Why is it individuals, and even an organization’s team members, will go to great extremes to protect their public image or the image of the organization? Not “telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth” (even in court) is becoming very much a part of our modern culture. We are getting very “creative” with writing, telling, and hiding the truth. We’ve actually gotten to the place where we don’t even expect the whole truth to be told anymore. Word of mouth just isn’t what it used to be.

Some great leaders seem to know how to handle truth and how to tell it like it is. They take their success and fame in stride, along with the continual questions, ridicule, and very public criticism – sometimes with a smile and a thoughtful comment like Sir Winston Churchill’s famous line, “Yes, it is somewhat impressive that when I give a speech, the crowds are large; but I know that they would be twice as large if I were to be hanged!”

As a business and executive coach, my goal certainly isn’t to hang anyone – far from it. My goal is to listen to what my clients have to say, ask some thoughtful questions, and then help individual leaders and business teams – to help people like you, owners and executives, design-build professionals, planners, construction folks and everyone involved in land development – succeed in the reality of the situation you face. My goal is to get you from where you are to where you want to be. For most people, that usually means being more successful, at whatever that word ‘success’ means to you and to your client(s).

Coaching is about taking action to get you to your goal. Coaching is about you running the good race. Playing fair. Winning. As long as it’s not an immoral, unlawful, or unethical action or goal, I’m going to be my client’s biggest cheerleader!

Co. Ca.   Co. La.
Here’s an easy to remember “cheer” for team success. It’s also a good guideline:

Communicate: Keep everyone on the team informed. If you need an interpreter, get one!

Care: Really care about the professional and personal success of your colleagues.

Constructive: Keep all of the dialog constructive, especially in the midst of any conflict.

Laugh: Have fun!  

One of my favorite corporate mission statements is: “Do good, make money, have fun!”

Can you relate to that? Who doesn’t want more good and to have more success, professionally and personally? It is an intuitive success formula every team member can remember!

We all intuitively know this as well: success will require us to make some kind of sacrifice along the way. There will be a cost to succeed. It may be a cost of speeding up or slowing down. It may be a timing cost of just plain waiting. Failure has an even greater cost that can live on for decades in the marketplace. It can also be very difficult to erase, no matter how much money is spent on advertising and marketing to improve the organization’s public image.

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster is one of the more famous examples of how to destroy your public image. By not taking the consultant’s/colleague’s expert opinion to slow down and/or wait and acting on it in an appropriate way, management laid the groundwork for a negative image that’s hard to forget.

Nearly twenty years ago, on January 28, 1986, seven astronauts were killed when the space shuttle exploded just over a minute into the flight. The managers at NASA were eager to launch for several reasons including economic considerations, political pressure, and backlogs in scheduling. Competition from the European Space Agency was also forcing an ambitious launch schedule to prove cost effectiveness and the potential market for commercialization.

Following heated discussions on the night before the launch, management’s “engineering assessment” was that the launch was recommended even though the engineers on the team had no part in writing it and refused to sign it. Trust, the foundation of teamwork, was destroyed. The team ceased to function like a team and began to function like a group of people with different agendas. The team’s previously agreed-on safe launch agenda was effectively hijacked.

A hijacked agenda is probably the major indicator of team dysfunction. This eventually leads to the ultimate team dysfunction, bad results. When a hijacking occurs, the vision and results can end up anywhere. As is often the case in a dysfunctional team situation, things end up in a place no one really wants to go.

The reality is that people live (or die) and succeed (or fail) and count profits (or losses) from actions (or inappropriate actions) taken on their own perception of reality. If the reality foundation (let’s call it truth) is flawed, the stage is set for ineffective, costly, and wasteful incorrect action.

Poor Results + Higher Costs (Rework) = Wasted $
Bad results at a minimum often mean rework, and a triple loss! You (1) lose the costs of initial work done; (2) you lose on the rework; and (3) you lose the opportunity to do another profitable job while doing the rework. Result: a big loss.

So what’s the marketing success strategy for any organization that wants the team to steer clear of a bad public image, and avoid the need to overcome poor results and wasted dollars?

If you want to keep your team on track, it boils down to two simple sentences:

1. Keep the team constantly focused on the results.
2. Let your “yes” be a “yes” and your “no” be a “no.”

In the Challenger disaster case, the finest consulting and design engineers were on the team. They wanted a marketing success. They understood what was at stake. They understood the issues. They understood the design limitations. Their expert opinions were given. Team-established safe launch guidelines were in place. And, still, lives were lost (and billions of dollars wasted and the entire program suffered a huge setback) because the truth was told (and then shaded, or not told, or ignored) and not acted on in an appropriate way. Even the very best consultants and experts giving advice are only as good as the leadership that chooses to take it or ignore it, and make the final decision.

Someone once said, “Make every decision like you might see it printed on the front page of tomorrow morning’s newspaper.”

That is good advice.

Coach, Not Consultant
Unlike consulting, the coach approach comes at a given situation from a slightly different perspective:
Coaching is about NOT knowing the correct answer.

