Year: 2018

The role of the CEO is to have ‘effective’ conversations. If his or her conversations are effective, then the organization will generate results, and if not, the results of the organization will get impacted.

In my experience of interacting with some top CEOs, several of them miss these basic, and yet critical conversations, with their teams. And interestingly, some others avoid having these conversations — because each of these aren’t necessarily easy conversations to have.
Often, it is learning to take the bull by the horns. And many CEOs I know who have mastered these conversations and have generated great results.

Here are what I assess to be the 5 key conversations CEOs must have with their teams. These are not discretionary conversations. These must be had for the sake of results of the organization:

1. Co-create a Future that the Organization Commits to
If the organization is not working to achieve a well-crafted future, my claim is the organization is in drift. The first key role of the CEO is to co-create with their team an empowering future for the organization. A future that will take care of the core reason for the organisation’s existence, and empower its people to get to work daily.

2. Have the Senior Management Team, and People under Them own the Future
This is the organization’s future — not just the CEO’s future. This future must be fully owned by the senior management team of the organization. Which is one of the reasons why this future must be co-created with other senior people in the organization. Because others have participated in the creation of the future, they are more prone to own the future. It is not unusual that a few members of the senior management do not own the future. This is when the CEO needs to step in and have the appropriate ownership conversation with these team members. The CEO needs to ‘listen’ and understand their concerns and effectively deal with these concerns.

3. Take Care of the Mood of the Organization
Teams can either be in disempowering moods or empowering moods. When teams are disempowered, they are disempowered about how the future looks to them. The mood of a team is directly related to how they assess the future of that team / organization will be. And when they are empowered, it is because they assess the future is achievable, and that this future will take care of what matters to them. In my opinion, the CEO is directly responsible for the mood of the organization. If the mood is disempowered, then there are missing conversations the CEO needs to have.Imagine the difference in the results of the organization when a team is disempowered as against a team that is empowered.

4. Inculcate a Culture of Learning
Learning in this case doesn’t mean theoretical learning. Learning means enabling people to do what they haven’t done before; allowing them the opportunity to fail; encouraging people to go out of their comfort zone – on a regular basis; inviting people to play big games – those that they haven’t played before; coach and provide coaching support (top CEOs spend a majority of their time coaching their teams).Teams that are not expanding; those that are not questioning status quo are teams that are not growing. Sooner or later, their results will slow down.

5. Manage the Promises of the People to Fulfill the Larger Promise
The job of the CEO is to effectively manage promises of their teams. This is a skill largely not present in a lot of CEOs that I have coached and interacted with. Many CEOs are expert ‘doers’. What is missing is the skill to effectively seek promises and to then ensure these promises are managed well. There are generative leadership conversations around managing actions that CEOs need to first understand and then practice to gain mastery.

As I have stated above, these conversations are not discretionary. Results of any organization are directly related with whether or not these conversations are happening, and if so, how effectively are these being managed.

Of course, there are many conversational distinctions that the CEO needs to master, but in my assessment, these are the absolute key conversations.

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1. All great performers have a coach. Look around – professional athletes, public figures, musicians and leaders. To operate without a coach is akin to operating without a mirror. It is like operating with the attitude that “I know I am right”. This “I know it” attitude is a killer in any organization, particularly at the top!
You make it significantly more difficult to win without a coach.

2. A coach reveals your blind spots to you. Let’s face it! All of us have blind spots, including the CEO. And my claim, dare I say, is, “the longer you have worked, chances are, the more barriers you have built!”
The coach helps you see these barriers that you cannot see on your own. These barriers need to be busted – for the sake of the organization.

3. The coach takes a dispassionate view, without any biases – he says it as he sees it. Few leaders have people in their organizations who give them unbiased, dispassionate perspectives – not necessarily because they don’t want to (in many organizations they are afraid to), but mainly because they do not have a dispassionate perspective.

4. Also, the coach asks you pertinent questions, those that others do not have the courage or the authority to ask you. These questions open up a whole new world for the CEO – one that was not available to the CEO prior to the conversation.

5. If you want to build a learning organization, you need to be the first one to have the attitude of “what may I be missing, if discovered can shift the results of my organization”, rather that the attitude of “I have so many years of experience and I know what needs to be done”.

6. A coach supports the CEO to manage conflict effectively. Often, decisions of the CEO please one group, and displease another. The CEO has to walk the tight rope walk, and this skill is built with the support of a coach.

7. There are certain conversations you cannot have with the board, and then there are other conversations you cannot have with your second line. The CEO needs a partner who the CEO can be open with; one who is going to be sensitive, and yet objective; honest, and yet respectful.

8. The Coach helps you significantly expand your options. And when you expand your options, your decision-making significantly improves.

Here are some questions for you to consider, particularly if you are a CEO, or a member of the senior management in an organization:

a. Do you have the courage to acknowledge that you need a coach?

b. Are you ready to question your inherent beliefs, biases and assessments that may be stopping you from achieving your full potential, and in turn the organization’s full potential?

c. Do you and your organization need to be shaken up out of their slumber?
d. Are you working hard, and yet not achieving your results?

e. Are you ready to make a learning commitment, and then build a learning culture?

If your answer to 4 out of 5 questions above is a Yes, then time has come for you to get yourself a skilled coach.

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I worked at and ran a business school for 21 years of my life. I thought you learn management and leadership in classrooms. I went and collaborated with one of the four federal universities and then the second largest University in the UK. I worked with thousands of students from 52 different countries and taught them management and leadership.

Today, I realize, I had got it all wrong.

I realize you cannot learn management and leadership in a classroom – just like you cannot learn to swim in a classroom, or play tennis in a classroom; or learn music, dance or any other skill for that matter in a classroom.

