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When people ask me what the responsibilities of leadership, management and coaching are in an organization, I offer the following statement: "The right people doing the right things at the right time in the right way for the right reasons."

Mike Jay

It is imperative that we discuss why the above statement has a place in the back of every person’s mind who may employ coaching as a strategy for improving and developing people and organizations—right action.

We often view the ability to create wealth and keep a customer as the most important role of leadership. Yet, it really isn’t enough of a noble cause to accomplish the real big things, is it?

In this book the organization is considered to be a framework for the exchange of value. It helps us to keep organizational life in perspective--the structure that surrounds us including all those functional but impersonal issues—and the people, the personal side of an organization. I admit I still struggle with the definition of an organization, and while I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing, it is not about struggle.

You will hear the term effortless used throughout the book with many different nouns, as work in today’s world with all of our modern attributes should not be about effort and work, but about contribution and flow. Never before have we had the opportunities that abound today. We literally are at the dawn of a new age, hardly capable of being known, yet fully emerging as we live and breathe.

This book is about this "new age," living and prospering in it and finding an uncommon happiness through effortless contribution. My goal is to help you help others find their own place in organization, their own best way of contributing, and that inner sense of well being that burns deep within all of us—everyday. Work and organization need not be about struggle and strife--scarcity and greed. Work is probably the most significant human bond, lying ready to afford us the abundance and satisfaction that is common to the least of us.

The short sidetrack above should not distract you from the central issue of right action—for it is merely the underlying foundation for it. Right action depends on the individual and on the collective action taken as a matter of choice each and every moment we process our thoughts—and behave. Right action is a matter of deep inner being that is often prevented from surfacing by personal and organizational barriers. However, in each and every moment, we have the opportunity, and some would say the obligation, to surface right action.

"Understanding how we diagnose and construct our experience, take action, and monitor our behavior while simultaneously achieving our goals is crucial to understanding and enhancing effectiveness."

Argyris & Schon, Theory in Practice, 1974

This is, of course, easier said than done. While this book contains the where with all or theory and practices to help facilitate that for individuals and organizations, it is beyond the scope of our time here together to fully explore right action for you in all of your roles and their dimensions. Perhaps someday I will finish the work in progress that addresses those personal leadership issues, but for now allow me to offer to you my experience and synthesis of how to coach right action in organizations—to create organizational effectiveness.

Please, do not think for a moment that I intend anything other than a synthesis of personal and organizational effectiveness--simultaneously. However, I have to focus the light of our attention and consciousness on the task at hand, that is, of helping us to understand how to create a system in an organization or workgroup that allows the opportunities for right action to surface and persist.

You will notice that we make reference to the surfacing of right action as opposed to having to create it? This is done on purpose. If we view the process of surfacing as something that already exists rather than constructing it from scratch, I think we can see that our system of approach will be much different. The methods, along with the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) that are required for competence in surfacing right action as opposed to constructing it, are not always similar.

While this book is about developing and improving the competencies we will need to master in order to remove the barriers to right action, it is also about people. These competencies are made up of the KSAs that people will learn and master. In later chapters we will discuss fully the integration of theory and practice.

Let’s for a moment go back to the concept of right action. We said that right action was "the right people doing the right things at the right time in the right way for the right reasons."

If we look at each component in the right action system, we will discover the reason for including it in the equation.

Right People

"It is a lot easier to hire the right people to begin with than to fix them later."

Bradford D. Smart, Ph.D.

The above quote from Bradford Smart’s latest book, TOPGRADING: How leading companies win by hiring, coaching and keeping the right people, sums up the importance of the right people in my view. So much of our time as change agents is spent working with the wrong people—people we are stuck with? It is clear that in order to be a great company or great workgroup you need to have great people. Yet, so much of the time, we find ourselves working with people who are not ready, willing and able to do the job they have been assigned.

While this book deals effectively with coaching in this situation, that is preventing a mismatch; recruiting, hiring and training the best person for the job cannot be overlooked. Fix your problems before they start! Coaching a person who is ready, willing and able is a whole lot different than interacting with someone who is not. Surfacing right action in the former is truly effortless, while the latter can be a challenge for even the most masterful of coaches at best, impossible in the least. Many coaching programs discuss the person who is not "coachable." A person who is not ready, willing, or able populates that subset.

I would recommend TOPGRADING for no other reason than to see how Smart helps us understand how different people fit into A, B and C possibilities. He fully demonstrates the effectiveness of how leading companies prosper because they spend 80% of their time with the people falling into the A class. He indicates that an effective strategy is to hire the best possible candidate available for the job based on an extensive interviewing process that is delineated in his book.

