Running a growing company is perhaps the most challenging and demanding job on the face of the earth. It requires the energy of two or three normal people, the patience of Job, enough singleness of purpose to make Sisyphus look like he had attention deficit disorder, and a very broad array of skills and abilities. To take your company from launching pad to synchronous orbit, you have to be able to envision the future, understand financial statements, build customer relationships, lead and empower increasingly diverse workforces and much, much more.

Some of these wide-ranging skills have far greater impact on your ability to lead your organization than others. As we move increasingly into an information/knowledge/service-based economy, the skills that seem to give CEOs the most leverage focus on managing people rather than the “hard asset” side of the business. Of course, you still have to know how to read a balance sheet, control inventories and things like that. But as technology continues to level the playing field, the only way left to gain a competitive advantage is with your people. In such a world, your people management skills — at the individual and group levels — will increasingly determine your organization’s long-term success.

A primer on all the various people management skills could easily consume terabytes of hard disk space. To keep this best practices module manageable and to provide immediate take-home value, we decided to focus on three specific skills:

• Time management/personal organization
• Coaching
• Change management

Why did we select these three? Each skill is designed to bring out the very best in people. Time management starts at the personal level (you), coaching relates to managing people at the individual level, and change management looks at the organization as a whole. By developing your skills in these critical areas, you empower your people (and yourself) to bring out the best they have so that your organization reaches its full potential.

Time Management/Personal Organization

Your effectiveness as a CEO begins and ends with the most critical skill of all — your ability to manage yourself. When you manage your time (and therefore yourself) well, says Vistage speaker and personal organization expert Bruce Breier , your effectiveness as a leader and a manager skyrockets. When you don’t, it sinks like a stone.

Breier believes CEOs who don’t manage themselves as well as they could fall prey to one or more of the following:

• Feeling of futility. Often, CEOs feel so overwhelmed by job demands and constant interruptions that they consider personal planning a waste of time.
• Lack of knowledge/expertise. Many CEOs simply don’t know how to plan their days and/or organize their lives.
• The adrenaline factor. Most entrepreneurial CEOs like a certain amount of chaos in their lives. They avoid time management or personal organization regimens that appear too rigid or structured.
• False reliance on technology. “Buying the latest wireless device or other technological gadget does not automatically make you more organized,” says Breier. Without a disciplined process for personal organization, technology only automates your disorganization.

Overcoming these personal organization obstacles requires a disciplined process that addresses four key areas: time, information, projects and people. Breier shares his 30 years’ experience and expertise on this subject in “The Organized Executive”.

Coaching

Picture the following scenario. A highly sought-after senior marketing executive mulls his employment options with two different companies. Each company offers a challenging position with plenty of responsibility and opportunities for growth. Each has a good reputation for providing quality products and treating customers well. And each position offers almost identical pay and perks.

In the second company, however, the CEO makes it clear that as part of the culture she meets with each of her direct reports twice a month to assist with their personal and professional growth — not just to work on their performance as management team members, but to help them develop faster through a feedback and an exchange of ideas. Everything else being equal, which job do you think the marketing executive will take?

This scenario, say Vistage speakers and coaching advocates Agnes Mura and Bob Niederman , represents just one of the many benefits of coaching your people. And as the battle for top talent escalates and companies become increasingly dependent on their employees’ continual growth and development, coaching will become one of those leverage points that sets the great CEOs apart from the merely good ones.

Mura and Niederman share their thoughts on how to coach effectively from the CEO position in “The CEO as Coach” and “The Art of Coaching”.

Change Management

Our third leverage point deals with managing people at the organizational level. In the corporate world, change used to resemble white-water rafting — long periods of calm followed by short bursts of rapids. Within the past generation, however, that trend has reversed itself. Today, short periods of calm (if any) are immediately followed by long periods of turbulent change. In most organizations, unpredictability, uncertainty and surprise have become the norm.

This doesn’t mean, however, that organizations should become passive recipients of change. In fact, say change management experts Joni Daniels and Del Poling , to survive and thrive in today’s “white water” markets, companies must learn to proactively plan for and manage change, which requires skill, guidance and direction from the person at the top. Like the helmsman on a clipper ship in a raging storm, your ability to guide your people through a continual sea of change represents a major leverage point in your quest for organizational success.

Daniels and Poling offer plenty of food for thought on managing change in “Understanding Organizational Change”, “Pulse Points for Organizational Change” and “Managing Resistance to Change”.

We also have the usual list of book recommendations and we have spent hours on our custom longboard surfing the net for articles, links and Web sites related to our three chosen skill sets. We think you will find these informative and useful.

If you have other CEO skill sets that you would like to see covered in future best practice pieces, let us know by responding to the “Rate this Article” feature at the bottom of the page or by sending an e-mail to the Vistage best practices writer Lee Polevoi. We welcome your feedback on this module and your ideas on future best practices modules.

What Is Coaching?

The concept of coaching is gaining popularity across the board. Yet, many CEOs and executives have misguided notions about what it means to act as a coach to their direct reports and other staff members. According to Vistage expert resource Bob Niederman, coaching is a very specialized role, separate and apart from that of leader/manager.

“A manager makes decisions on employment, pay, process and performance kinds of issues,” he explains. “By nature it is a hierarchical position with power and authority over those below. In contrast, a coach assumes a position of equality with the person being coached. A coach helps the employee improve his or her performance and develop the steps that lead to the desired future.

“Managers can play both roles, but they need to make it very clear which hat they are wearing at any given point in time. Lack of clarity with respect to the two roles can create confusion, uncertainty and lack of trust. Employees need to know when a request comes from the manager and when it comes from the coach because those are two very different situations.”

