People often ask what is the bottom-line value of coaching, and here’s a classic example. A story in the Sunday Times yesterday showed how the share price of telecommunications, multi-media and IT holding company Altech had dropped by 5% on the news of its COO Jeffrey Hedberg having resigned. The story made a strong case that he resigned because he coudn’t take the “autocratic and domineering” leadership style of CEO Craig Venter, who is also the son of the company’s founder, Bill Venter.

This was not the view of the outgoing COO, in which case it might have lacked objectivity. It was the consensual view of analysts and “group insiders”, who had predicted a fallout six months before, when Hedberg’s appointment was announced. In the face of these comments, Venter responded by casting doubt on Hedberg’s abilities. This lacked credibility for the investment community and it looks from the outside that everybody can see the problem except him. As a result there is a call for his head and for a non-family member to replace him.

It appears that one way or the other, Venter will have to admit some faults, even if only to himself, in order to restore the company share price.

It’s hard to rely on newspaper reports and what people say without knowing a person. However, it’s also true that the world gives you accurate and useful feedback and that it’s more constructive to take that on, integrate it and grow, rather than defend yourself to the bitter end. It appears that one way or the other, Venter will have to admit some faults, even if only to himself, and make some changes to his management style or position, in order to restore the company share price. Of course, there’s a chance that he can continue as he is and pull some rabbit out of the hat, but that might only provide a temporary solution.

Identifying what to change, and making smart changes fast, is something that a good leadership coach could support him to achieve. The value of getting that right would be measured in tens of millions of rands.

The response of the Blue Bulls management to the pending appointment of their executive of rugby, Heyneke Meyer, as the new Springbok coach is an example of poor and petty leadership. They let him go, and then they childishly announced it the day before the Springboks had planned a massive public event to do the same – despite the Springbok management having asked them not to.

However they spin it – and they’re saying that they had invested resources in Meyer’s four-year commitment to them – their response is petty. When you have a commitment from someone, and that person asks to be released from their commitment, they are not out of integrity as long as they remain willing to fulfil on the commitment if you don’t release them. In other words, if the the Bulls had said no, Meyer would have stayed. If you do release them, no matter how much pressure you might be under from the general public or the pressing and obvious dictates of that person’s future, then you are responsible for releasing them. It’s your choice, and it’s petty to then try to get back at the people asking you to make that choice, in some other way. Nobody put a gun to their heads; they could have released him with dignity and kept their own honour intact.

The ability for an organization to rise above pettiness depends the maturity of the people in the organization and their ability to rise above themselves.

A self-serving, small-minded attitude is what leads to this kind of pettiness. It happens when the greater vision is not being served. When a greater vision is being served, you will find people being willing to put aside their petty differences and power struggles to show solidarity with the current leadership at important times. You can argue your point in the boardroom, but if you lose, then you don’t go out and undermine the decision that was made, you go out in support of it. If you can’t do that, then you need to get over yourself, stop being so childish. If it’s something you absolutely can’t live with, then you leave, and you leave with honour; you don’t undermine.

The responsibility for communicating the vision lies with those at the top. In this case, with the South African Rugby Union (Saru). The conventional notion is that getting buy-in to the vision is also the responsibility of those at the top, and that this is achieved through rousing speeches and persuasion. It doesn’t work. What works is the maturity of the people in the organization and their ability to rise above themselves. Just like a divorced parent who has to rise above their own petty arguments with the ex-spouse in order to serve the needs of the child.

Motivational speakers won’t do it. An engaged and sustained program of leadership coaching is the correct way to address this issue. If South Africa is going to rise to the great future that it’s capable of, getting leaders to rise above pettiness will be one of the cornerstones.

If you hand the same project with the same materials to a hundred children – or adults for that matter – you will get a hundred different results. Each one will be unique. OK, maybe a few cheats will copy the others, and maybe by some osmosis two of them might be very similar, but the point is that every person’s solution to the same problem differs vastly from the next person’s. If you just look at how uniquely every person’s life unfolds, there is further evidence for this. Each person is given the same project: make a success of your life; and the same materials: a brain, two hands, eyes, etc; and yet every person’s life takes a vastly different course.