While consultants may have clients working in wide ranging niche fields like financial planning, land surveying, architecture, risk management, construction management, and civil engineering, and offer expert opinions in a very specific area of expertise, coaches have clients who are mostly human beings.

Coaches partner with people, unique people, who are highly valuable, knowledgeable, ready to improve, open to learning and change, and work in an endless variety of fields.

Coaches do not come to the table with “the answer.” A coach comes to the table seeking the truth, and seeking the very best, seeking success for their client (not themselves), whether that is individual client success or team success. When the individual “player” succeeds, or the team players succeed, then, and only then, does the coach succeed.

Coaches also demand the client’s best performance. Coaches hold clients accountable for actions with questions like, “What are you going to do?” and “When are you going to do that?” Then they check to see how things are after the change.

My clients, for example, tend to be people who want to get from where they are, to where they want to be. They welcome change. They want more success and less stress. They are people who want to make giant steps or leaps forward professionally. They want to be more productive and effective in every aspect of their professional work life. They are people who want more of what they really, really want, and less of what they really, really don’t want. They are ready to work hard, and ready to work smarter.

And, they see that their professional and personal lives are linked. They want better lives at home, too. They see a need to have lives that are personally more fulfilling and satisfying in every possible way.

Success is, therefore, whatever the client defines as success. The coach’s job is to help individuals or teams achieve success, and help the client(s) use their talents and abilities to achieve their personal and professional success goals.

Here’s a good working definition of how a coach works:

The focus of a coach is on the inner guidance of the client and a process of self discovery. The client is the expert.

The coach listens (a lot) and tries to practice W.A.I.T.  (Why am I talking?) The coach asks some focused questions, listens more, and the client discovers the answers. Often, the client intuitively knows what to do.

The action to be taken, right or wrong, is always up to the client. Here’s the difference between consulting and coaching. Coaching is all about the expertise of the client, not about the coach or the coach’s specific knowledge or expertise in a given field, even though he or she may be an expert.

Because the client has gone through a process with the coach as a true partner, knows the coach supports him or her unconditionally, and has discovered the answer for themselves in the process (and therefore ‘owns’ the answer as their answer) they are more likely to act on it.

Few of us like being told what to do, especially if it goes against our agenda, our timetable, or the way we normally live our lives. That’s human nature.

We question everything. We live in a world where truth and honesty are no longer a part of everyday life.

What is Truth?
That’s a great, classic question. It cost me three years of reading books and a master’s degree to get a good definition, and I’ll give it to you for free. Here is the best, shortest, easiest-to-remember definition of truth I have ever found: Truth is conformance to reality.

Just try that definition out. It really works.

I don’t like confrontation. I spent much of my life trying to avoid it. But I’ve learned that when there is a problem, the best time to confront it is when you first see it or sense it, even intuitively.

Confrontation needs to be constructive, not destructive. People need to be treated with care, dignity, trust, and respect.

In the best sense, confrontation is about building constructive relationships. It’s not about tearing someone down. It’s not about proving you’re right, and the other person is wrong. It’s not about belittling, or embarrassing someone.

Confrontation, especially in a team coaching context, is about helping the team members reach their full potential as a team.

Another test question: Were you ever part of a development team, or any other kind of work team, internal or external to your company, and heard someone say something, or saw someone roll their eyes, or caught some other kind of little intuitive signal that something was wrong, and felt really, really uncomfortable, but said nothing?

Here’s an example: Picture a planning team meeting, ten or twelve people around the table, and suddenly, out of the blue, one of the team members addresses another team member and says, “There are two kinds of people I really don’t like. Those who say too little, and those who say too much.”

The silence is so thick in the room, you can cut it with a knife. How do you answer a comment like that? If you say anything, they don’t like you. If you say nothing, they don’t like you. And, everyone at the table is intimidated by a bully, trying to hijack the agenda and gain control of the group.

It’s a power play, often aimed at the new kid on the block by a threatened old timer who’s decided that it’s time to gain control…again.

What do you do in a situation like that? Who has positional authority to confront an out-of-bounds team player who’s trying to hijack the agenda or put another team member down?

One of the things I learned in business and business coaching is that the answers you don’t have are often more important than the answers you do have.

As a business coach, a “What did your intuition tell you to do when you observed that activity?” kind of question is an obvious follow-up. Because people tend to define their own integrity.

Your “yes” should mean “yes” and your “no” should mean “no.”

People who shade the truth on little things end up making it easy for themselves to eventually shade the truth on the BIG things. Given enough of that level of thinking, people want to rewrite history.

Same Time, Same Place, Next Year
    • Do you have a professional goal for yourself?
    • What would you need to do and when would you do it to feel really happy about your progress toward your goal?
    • What’s the biggest obstacle you can think of to prevent you from achieving that goal?
       • What are the biggest opportunities you have, right now, that you can focus on to help you achieve that goal?
    • Which of your talents and abilities do you need to develop to help you achieve your goal?

If I met you next year, would you be any closer to your goal? In most instances, it is that first step of change that is the most difficult, oftentimes due to a lack of confidence or certainty of the decision being made.
  

Perhaps you need a coach to cheer you on, put your team together, and ask the right questions.  SLDT