10 Things Your Org Can Do Right Now To Give the Progressive Movement a Chance to Win

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Recently deceased Harvard Professor Richard Hackman, the best thinker and writer in the country on “senior leadership teams,” conducted voluminous studies on what makes successful teams.  Not surprisingly, having a coach for the team was vital, someone whose job it was to give feedback and coaching to team members on their behavior with other team members.  Even with smart, energetic, committed team members, good team behavior is not guaranteed.  It is a learned behavior.

10)  Get help. For those who say, “Well, I didn’t get any help and I made it,” I say, “I’m sorry, but you would have developed a lot faster had you had the right kind of help, and you might not be operating today with as many blind spots, and you might not be so rigid.”

Our organization, for example, has concluded that leaders need—and important progressive leaders deserve—three distinct but interconnected kinds of coaching.  We call it 3C Coaching.

3C Coaching is a rich blend of individual coaching, performance coaching, and organizational coaching.  Synthesized from the hundreds of years of collective experience of our faculty, this approach is based on several assumptions:

a) Most leaders, often for a lot of good reasons, hold themselves back.  They play under their weight class because it is more comfortable there.  And in many cases, they are not even aware of how much they are limiting what they could accomplish.  Therefore they benefit from Individual Coaching, the first “C.”  This work involves, often over several months or even years, helping leaders understand the ways the are holding themselves back, and to support them as they venture forth toward bolder leadership.

b) Most leaders spend little time crafting their public personas and, as a result, fail to create maximum impact in all their encounters.  Therefore, they benefit tremendously from Performance Coaching, the second “C.”  Here, the necessary work is to get help from trained actors who pay attention to the body and voice aspects of public leadership.  Usually, leaders will experience almost instant improvement.  Sustained practice under watchful eyes can extend the range of compelling public performance to all settings—speeches, TV appearances, press conferences, negotiations, internal meetings, etc.

c) The cultures of most organizations stifle creativity, hamper change, and diminish the people in them.  Therefore, they usually require Organizational Coaching, the third “C.”  We have identified five fundamental human needs that, if met inside of organizations, create the conditions for people to thrive.  In addition, we have identified ten critical elements of successful organizations.  We work with top leadership teams to ingrain those elements into their organization in a way that is appropriate and specific to their structure, mission, and competitive environment.

Start Now

You can get started now on any of the above ideas.  Start.  Put some things in motion, evaluate, change/tweak, and try it again.  The constant act of leadership is hard work, requiring both will and skill.  Dig in and discover or unleash the sources of your will.  Get serious about developing the skills you need.

If you do so, our progressive organizations will be bigger and badder and our movement will be stronger as your own leadership becomes bolder and more thoughtful, generous, strategic, practiced, and full.