The old adage "People are your most important asset" is wrong. The right people are your most important asset.

Jim Collins, Turning Goals Into Results, HBR, July-Aug, 1999, p.77

 

Right Things

The first part of the equation is fairly simple, start well—end well. However from here on things get pretty complex. What is the right thing? This question in itself is probably responsible for more books, papers, articles and conversation than most other topics except the right reasons.

The right thing has a way of being highly elusive especially when the right thing today is not the right thing tomorrow in an ambiguous environment! However, the right thing can also be surfaced with the proper methodology. In fact, the quality of the right thing will improve with the use of the coaching methodology we describe in this book.

The focus throughout the book often centers on the question what is the right thing--for the person coaching, the person being coached, the system or the organization? Simply put, the right thing is whatever content, delivery, product or service meets the needs—that has value--to the person/organization and situation you are dealing with at the time. Many of these values will be in conflict, hence the turbulence and ambiguity of business today and tomorrow.

In the case of the person coaching, the right thing may be something we say or refrain from saying. It might appear as a question, a form of feedback, an idea or perhaps even silence. For a customer service person, the solution might appear in what the customer wants and the company can afford. For a leader, the right thing might be that vision thing, the correct selection of CFO, a new product idea or even a smooth, quiet ride through the countryside.

Each moment in time defines rightness or fit. The ability to do the right thing is within each of us. It may not be the right thing for everyone but at that precise moment it might be the right thing for us—a chance to work for another company, an opportunity to pursue a lifelong interest or the action taken to help someone in need.

To do the right thing requires an awareness and understanding of one’s self, the situation and the desired outcomes, either shared or held individually. It must meet a host of moral and legal criteria, all so complex that at times we find ourselves pulled in two directions at once, yet underneath it all, we know the right thing.

An effective coaching interaction surfaces the right thing at the right time, even under the most ambiguous of circumstances.

Right Time

Timing is essential. Almost everything can be fixed except time. Time passes and often you get just one chance to do it right. Accountants talk of efficiency. In systems, we measure efficiency, the time and resources it takes to do it right the first time. As an individual or organization, we need to focus on doing the right thing at the right time because of the costs involved in doing it over and the speed in which the business environment is changing shape. Regis McKenna’s book called REAL TIME: Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer brings into view how critical timing is to both individuals and organizations.

"Companies best equipped for the twenty-first century will consider investment in real time systems as essential to maintaining their competitive edge and keeping their customers. By this I mean that they will use information and telecommunications technology to respond to changing circumstances and even more important, customer expectations within the smallest lapse of time."

Regis McKenna

Clearly, we have no choice but to take into consideration how time affects everything in our personal and organizational lives. From being on time to seeing your child perform in a play, to having the right thing ready for a customer precisely—on time. People and organizations have NO CHOICE but to seriously consider the impact of time on everything—including the right time to relax!

Without a doubt, the most exciting thing about coaching is that it brings about the consideration and importance of timing—through interaction. When we take the time or the opportunity to connect with people, to clarify meaning and to make commitments that are healthy, wealthy and wise—our time is well spent.

Right Way

This book is about a right way because the right way is the way that it needs to be or what works! On the surface, however, we don’t always know the right way and many times will unconsciously do things in a way that is not representative of this knowing we all have access to deep inside us.

"The environment in which we operate is significantly more complex than what the human mind can process at a given moment. In order for the human mind to deal with reality, we must abstract from the buzzing confusion of everyday life by using abstract concepts."

Chris Argyris, Org Dynamics, Autumn 1982

Quite often, the right way becomes something that has worked in the past or something that is familiar. Due to complexity we tend to use these previously successful right ways to handle more and more challenges—to the point that they are no longer the right way. One of my favorite quotes from Abraham Maslow demonstrates this modus operandi, "he who is good with a hammer thinks everything is a nail."

The right way syndrome can be tested and often determined from using coaching methods. This is why coaching has become so popular among the fad of the month practitioners. As a way, coaching is participative and not directive as other ways and by rule, much more appreciative of people. It allows for the surfacing and development—not just the substitution—of the right way in each circumstance. At the very minimum, an awareness that we often fall into using the same abstract concepts-- for making meaning and decisions stated by Argyris--to solve a variety of solutions. In organization, it is easy to sub-optimize the system by using less than ideal solutions.

Ask anyone who has been in a coaching relationship for any period of time and regardless of whether they like their coach or not, they will feel more aware of themself and the organizational patterns. The mere fact that two people relate to one another and discuss things that are not normally discussed has the power of unleashing forces within us that are seldom seen. No wonder everybody is a coach!

