with a large group of managers one day when Duane Black himself volunteered to step to the front of the room to illustrate a point I was making. He walked up to the two flip-charts I was using to contrast the thinking of ownership versus the thinking of victimization.
“Let’s try looking at it this way,” Duane said going to the ownership flip-chart. He drew a very large plus sign on the page and said, “When you are positive (pointing to the sign), you add something to any situation, conversation, or meeting you are in. That’s what being positive does, it contributes. It adds something.”
He then walked over to the victim’s flip chart, drew a large minus sign, and said, “When you are negative, you subtract something from the conversation, the meeting, or the relationship. If you are negative often enough, you subtract so much from the relationship that there is no more relationship.”
Duane was giving us the simple math of the human interactive experience! It was a law of the universe up there on the flip-chart of life: positive adds, negative subtracts. A positive person contributes, a negative person takes away. I immediately recalled that in grade school, the minus sign was called the “take-away” sign.
As in math, when you introduce a negative to the workplace, it diminishes the total. Add a negative person to the team and the energy of the team is diminished.
When you are a positive leader with positive thoughts about the future and the people you lead, you add something to every person you talk to. You bring something of value to every communication. Every e-mail and voicemail that’s positive adds something to the life of the person who receives it. Because positive always adds to (increases, improves) something.
It’s a definite plus.
It runs even deeper than that. If you think positive thoughts throughout the day, you are adding to (plus sign) your own deep inner experience of living. You are bringing a plus to your own spirit and energy with each positive thought.
Your negative thoughts take away (minus sign) from the experience of being alive. They rob you of your energy.
And so the first thing a coaching conversation does is change the math. It alters the charge in the mind of the person being coached from negative to positive. That alone makes coaching immediately valuable.
Notice that most hands-on old-school micromanagers almost always bring a negative charge to their human interaction throughout the day. Every time they indulge in sarcasm about the organization, skepticism about the mission, or cynicism about the customer, the negativity builds. And they do this all day long.
One of the Internet’s most successful business gurus is Matt Furey (www.mattfurey.com), a former international champion martial artist who specializes in coaching his clients to stunning financial results. He is a friend of mine and shared with me his own thoughts about negative people and the message he likes to send.
“If you’re interested in more success,” says Matt, “then you and I can spend time together. If you’re interested in blaming others, staying stuck, whining, complaining, and so on, then we will not hang out together. Simple as that. Now, why do you think I have this rule? I have it because I have witnessed what happens to me when I am around successful people. I get charged up. I get excited. And I succeed even more than before. But if I hang out with people who act and think like losers, then I start going downhill.”
A client of mine I’ll call Linda had a real problem. She was trying to run a sales and marketing team and failing at every turn. She was selling a service targeted to women, and her team was comprised of women who loved and admired Linda—almost to the point of worship.
Linda’s product was wonderful, but her team was losing money, and when she hired me to coach her, she thought she was a hands-off manager, but she wasn’t.
Linda had the same misconception about hands-off management that many people do—they think it means no accountability. They think it means to just fire people up, love them and then look the other way. If they don’t perform, express your hurt and disappointment.
Dangerous misconception.