In Coaching, is experience useful or dangerous?

Last Wednesday I facilitated a discussion on this topic at the Hong Kong Coaching Community. You are probably curious about the outcome. Well, the answer to the question whether experience could be dangerous in coaching other people is, yes, if you use it in the wrong way.

What does that mean? Our discussion lead us to the equally important question as to how is coaching different from consulting. The point is, if we use our experience or knowledge to recommend to the client what to do in a given situation, that is not coaching, but consulting. Nothing wrong with that, this is especially appropriate where the client has a clear deficit in expertise.

However, usually we handle people's issues in coaching and we could say that everyone knows something about people, especially about him- or herself. In fact, no one knows better about one-self than we ourselves. The only problem is, we often lack awareness. Here is where the coach can become very valuable, if he manages to raise our awareness, expand our horizon, etc. The masterful coach does that by asking the right questions, by provoking through exaggerated statements, by a process of clarification and discovery. Needless to say that excellent rapport between client and coach is a precondition for this process.

Also, experience can be very valuable for the coach to 'smell' where the issue could be and then tap into that area and see whether something valuable comes up. Someone with out experience, may not be able to get to the point so quickly, if at all. So here we go, experience can be very powerful in coaching as long as it does not lead the coach to consulting where it is not appropriate.

During that discussion I also shared some results from my research on outstandingly successful coaches. If you want to know more about it, don't hesitate to contact me.

How many countries have you traveled?

Today I got an interesting link to a website where you can create a map of the countries you have traveled. You get even the html code to post this map on your website or your blog (like I did).



It was interesting for me to see that I've already been to over 60 countries. This is due to the fact that my previous positions in International Management required me to travel considerably. Also, I always like to explore new places when I travel for fun.

When you tick the country boxes on the above mentioned website, memories are triggered and I realized how much time I had been spending in Asia even before I moved to Hong Kong three years ago. This is perhaps one of the reasons why I felt at home almost instantly once I arrived here.

Karate & Coaching

I was 17 years old when I started learning Karate (traditional Shotokan Style). Until that time, I had never been a very sporty person. Hence, it took me a couple of years of intense practice before I was able to join the first Karate competitions.

I was in a way lucky to have a great trainer despite of living in a small German city, famous for its jigsaw puzzles: Ravensburg. The trainer of our Dojo, Guenther Mohr, was at the same time national team coach, won numerous titles such as Vice World Champion (1 time), European Champion (5 times) and German Champion (12 times).

Our junior (age 18-21) team won in 1983 the State Championship of Baden-Wuerttemberg and in 1984 the National Championship of Germany. I was proud to be member of this winning team. In the same year, I completed high-school and went to the army for a bit more than a year.

Being away from Ravensburg during the army times, I had little opportunity to practice Karate. Having returned for my mechanical engineering studies, I picked it up again, however, due to study-related work, I would only go once, max. twice a week to the Dojo.

After completion of my engineering degree in Ravensburg, I went to France for post-graduate studies in International Marketing. That was the time when I quit Karate...

...until August 2004, approx. 16 years later...

It is amazing how much the body (yes, the body, not the mind) remembers. Of course, it took my quite a few lessons to catch up to come even close to the level I have been 16 years ago. And I still didn't reach this level after 3 months of not very regular practice. But I can see that I make great progress every time and it reminds me of catching up with a language not practiced for a few years.

How is all this related to Coaching?

I realized during these training sessions that I had a truly great coach some 20years ago and that I benefit from the great learnings of that time even today. Would I have progressed at that time with an average coach? For sure. Would I have become a member of the winning team at that time with an average coach? Rather not. Would I be able to pick up things so quickly now, after a pause of 16 years if I had an average coach? Unlikely.

Executive Coaching basically has the same target as Sports Coaching, that is, to help the coachee to reach peak performance. Average coaches may help you to improve faster than you would without the coach, masterful coaches may help you to be the best you can - be it in Karate or in Leadership.

Talking to Top Executive Coach Marshall Goldsmith

Yesterday evening I had the unique opportunity to talk to Marshall Goldsmith who is considered by FORBES to be one of the Top 5 Executive Coaches in the US.

