By the third follow-on executive coaching session after a three-day Leadership Excellence Course, a chemistry usually forms between coach and learner. It is important to understand that the best coaching relationships are two-way: for sharing, for learning, and for continuously improving. Two positive indicators of substantial learning and ongoing chemistry from a recent coaching session come to mind. The first involves conflict. Most of us seem to naturally avoid conflict, let’s just say years of observation support the claim. It was a delight then to hear that the client wishes to work on conflict leadership. His words: Conflict Leadership. Not just conflict, or difficult people. He used the word leadership. That was a terrific sign he really got a lot out of our Academy Leadership Leveraging the Power of Conflict workshop. It also made me think of all the things we usually do to avoid conflict which can hold us, and our teams, and our organizations back. In Michael Roberto’s extremely well-researched book Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes For An Answer, he argues that leaders must cultivate constructive conflict in order to enhance the level of critical and divergent thinking, while simultaneously building consensus in order to facilitate the timely and efficient implementation of the choices they make. A very strong argument.
The second indicator was my favorite part - we discussed books, what we learned from them, and most importantly, what we are doing differently afterward. Many of us become so busy, we seem to lose our curiosity, which in turn leads to further losses we probably are not even aware of. My client emailed a list of books, all worthy of reading and reviewing, and I asked my client to look on the choinque bookshelf page online to view my recent review of Whitney Johnson’s S-Curve diagram from Build an A Team. You see, one of the issues my client faces is reluctance to learn, reluctance to change, among several more experienced team members, legacy employees, who have become rather set in their ways. In his industry, travel, innovate or die is existential reality. He thought Whitney’s S-Curve perfectly captured his situation. We both learned a lot in that session.
Who coaches you? Who do you coach? How do you constructively cultivate conflict? Are you and your team curious? Leaders Embrace Conflict and Disruption.