Vistage speaker Agnes Mura defines coaching as “a just-in-time alliance designed to generate both results and learning.” That’s a powerful combination that generates great value for the organization, both in terms of short term results (a problem solved) and long-term learning (transferable to future challenges). It benefits both the company and the individual, demonstrating their interdependence. Work challenges become perceived as growth opportunities when a mentor helps us think them through. The habit of life-long learning becomes ingrained and helps people become more effective and feel more fulfilled.

Coaching, whether brief or formally planned, is a developmental process that focuses on the coachee’s interests and goals. It involves stepping over to their side and asking, “What changes do you want to make, who/how would you like to be so that you can accomplish your goals, and what resources do you need?”

“Coaching raises people’s awareness of their own patterns of thought and action and also encourages them to try new behaviors, new ways of learning and new ways of relating,” Mura says. “It nurtures a sense of responsibility and enhances problem-solving skills. When done well, coaching fosters goal setting and builds implementation skills, as well as more effective work habits. Ultimately, the person receiving the coaching internalizes the new behavior so they can continue to grow and develop on an ongoing basis… and ultimately self-coach.”

Benefits of Coaching

According to Mura, coaching offers numerous benefits, including:

• Improved retention. In the face of the current talent wars, CEOs can no longer discard good performers just because they don’t perfectly fit the culture or they have a bad quarter. “Coaching provides a powerful tool for developing and retaining people,” says Mura. “It also helps in the hiring process because it allows you to benchmark certain behaviors and performance standards. In the long run, coaching is far more cost-effective than churning employees.”
• Better performance accountability. Coaching allows you to hold direct reports and others accountable rather than avoiding issues.
  “In today’s organizations, too many CEOs and top executives tolerate mediocre and/or inadequate performance or behavior,” says Mura. “In their role as coach, managers can address those issues in a humane, effective and productive manner, rather than letting them fester for long periods of time and watching overall morale suffer. Until they address performance issues through coaching, most managers feel uncomfortable about making job change or termination decisions – and so they should.”
• Succession planning. Part of your job as CEO involves recognizing and developing your successor, and role modeling that responsibility for your direct reports. Coaching allows you and your direct reports to stay current with your firm’s people, know their strengths and weaknesses as well as aspirations and — when appropriate — work with them toward a career and succession plan.
• Truth-telling. Many organizations waste a lot of energy hiding the truth and engaging in destructive political behaviors. Coaching provides a method of surfacing the truth in a non-threatening and constructive way.
• Reinforced culture. Coaching establishes a culture of constructive, multi-directional feedback, personal development and accountability. When coaching becomes the currency of the realm, so to speak — with direct reports, among peers and even upward — it sends the message that it’s ok to help and ask for help, to give and receive feedback, to change and grow.
• Reduced employee conflict. Gender, cultural and generational clashes can become virulent in many organizations. Coaching across gender, culture and generational gaps yields far better results than trying to segregate people or hire a homogeneous culture that creates a climate that does not match today’s market realities.

Niederman echoes these benefits, especially in regard to the retention issue. “Today’s employees want more than just prestige and a paycheck,” he says. “They want to make a contribution, magnify and improve their performance and build a future for themselves. Research indicates that people tend to leave companies when these three variables aren’t present. Coaching addresses all three in a very positive manner.

“Without coaching training, most CEOs tend to think in short-term, win-lose terms. They often fail to see how the development of their direct reports results in long-term benefits for the executive and the company. They tend to close down conversations that have the potential to create real transformation. When these opportunities don’t present themselves, valued employees leave companies. On the other hand, a CEO with great coaching skills can help direct reports develop and apply their gifts so that the employee and the company wins.”

Niederman also believes that coaching benefits the coach (as well as the person being coached) in three specific areas:

• Purpose. Many CEOs do not have a clear notion of why they are in business or what they want to get out of it. The process of coaching often helps them discover their true calling.
• Personal standards. Coaching enables CEOs to determine a higher standard of performance for themselves. They can then coach others to that standard.
• Life balance. Most people today have difficulty balancing family, work, creative activity and leisure time. The CEO coach can serve as a role model for employees by modeling the skill of making good personal choices.

Organizational Outcomes of Coaching

According to our experts, coaching leads to many positive outcomes at the individual and organizational levels. For individual employees, coaching:

• Leads to breakthroughs on issues that create ongoing bottlenecks to improved performance.
• Brings performance to its highest capacity. (In some cases, the performance may still not meet the organization’s needs, notes Niederman, but it empowers the individual to reach his or her full potential so that the company and the person can make informed choices.)
• Helps employees understand the intersection between themselves and their jobs. They get an answer to the question of whether they really fit the job and vice versa. In essence, coaching provides self-driven career education, notes Mura.
• Creates enormous gains in emotional intelligence and effectiveness in people’s entire interpersonal domain, both professionally and privately.

At the organizational level:

• Problems are no longer tolerated, covered up and allowed to snowball.
• The level of trust and motivation rises (when coaching is done routinely and/or on a large scale).
• People get better at telling the truth and become more creative.
• Coaching removes barriers to people’s performance. People either discover that they don’t belong in your company or their performance (both technically and interpersonally) dramatically improves.

When CEOs learn the fundamentals of coaching, they can role model, which moves the management team to a much higher level of performance. The team learns how to discuss the issues that never get addressed. Team members become more confident that they can handle even their biggest challenges. Creativity and problem-solving skills increase. Group coaching and peer coaching can keep the momentum going.