I was quite excited and somewhat nervous when I dialed his number. I guess he sensed that and suggested immediately to introduce himself first and then I would have the chance to introduce myself. This approach immediately broke my nervousness and the talk was very relaxed from that point.

I prepared a long list of questions, however, only approx. 50% of them I needed to ask, for the rest of them he gave the answers without me asking. I learned how he got into coaching and a few secrets of his outstanding success.

After talking about his work, I asked him whether he had a chance to have a look at my website which he confirmed. Then I asked him what he thinks about it and he said “It’s good.” Hmmm, I thought, this is a bit short, let me dig deeper and so I asked, “What do you think I could improve?” And then he took off and basically confirmed some thoughts I already had and that is that I need to become much more focused in what I am doing. He said that you will be considered as a top expert only if you narrow down your expertise to a few areas, even though you might be competent in a no. of other areas. The point is that you won’t get the credibility unless you clearly focus.

It is a leap I was hesitating to make but I realize more and more that this is a necessity to progress to a new level.

Also, I was asking him what he thinks about networking and he said that one can make a decent living from working within a network. However, you will be somewhat limited to this network. If you want to get broad exposure, then you must expose yourself. Good ways to do this are to get published (articles, books, etc.) and to do a lot of public speaking. A couple of months ago I started with such activities and very recently I even started writing a book about leadership which I plan to launch in Spring 2005.

After this phone conversation I am even more determined to follow my vision and to do the necessary. Marshall acted as a true ‘coach’, that is, he moved me forward faster than if I would have ‘walked’ by myself.

How to turn prospective clients into real clients

Last week I met a recently trained coach who responded to my article about mentor coaching. She told me that she is stuck with her coaching business and that she does not know how to find and win coaching clients. We first discussed different possibilities to attract prospective clients and she has to figure out which of the possibilities are most suitable for her.

Then, I asked her, why would any of the prospects hire her as their coach and she gave me some general arguments which did not sound very convincing to me. I think that this is a big problem for many coaches who have little experience in sales & marketing. Eventually, I got her to figure out what is unique about her, her background and her experience and how that could benefit her potential clients.

She was quite surprised to find out that she has something unique to offer which could be very beneficial to prospective clients. I helped her also to understand the 14 buying motivators and how to align the unique buying proposition with the key buying motivators.

This principle works with practically all products and services and is part of my Innovative Sales Program. If you want to learn more about it, contact me at Charlie.Lang@progressu.com.hk or call me at +852-9199 2019.

How to Retain and Develop Talent

According to the following article which I found at Egon Zehnder International , development of top talent becomes more and more important. At the same time, corporations are reluctant to invest in training due to low effectiveness experienced in the past. This is also my experience and that's why I highly recommend to combine training with an initial psycho-metric assessment and with follow-up coaching as this drastically increases the effectiveness. I even provide a results guarantee when this approach is being used. Now read the article:

TOP STORY Talent Management:

Skills shortage makes talent development top priorityWhile poor performance is often blamed on the skills shortage, many companies are reluctant to invest in training, reports Gill Plimmer in the Financial Times. Companies often prefer poaching top players from competitors or overseas as an alternative to developing existing staff. Despite pressure from policymakers to promote professional development, estimates suggest that corporate spending on formal training has dropped 10 percent in the last two years. High employee churn and the difficulty of assessing return on investment have discouraged some companies from investing in training, explains the author. Continuing professional development was sidelined by many companies during the 1990s in the quest for shareholder value, say experts. However, with downsized, flatter organizations, companies are now realizing that getting more out of their staff is the key to competitiveness. Increased regulation is forcing companies to invest in professional development in areas like accountancy and law. Companies are also under pressure to show shareholders the impact of training on their results, which should help them to justify bigger training budgets in the long run. Firms seeking to attract top talent must realize that the best people want professional development, concludes the author.

Full story. Gill Plimmer: “Emphasis on more skills investment” in Financial Times (October 11, 2004). Search archive on title to retrieve article. Subscription required.

