Executive Coaching, High Performance Teams, Leadership
Accountability is essential for high performance.
It is a social contract between people. You are accountable to someone for something. The someone could be an individual or a team. The something is a result.
Accountable means ‘count-on-able.’ You said it. You delivered it, just as you said you would.
‘Responsible’ is a synonym of ‘accountable.’ One definition of responsible is ‘being a source, cause, or agent of.’ In other words, if I am responsible, I can be counted on to originate the action(s) needed to produce the result(s).
Every job is comprised of an accountability: some specific result(s) you are count-on-able for producing within certain time frames.
People sometimes struggle with holding others accountable, fearing that those others will resent or dislike them and accuse them of being ‘confrontational.’ To be an effective leader or manager, your accountability is to hold people accountable in a respectful and clear-cut manner, despite your concerns for being liked.
Trust is often talked about as missing or weak in a team or culture. A necessary element of trust is that people know they can count on each other. Another definition of ‘responsible’ is ‘trustworthy.’
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If accountability is not as strong as you would like with your team or organization, Barry Pogorel Inc. can help make accountability present and powerful.
Executive Coaching
As our series on Executive Coaching heads to a new year, we offer a clear path to the source of Revolutionary Results.
Consider the energy of the word itself:
Revolutionary = innovative, outside or beyond the established and predictable, providing new difference-making possibilities and opportunities, altering the trajectory from past to present to future so that something beneficially unprecedented can happen.
To produce a revolutionary result, a result you’ve not produced before, you need to take actions you’ve not taken before, which requires you to think in ways you’ve not thought before. It’s about revolutionary thinking, action, and results as a flow.
How do you think in new ways?
One powerful access is to identify your habitual ways of thinking: to identify the patterns, formulas, and the familiar so that you can go beyond these.
If you apply this to a team, there is one additional dimension—how the team members relate to each other. It means the team must interact in ways they’ve not interacted before, to think together in new ways, to act in new ways together, to produce unprecedented results.
For a group to become a revolutionary team, they must have a new level of trust and collaboration with each other. This requires:
- Candor—honesty and forthright communication with each other—saying what has to be said.
- Count-on-ability—when you say you’ll do something, you do it and do it when you said you would.
- Listening deeply, hearing each other fully—putting aside all preconceptions, assumptions, biases, prejudices about what others are saying and listen for what you’ve not heard before to expand your own thinking.
- Establishing alignment among all team members, without reservations, on the objectives to be achieved.
- Expressing gratitude and thanks for each other, for what each person contributes to the team’s efforts. Accomplishments are recognized.
- Having each other’s back and rooting for not only the team’s success, but each other’s success.
I transform individuals and teams to become the source of Revolutionary Results.
Ready to leap ahead? Call me at (310) 730-6355 to find out more about Executive Coaching to stop overwhelm.
Executive Coaching, Leadership
For a Leader in a hurry (what leader isn’t?)
Our executive coaching series picks up the pace for those already moving very fast to cover a lot of territory.
They barely have time to ask themselves three critical questions…
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- Why have an executive coach?
- What is the value to me?
- How do I select the right coach for me?
Why have an executive coach? Consider these possibilities:
- You have a challenging issue you are dealing with, and you’re looking for a resolution, such as:
- You are overwhelmed with your workload
- You are having difficulty dealing with someone, such as a partner/report/boss
- You have a team that is not functioning at the level needed
- You have an intractable problem
- You are seeking to develop yourself as a leader—your skill, ability, effectiveness, productivity. You aim to be a great leader.
- You want to surpass your own performance beyond anything you’ve ever done before.
- You would value someone to think and plan with, someone outside your company, outside the culture, who will listen—and who can provide objective, intelligent insight and thought-provoking dialogue for new perspectives and new thinking. A strategic confidante.
- You are in transition from one job to another or one company to another. You’d like to discuss and gain clarity on your next career move. You want to clarify your career path and make it happen.
- You’ve been stuck in some way about something and you want to get into effective action and deal with it.
How do you select the right coach for you?
Here is a quick guide to selecting an executive coach:
- Interview at least 2 candidates.