Leaders who try to please everybody, when everybody’s solution is always going to be so vastly different, will find themselves stuck and end up avoiding the decisions that need to be made. Since decisions open the channels for energy to flow, for things to happen, the team will quickly stagnate.

Fearful leaders arise out of a culture of taking things personally

One of the most common drivers for this is fear, although often this fear is hidden behind euphemisms like consultation, consensus, even ubuntu. What is this leader afraid of? Of the consequences of people taking things personally. If I don’t take his suggestion into account he’ll be upset with me, or she might talk badly about me and turn the team against me; they might become uncooperative; or, quite simply, they might not like me.

To the extent that there is a culture of taking things personally, there will be fearful leaders and a tendency to avoid or delay making decisions. Strong leaders can rise above this. However, if they can’t shift the rest of the team to do the same, they can end up getting their heads chopped off.

The most effective organisations are those where decisions of leaders are readily accepted and supported, while rejected suggestions are not taken personally. There is usually a commitment to excellence in those organisations and everybody buys into that. The movies The Devil Wears Prada and The September Issue provide good examples of this. They are both about Vogue magazine and its editor Anna Wintour, who is uncompromising in her dedication to excellence. Whether she’s right or wrong in her decisions, the team respects them and gets on with it. Those who can’t take it, leave. There is no compromise on quality and the results show in the product: it is the best magazine in the world, by far.

Identifying a culture of taking things personally, and transforming that into a culture of excellence, is the task of any worthwhile executive coach.

The story is in fact much smarter than that. The action happens over a 24-hour period on the day that the music stops, inside one investment bank whose big cheese, John Tuld (played brilliantly by Jeremy Irons) gets called in to assess the crisis and makes decisions with astonishing speed and clarity, decisions that put him in conflict with his senior management. When challenged, he is clear and unwavering and you get the sense that he also has knowledge of a bigger game that’s being played out there in the world that he moves in, that nobody, not even his CEO or senior staff, have any real knowledge about. The speed and clarity of his decision making comes from his very clear and singular mandate.

The public – those of us who have pointed fingers at the bankers – get put firmly in our place through one particularly candid observation by senior trader Will Emerson (Paul Bettany). Anticipating the public backlash, he notes how everybody, including the masses, were enjoying the ride that the credit spree, created by the bankers, gave them.

More poignantly, it shows how the people who found themselves as bankers on the day that the bubble burst were simply the executors, doing their job as every other person in history has had to do – and for the same reasons: mostly because they themselves needed the money. In a speech given by Tuld (Irons) to a long-serving senior staffer Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), he shows how this is a movement through history that has happened many times before. And when you listen to the dates you realise that it’s been happening with greater frequency, lending credence to the view of time expressed by the Mayans through their infamous calendar: that as we approach 2012, more and more cycles of human social transformation will fit into shorter and shorter spans of time. The dates that Irons lists are first centuries apart, then decades apart, then mere years apart. Either they knew something, or we’re just getting more and more greedy.

It’s an intelligent movie about the people who find themselves in the boat, riding the wave of history as it happens, when there is no time to stand back and judge, only time, as Irons points out, to react. We are all tiny fish in a big sea and it’s easy to stand on the outside and point fingers, much more difficult when you find yourself in the middle of it.

When we learn the lessons in life that we think we need to learn, we generally learn nothing at all. The real lessons we need to learn are the lessons that life has in store for us. You know when you’re due for your next lesson: it’s when you’re resisting some or other change. You find yourself stuck, defending your position, trying with all your might to hold on and control what should happen next.

When you’re driving a car, the sooner you react to a sudden change in circumstances, the less likely you are to crash. When you’re slow to react – because you’ve been driving too fast, had your attention elsewhere, or the obstacle has arisen suddenly – then there’s a chance that once you react, your car will go into a slide. In a real slide, the correct thing to do is to point the front wheels in the direction you want to go, and keep your foot off the brake. And wait. It’s when you touch your foot on the brake that you’re likely to spin and roll. There’s nothing else you can do, but wait until it’s all over, then check for damage, and deal with the fallout.