You Need to be Out There, Learning in Action.

I am questioning our historical way of learning management and leadership – where we learn first and act later. We need to get our teachers and students to recognize, “you need to act first and then you learn.”

Real, Embodied Learning

That is how real embodied learning takes place! Leadership muscle is built through actions and practices, and not through only knowing of concepts (It’s exactly like building your body muscles — you can know of the exercise, but till you do not do the exercise, the muscle isn’t built.)

Once learning is “embodied” it goes into your muscle memory. You can access that learning at any point of time in your life.

Learning Programmes Not Useful Unless Backed by Actions

I see a lot of leadership programmes take place in classrooms and conference rooms, and I question the usefulness of these programmes, unless backed by actions and practices. Here are some important thoughts for entrepreneurs and middle & senior managers looking to expand their leadership capacity; and, for people in the learning and development space looking to develop their leaders (and their second line of leadership)

Learning Happens by Shifting Practices

It doesn’t happen in conference rooms. If you are looking to develop your leadership capacity, look for institutions that work on your practices and support you to shift your practices. Experts say that over 80% of our actions are habitual. We need to change our habitual actions if we want to expand our leadership impact.

Get a Coach

I cannot over emphasize the importance of a coach. Ever since 2010, I have had a coach supporting me, and after each coaching conversation, I have noticed a shift in the way I perceive and interact with my world. It is important to recognize that “Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”

Create a Structure of People that Support You and Learn with You

In 2012, a bunch of my friends and I created what we then called ‘The 5Am Club’. We used the club as a place to practice powerful distinctions and practices, get supported by like-minded people, who wanted to play big games (despite not knowing how to when we started), and achieve extraordinary results that we had historically not achieved. The learning each one of us had in that one year perhaps was more than what students perhaps learn theoretically in a business school. This was real learning in action.

Remember, there are no shortcuts to building leadership muscle or any muscle for that matter. The question is, “Are you committed to building your leadership muscle?”

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About 5 years ago, I wrote a blog post presenting an interpretation that sometimes your experience may be your biggest constraint. I stopped at that. In this article, I have suggested steps to ensure that your experience works for you, rather than be a constraint.

Let’s begin by looking at what experience means. You can have the same event take place, and if there are three persons observing that event, chances are all three of them will have a different experience. So, experience is an interpretation you create, and often you hold that interpretation as a fact. The fact was the‘event’, the experience was the ‘interpretation’ of that event.

Let me give you an example: Let’s say a group of Indians set up a company in the US. In the first few years, the company does well, and then for some reason, it goes bust. There are three Indian directors at the time of the company going bust (the company going bust is the event).

One of the three directors makes an interpretation: “Doing business is risky,” and hence decides that he will never set up his own business ever again.

The second director makes a slightly different interpretation. He states, “Doing business in a foreign country is risky and decides that he will hereon only operate in his own country.” And finally, the third director has a completely different interpretation. His interpretation is: “We screwed up! The next time, I will need to look for signs for serious threats to the business.”

The same event has three different interpretations and three different experiences. These directors are unaware of the fact that their experience in that moment almost set up their default future.

Here are possible future of these three directors:

• Director 1, given his ‘experience’, he will never set up another business
• Director 2, given his ‘experience’, he will never set up a business in a foreign country
• Director 3, given his ‘experience’, will set up a new business, and perhaps in a foreign country — but will have his radar up for threats.

These directors may also give advice to others, based on their experiences, and will proudly back up their experiences with the event of the business in the US going bust. They are blind to how their experiences shape their future.

This happens all the time, and often, we are blind to this phenomenon working in the background guiding and often creating our default futures. A dealer manager of an automobile organization that I actively work with had shared his experience while working with a particular dealer, whom he called ‘inefficient and useless’. The default future, with such an assessment (and experience), is this relationship would not work (and for the period it would, it would not thrive). The dealer manager after 2 years eventually decided to terminate the contract with that dealer. Within a month, the dealer was snapped up by competition. The competitor did not experience this dealer as ‘inefficient and useless’.

And this dealer went on to do record sales. These are just a few among many examples that I come across regularly in my work of how our experience becomes a constraint in our growth.

Here are the three points you need to keep in mind to ensure your experience works for you, and does not become a barrier.

1. Become Aware: While experience is critical in the ‘action domain’, it sometimes becomes a constraint in the domain of ‘looking for new possibilities’. The first step is to recognize that it is our experience that creates a certain lens through which we see the world. This lens may assist us in certain places – but is this lens also limiting our possibilities? This simple awareness that ‘my experience may be limiting me’, can open up a whole new world of possibilities — as long as you are ready to explore that world of possibilities

2.Question your experience: As I stated above, experience is an interpretation; however, we hold our experience as a fact. Historical events cannot be changed. However, our interpretation of these events can. Your experience may tell you “this thing cannot be done”. And this ‘experience’ will only limit your ability to “get this thing done”.Once you become aware, question your experience. The question is not “whether this thing can be done?” the question to explore is “how can I get this thing done” — particularly if the results matter to you.

3. Be connected to “what result do I want to generate” moment-to-moment:This is the key point. As long as you are connected to the ‘result you want to generate’, you will keep looking for ways to generate that result, independent of your experience. Often people make assessments that are not aligned to the results they want to generate and worse, they are unaware that they are making these assessments.

History is evidence of the fact that breakthrough ideas in businesses do not come from the same industries. If you continue to do what has always been done, you will continue to get the same result. If you want a breakthrough result, you need to come out of your comfort zone (read experience), and try ideas that have never been tried.

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