- If you have a referral from someone you know you can trust, that’s great! If not:
- Check your gut—do you like the person?
- Do they “get” you?
- Do you like their approach/method. Does it make sense?
- Is there a lack of B.S.: do they seem straightforward and honest, do they listen, do they stay on point?
- What is their track record? Do they talk about results or anecdotes and stories. You want results.
- What do they promise you? What can you count on them for? Ask them.
Like any great performer: an athlete, a dancer, a musician— and for a leader in a hurry— powerful coaching can immeasurably increase your performance.
If you’d like to interview me as one of your candidates, it would be my honor. And… remember to ask me about my approach called “Transformational Coaching” which is specifically designed to produce breakthroughs in your performance.
Ready to use this guide? Call me at (310) 730-6355 to find out more about Executive Coaching for yourself.
Executive Coaching
As our Executive Coaching series continues, we noticed the calendar is about to change years. How do you really go about planning a great next year?
Where are you standing now? Are you an executive, a team leader, or a senior member of an executive team who needs to know where to look first for what’s next?
WOULD YOU TELL ME, PLEASE, WHICH WAY I OUGHT TO GO FROM HERE?
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
—Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
In the year-end press to get work done, transactions finalized, and loose-ends tied up, it’s easy to miss or neglect something that can make a huge difference in the upcoming year: creating a powerful plan.
Creating a Powerful Plan. Where do you begin?
If you google “planning,” you will get nearly six billion entries! Advice, tips, strategies, techniques. And then there are the established corporate procedures for year-end reviews and planning. And advisors, consultants, and coaches to guide you.
However, there is usually one most crucial and fundamental step that is left out or short-changed. Without it, plans can be acceptable, thoughtful, and yet they lack a certain inspiration and real creativity that can mean the difference between a great year and a mediocre one.
That missing step is completing the past. Before you look to the next year and what you are going to accomplish, look at your past year and get it complete!
Complete (adjective)
having every necessary part or element; entire
ended; finished
thorough
absolute
perfect in quality or kind
— from www.dictionary.com
When something is complete, you are no longer concerned with it, you no longer “carry it.”
- It has moved to the background.
- It has given you whatever value it held for you.
- It has no influence on you anymore.
- You are ready to move on.
- You are free and unencumbered to create newly.
Planning is a conversation, right?! So have this conversation with your executive team before you turn your eye to what is next: a conversation to complete the past year.
Here are some questions to respond to and guide you and your team:
- What did you say you would accomplish this past year? Goals, targets, projects, issues to resolve.
- What did you actually accomplish of these?
- What did you not accomplish of these?
- What else did you accomplish that was not planned?
- With respect to what you said you’d accomplish that you did not, what happened? What was missing? What got in the way? What are the corrections going forward? What actions can you put in that would be useful? What actions can you take out that were not productive?
- Who should be acknowledged and for what?
- Did you forward fulfilling your mission/vision?
- Is there anything else to say to be complete with the past year?
OK! Now you have a space in which to create a powerful and inspiring plan!
- Put this on your calendar with your team.
- Planning a great next year begins with engaging in these powerful questions.
- It will be time well spent to begin a productive— and extraordinary— new year.
Ready? Call me at (310) 730-6355 to find out more about Executive Coaching for planning a Great Next Year, and leap before it begins.
Executive Coaching
Our series jumps ahead with Executive Coaching to Stop Overwhelm
Here’s more of The Inside View with Barry Pogorel
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How does accomplishment turn into overwhelm?
- You’re on track in your career. Results are strong. You’ve been promoted or you’re working hard on being promoted.
- Your schedule is packed.
- One meeting leads to the next meeting or call. Videoconferences, projects meetings, unplanned interruptions, endless emails, people to manage, travel, someone who just ‘has to speak with you right now,’ luncheons, dinners, that unexpected problem.
- You’re waiting for a slowdown, a break, to catch your breath and to just simply catch up. And…it never comes. In fact, the amount of “stuff” to deal with is increasing. At moments, it’s a little scary.
- You plan on catching up some evening, or on the weekend. This cuts into your personal time. And it’s never enough time anyway. You experience some guilt about taking time away from your family.
