A key theme in this blog is transformative leadership, which involves transformative learning – on the part of both the leader and the organization. A key competency of transformative leadership is coaching.
As a transformative learning strategy, coaching can be contrasted with consulting. Consultants are experts who supply answers. However, more often than we might hope, these answers may become expensive “shelfware.” Knowledge becomes shelfware primarily because leaders and their organizations have not digested it and made it their own.
As an example, the CEO of a personal care products company in the Western U.S. wants to increase the company’s sales. He has hired a succession of marketing consultants to advise him on how to accomplish this. Each consultant is hired with great expectations and eventually ushered out the door as a disappointment. Why? The CEO does not agree with the consultants’ assessments or recommendations. What they see as dysfunction, he sees as the way he wants to run his business. He has a particular philosophy of business and isn’t inclined to change it, even though it is not working for him. If he saw the world in such a way that the recommendations made sense, chances are, he would already have been taking the actions the consultants’ recommended. He wants someone to make his philosophy work.
Assuming that the CEO is behind the needed changes, if the changes don’t seem normal and natural to all of the organization members who need to make them work, the organization will struggle to change. People will do what is asked as long as someone is looking over their shoulders but will tend to drift back to old, comfortable behaviors.
Transformative coaching, on the other hand, involves supporting leaders and organizations in developing expanded and more effective perspectives and strategies. In the above example, a coach might support the CEO in thinking though the assumptions that underlie his philosophy, to learn why it hasn’t achieved the desired results; in developing an enlarged perspective; and in developing and executing strategies that reflect these new insights.
Similarly, the CEO as transformative leader and coach, has the tools to facilitate a similar shift on the part of the organization as a whole…
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