The Coachable Leader speaks to executives who are serious and willing to reflect upon, refine, and possibly reconstitute their leadership practices. If you want to be one of those people, it's imperative that you remain coachable so you can gain insights on how to encourage positive behaviors and avoid executive actions that sabotage mutual success. Use this book to seize your opportunity to become an exceptional leader. Through its clearly outlined chapters, complete with real-life business examples and comprehensive graphics, you'll learn how to balance the seven fundamentals for effective leadership development: collaborative convincement, emotional strength, integrative ethics, provident power, interactive influence, team forbearance, systems discernment. With these foundational concepts, you'll discover how to initiate a more cooperative and collaborative approach to leadership. As you seek to become a coachable leader, you'll develop skills, techniques, and tools to inspire and accomplish tangible, bottomline results. Achieve a more balanced approach to reaching your goals with The Coachable Leader!

The COACHABLE LEADER

What Future Executives Need to Know TodayBy Peter J. Dean Molly D. Shepard Monica L. Warner

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Peter J. Dean
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-4888-5

Contents

Acknowledgment.............................................................................................................................................................ixPreface....................................................................................................................................................................xiChapter One The Coachable Leader: Congratulations, You Are a Leader But, Are You Coachable?...............................................................................1Chapter Two Coaching Executive Leaders to Practice Collaborative Convincement: Management and Leadership...................................................................11Chapter Three Coaching Executive Leaders to Practice Emotional Strength: Healthy Ego and Empathy...........................................................................27Chapter Four Coaching Executive Leaders to Practice Integrative Ethics: Principled Rules and Well-Intended Results.........................................................41Chapter Five Coaching Executive Leaders to Practice Provident Power: Professional Power and Personal Power.................................................................53Chapter Six Coaching Executive Leaders to Practice Interactive Influence: Feedback to the Self and Disclosure to Others....................................................75Chapter Seven Coaching Executive Leaders to Practice Team Forbearance: Positive Team Behaviors for Task Completion and Group Relations.....................................111Chapter Eight Coaching Executive Leaders to Practice Systems Discernment: People's Perception of Work and a Well-Designed Work System for Productivity.....................133Chapter Nine Coaching Executive Leaders to Coach Other Executives..........................................................................................................147Quick Guide................................................................................................................................................................175Appendix A: Management.....................................................................................................................................................181Appendix B: Leadership.....................................................................................................................................................217Appendix C: The Three Elements of Speaking.................................................................................................................................231Bibliography...............................................................................................................................................................255Resources to Build Your Own Leadership Library.............................................................................................................................265Index......................................................................................................................................................................281

Chapter One

The Coachable Leader: Congratulations, You Are a Leader. But, Are You Coachable?

Arguably, many corporate executives have lost their credibility and our trust as successful leaders. Sadly, this is not the age to have doubtful leadership in our companies; the world faces economic confusion, extreme self-interest, aggressive materialism, lack of respect for human rights, and duties, and a violent utilitarianism that causes physical or financial harm to customers. Much of the blame is being put on executives. Whether it is a lack of good leadership, bad behavior, outright fraud, or just not stepping forward to take a stand for fair business, our executives have put in a lackluster performance as champions of business for society. It is critical now to reexamine comprehensively our notions about what it takes to be a successful and positive executive leader.

Current-day executives and those who hope to be successful executive leaders ought to be open to understanding the impact of their character and leadership on others. Feedback presented in the fundamental categories that constitute leadership is not easy for executives to receive, especially if the feedback suggests needed improvement of some areas, but it is essential for the following reason: as executives move up the ladder in organizations, the one thing they receive less and less of is developmental feedback about their competence, character, and positive impact as a leader. Without this multipronged feedback, executives can slip into a state of denial about their effectiveness.

An example of extreme backlash can be seen in the 2011 political uprising in Egypt that sent aggressive feedback by the masses to the leaders in that country. On a smaller scale, but no less important, executives can learn from this example that honest and continuous feedback is much more easily received by the executive than mass revolt, which for companies means losing talent and losing in the marketplace. Having witnessed the failure of leadership over and over again, in firms like Tyco, Enron, WorldCom, AIG, Lehman Brothers, and most recently BP, it is time to present feedback that helps executives move beyond the autocracy of linear decision making present in our corporate systems, where poor and sometimes disastrous results routinely emerge from narrowly focused, short-term, self-centered, and unenlightened thinking.

The Seven Fundamentals of Leader Development

In order to receive feedback in the seven fundamental categories that comprise the content of this book, one must be coachable. That is, open to truly hearing and receiving the feedback with the intent to make the relevant changes necessary to be better leaders. To act on being coachable, an executive can hire an executive coach, who will collect the feedback and fold in the knowledge of the fundamentals in leader development. Once assembled into a report, the coach will offer the feedback to the executive and put the suggestions into observable behavior. A second alternative is that an executive can learn the kind of feedback that is important from a progressive MBA curriculum designed to connect and apply the many disciplines from which leader development draws its knowledge. Finally, a third option is that executives can take direction from this book, which has been written from the perspective of the disciplines of leadership, from actual experiences of executives in programs of leader development, and from our research and practice in the field of leader-development studies.

The seven fundamental categories in which feedback is given to the executive are depicted in the visual below. It is important to note that all seven fundamentals speak to the executive directly about what he/ she has control over in his/her own practice of leadership. If all seven fundamentals are utilized to some degree in an executive's repertoire of leadership practice, then the executive's impact of leadership is more seamless, contiguous, positive, trusted, and longer lasting. In other words, executives who have been coached in all seven fundamentals have a more positive impact on others.

The Coachable Leader has been written to provide executives with proper coaching in leader...