Here it comes…
The work is good. You like what you do. It may even be exciting. But you’re bothered.
- Where is the time for your family? For exercise? For rest? How long can you keep this pace up?
- You feel buried under a mountain of things to deal with. You may experience frustration, struggle, distraction, stress, overwhelm, even procrastination.
- And sometimes, in a rare moment of reflection, you wonder where all this is going. Perhaps you feel like all this is keeping you from making the difference you really want to make with your life. You ask, what is this all about, ultimately? Money? Position? More advancement? To what end?
What aspect of this resonates most? What sounds like the inner thoughts that rise unbidden about your own life?
Too many executives hide their real answer to this question from others— and from themselves.
The amount of work is increasing everywhere. How do you deal with it all?
The old fashioned “time-management” systems—prioritizing into A’s, B’s, C’s and 1’s, 2’s, 3’s, etc. just doesn’t work anymore.
Most available systems were designed at a time prior to the deluge of work we are all facing now.
Incremental improvement is not even close to what you need.
Is there a way out of overwhelm that actually works?
It may look impossible.
And… YES, there is an alternative.
It is a brilliant new approach that produces a genuine breakthrough in your ability to deal with everything you have to do and handle in your entire life, leaving nothing out.
A new methodology that includes:
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- new principles,
- work habits, and
- a structure/system that leaves you with power, freedom, and peace of mind.
… is what it takes to end overwhelm and stress, to exponentially increase your productivity and effectiveness.
Ready to leap ahead? Call me at (310) 730-6355 to find out more about Executive Coaching to stop overwhelm.
Executive Coaching, High Performance Teams
Our series continues with a post on Executive Coaching for teams . Something Impossible?
Enjoy The Inside View with Barry Pogorel
What happens after a merger takes place?
That’s when senior executives are left with the often daunting task of making the merger work in the real world, with real people.
This case study may surprise you as Barry’s executive coaching for teams set about creating a new context for formerly very competitive foes.
Post-merger, what these new teams faced: Something Impossible
Post-merger, the new company was disjointed. The newly formed executive teams in the various regions of the world were made up of executives who had previously been fierce competitors.
Overall, the company’s performance was impacted by all this and in a declined state.
I worked with one region of the world as a pilot to see if we could transform it into a high-performance team/culture in a short time frame and produce a breakthrough in results.
I began working the regions executive team in a “leadership intensive”: 5 days in one month, and 5 more days a month later. We began by creating a “safe space” in which people were encouraged to be candid. The president promised this.
We examined, person by person, their strengths and defenses: we looked at each person’s formulaic ways of winning—their personal strategies.
Then we looked at each of their typical responses to threats. After a while, everyone saw that underneath the variations, there was a kind of template—something very human and universal.
A note here: my work is not psychological—but rather ontological. That is, having to do with being (ontos in Greek means “being”). And there is a generalizable “being” of being a leader. A fundamental structure that has to do with certain habitual ways of thinking, communicating, relating, and acting, like a piece of software that reliably repeats itself.
Was is the real challenge in executive coaching for teams ? Could they let their guard down?
We went around the room, person by person, exploring her/his “ways of being.” It became apparent to everyone that, although they had different variations on the theme, there in fact was an underlying theme as to how they succeeded and how they responded to threat or danger that was universal.
Everyone increasingly let their guard down, as they saw the common humanity in the room.
The president proposed, in this new-found collegiality and partnership, that they take on something big together—something impossible: a breakthrough in market share throughout the entire region.
They asked if I would train the various local executive teams in the same material and get them all on board, which I did.
A Revolutionary Result:
In a year when the region was experiencing a recession, they produced a breakthrough in market share and surpassed every crucial financial measure.
The corporate president acknowledged them for not only their superb performance beyond any other region in the world, but also for having become a seamless team.
The executives not only made something that had seemed impossible happen, but also had real breakthroughs in their own development as leaders.
Your comments and questions are invited. about this post or any issues you’d like to see in the series.
You may also want to visit “How to Choose the Right Executive Coach” for a winning approach to selecting the right coach for yourself, or your team.