[If we were on the internet I would have put a <g> (stands for an emotion of smiling or grinning) but since we are not I will just say the statement was meant facetiously<g>].

One mistake that is often made—addressed clearly throughout the book—is that not everyone can or should be a coach, however, everyone should learn to use coaching KSAs (knowledge, skills and abilities).

The right way is therefore, determined mostly by the actor acting in accordance with the situational needs with unbending principles. If we understand that paradox, then using coaching KSAs can surface or test the right way, whether we are a coach or not. Most times, the right way is a perception and not a truth. This confuses most people because so many people have been taught to believe that there is a one right way to everything (remember Maslow?).

In a complex and ambiguous world such as we live and work in, very few things are universally true. We perceive them to be, but such is just not the case. We do not see the world as it is, but how we are.

If I asked you—for just one moment—to suspend all your truths and ask you to find the right way to do something, you would probably use coaching KSAs automatically. Not knowing—that is, starting with a beginner’s mind—you would have to probably connect with someone, clarify some issues—testing alternatives—and then commit to the right way for that situation.

Of course, we always consider the right reasons while we are discovering the right way, but that goes without saying.

Right Reasons

I saved the best for last! For the right reasons is the most written and talked about subject of mankind. Whole nations have been annihilated for not having the right reason on their side! Our entire democracy exists for the right reasons. Each and everyday we think we are doing things for the right reasons. We are individually and collectively guided by the right reasons, yet why don’t we all have the same reasons?

Because the right reasons are highly personal and often very subjective—often hidden deep within our cognitive and emotional conditioning—being interpreted from rising complexity, arising out of abstract concepts.

As we discussed in right way, there are universal truths but not as many as we subscribe to and believe. In business, the right reasons have to be motivating, empowering, energizing, on solid legal ground, compassionate. Compassionate? Yes, that too! It is no longer acceptable to hide behind a stoic truth about how the organization is all-powerful and dictates the lives of its constituents, its market and its buyers! A new world has dawned and we now live in a buyer’s market, driven by overcapacity, global competition, ambiguous and turbulent circumstances, a deteriorating environment and a deep need to connect and belong to each other.

The right reasons today are different from the right reasons of yesterday. Yes, we need to have the same moral compass, yet the moral points have become more graduated. We cannot live and work any longer at the benefit of our environment. No longer are there people lined up at our doors willing to work for anything we chose to declare as fit.

The time has passed that we are able to command the world’s markets and our employee’s time, life and existence. A fragile, yet dynamic balance is coming into vogue where we must—for the right reasons—conduct ourselves individually and collectively in harmony with one another and our environment.

Coaching is one of the few ways to approach and dialogue about the right reasons at the individual level.

· Leaders describe for us the right reasons in their noble visions.

· Managers decide our course of actions for the right reasons.

· Trainers teach us what to do for the right reasons and

· actors perform their roles for the right reasons.

Yet, in coaching, we explore the right reasons; we test the assumptions those right reasons are based upon. Through discovery, appreciative inquiry as well as dialogue and conversation with another person, we generate the right reasons through interaction.

Throughout this book, we will discover why coaching is not just another program du jour. We will come to understand how coaching fits in the modern day organizational structure. We will learn how to conduct coaching interactions to develop well being, purpose, competence and awareness in an individual and in an organization.

"I recommend that we account for behavior by understanding it as what follows from the way the world is showing up for someone. In other words, it is not events, communication, or stimuli that lead to behavior, it is the interpretation an individual gives to the phenomenon that leads to actions taken."

James Flaherty from COACHING: Evoking Excellence in Others.

 

Clearly, right action is determined through interpretation of the interaction of a variety of factors. This is not always defined in terms of standards but often emergent according to interpretation or one’s governing variables as Argyris might conclude. The role of coaching in an organization and for the individual can facilitate interpretations that are more generative for all concerned.

In a sense, people who practice this methodology as a lifestyle rather than in a part of their lives evoke for me the term generati. I coined this term a number of years ago to describe this very condition—people who continuously create generative outcomes for others.

The term is derived from the forms of literati and digerati describing conditions surrounding the literary and digital worlds. I offer this coaching methodology to a new world. This new world is about right action…is about creating generative conditions for all involved and…is about a practice of understanding and acting in harmony with our goals, our work, our communities and ourselves.

Please join me in the following chapters on a journey towards generati. Coaching is a path you will find generative for you and your organization.