Change is truly exciting if you have an attitude of faith and trust

In life, when you’re in a state of flux, it’s a situation with many variables that you can do nothing about. Instead of trying to control everything, keep your mind fixed on where you want to go; give up trying to control or stop the things you cannot control (like what he or she thinks or feels), and wait. See what’s left when it stops, then pick up the pieces.

When we emerge from the wreckage of change we have the lesson that life wants us to learn. It’s seldom the lesson we wanted to learn and that’s why it took a crash to get us to learn it. Some of the greatest inventions and discoveries happened quite by accident. We can never predict what beauty or genius comes out of a new set of variables that follows change. Change is truly exciting if we have an attitude of faith and trust. Do you trust life, or only yourself? If only yourself, then please make more trees grow, and stop global warming while you’re at it!

The movie Tornado is a story about a guy who learns to sit through the night, listening to a horse, and through his listening, he becomes healed, and heals the horse. I’ve been practising this, with my son, with myself – sitting up, not all night, but some of it, and listening, really listening. It’s amazing what has come up. Most of us are so busy trying to solve the problem that we don’t listen for the solution. Coaching has taught me that we all know the answer to every problem, we just aren’t listening to ourselves.

They measure the depth of the ocean by dropping a sonar beam, and measuring the time it takes to hit the ocean floor and return. The way to listen to yourself is to drop a question, let it fall all the way down to the bottom, and see what comes up. Repeat, until you have your answer, or your next question.

Listening requires courage, and the willingness to face what comes up. When we’re afraid to hear, we actually turn up the volume of our own internal noise. So you first have to be willing to face what comes up. Then when you become still, and really listen, and then listen some more, the answers will come to you. Good coaching is about getting the client to hear himself. It’s the art of listening.

If you can’t hear yourself, and you want to, then find someone who can help you listen: find a good coach.

If there’s anything you’re certain about, anything you’re 100% sure that that’s the way life is, that’s the way God made us, then you can be certain about one thing more: that you’re fooling yourself. What you take as the absolute truth is simply the current  limit of your world, of what you believe is possible. It’s your ‘flat earth’ statement, and you just haven’t sailed beyond the limits yet to test it.

Ne plus ultra is a Latin term that means ‘not further beyond’. It referred to the point beyond which sailors would not sail their ships for fear of being swallowed by monsters or falling off the edge of the earth. We each have a ne plus ultra in our minds, the point in our beliefs beyond which we’re not willing to go.

When you go beyond that point, you’re
left with nothing but pure possibility

Going beyond our ne plus ultra is the scariest thing. Beyond it lies nothing but pure possibility. When you give up certainty, you’re left with only you; you realise that you don’t run the universe and you don’t define God, and that’s pretty humbling for most of us. It’s also the launch pad for personal power, because you start facing the problems as they are – or rather, the problem as it is, the problem of you – instead of the problem being ‘out there’ somewhere. Just as the limit for sailors was never the earth, it was always what they held to be certain in their minds.

Being uncertain about the things you’re certain about will start to dissolve your limitations.

I was in the presence last weekend of men sharing themselves authentically and it was a privileged place to be. ‘The future is now,’ is a phrase coined by the guru Jiddu Krishnamurti. It means that you bring ecstasy into the moment as soon as you live committed doing the thing that would make you ecstatic. In other words, it’s the journey of commitment that brings you the ecstasy, not reaching the destination. It came alive for me last weekend while presenting the first Authentic Success Program for Men: I saw that there is nothing else for me to be doing. This is it. This is my purpose and what gives my life meaning. There is no ambition for wealth or for some option out there that will make me happy. This is it.

What a place to be, and boy have I been lost and unhappy and searching for long periods of my life. To see other men find that space, or the possibility of that space, was humbling and awe-inspiring, and I look forward to doing it with thousands more around the world.