Urgency in Japan

This Monday I got a call from one of my clients, a medium sized European Hi-Tech company with their Asian headquarter being in Hong Kong. I have been working for this client already for some time doing consulting and coaching work. I was also working with their regional country managers in Asia in order to support their organizational development.

The general manager of this company sounded quite disturbed and asked me whether I could fit in a short trip to Japan still in October as he was really worried about what’s going on there.

My schedule this month was already quite packed and the only possible time for me to squeeze in such a visit by moving some appointments was to leave the very next day in the afternoon and meet with the Japanese country manager – let me call him Pete - today.

Since last Monday was a public holiday (National Sports & Health Day, which was established upon the start of the Olympic Games in Tokyo on 11 Oct 1964), I could not reach the person I was supposed to meet today. Nevertheless, I made the flight reservation and luckily, Pete could spare the time to meet with me.

To cut a long story short, it became pretty obvious during our 6 hours meeting today that Pete is overwhelmed with all the tasks at hand. He is an outstanding connector and doubled the business for this company in Japan within the first 6 months after his arrival and is likely to increase it by another 60% this year.

Even though he possibly has the required general management capability, he faces a no. of problems;

* lack of time to drive the business AND develop the company
* lack of competent co-managers to support him with the operational tasks
* lack of patience with his co-workers leading to high staff turnover (some key persons already indicated that they won’t take that for very long anymore – and most Japanese employees have a rather high tolerance for suffering)

Of course, all these problems are interlinked and we came to the conclusion that the only way around this problem is to search for a competent chief operating officer who takes off the burden of handling all the daily operational tasks at hand. Due to the strong growth of the company, it will be possible to afford a 2nd strong manager. The benefits to be expected are:

+ Pete can focus better on what he is really good at, and that is to bring in new business

+ the morale of the other employees is likely to considerably improve leading to less turnover and higher productivity – Pete is normally a quite relaxed and funny person but turns into a rather cynical and dominating boss under high pressure

+ the headquarter can feel more secure because it is safe to assume that reporting will be more regular and they don’t need to fear anymore that the operation will depend only on one key person

For me it was again interesting to experience how people often can’t see the forest anymore because of all the trees around them. Being not directly involved in their day-to-day business, enables me to look at the forest from outside and see the dynamics which lead to the current problems.

Meeting Dan Harrison, Creator of Harrison Assessments

Last Friday and Saturday I had the privilege to join a workshop in Hong Kong facilitated by Dr. Dan Harrison, creator of Harrison Assessments. The target of this workshop was to learn how to make maximum use of Harrison Assessments in a coaching situation.

The participants were from quite a variety of backgrounds, such as HR directors, Consultants, Educators, Financial Controllers, Factory Managers and Coaches (incl. myself). During the first day, Dan mostly introduced us to his approach to coaching and made us coach each other. There was little new for me in that approach, the greatest learning was to focus more on the strengths highlighted by the assessment reports rather than on the weaknesses.

This makes perfectly sense because
a) it helps to improve the rapport between client and coach
b) it helps the client to open up, to take down any possibly existing defences
c) it is more successful to enhance strengths rather than focusing too much on weaknesses

On our second day, Dan gave us deeper insights in the design of the assessment reports and how to better interprete them.

What was most amazing for me was the energy we had in the room. Despite the variety in backgrounds, literally everybody opened up in no time and after these 2 days many of us felt as if we knew each other for a long time.

Overall, it was an interesting and useful workshop and it was certainly great to get to know Dan personally.

What do you think about Tele-Classes with Video

In order to make my coaching and training services available at a lower cost to a broader audience, I thought of various ways how to accomplish that. One of the ideas I had for some time is to arrange for Tele-Classes (TC's). I've participated in quite a no. of TC's before and though I found them useful, I always felt that something is missing. Reflecting more on what that is, I realized that I actually would have liked to see the person who is facilitating the class.

Hence my idea to arrange for TC's combined with video. How could that work? I thought of setting up a webcam at the place from where I facilitate the TC and put it up on my website or on Yahoo. I would wear a headset and the participants in the teleclass could talk to me through the phone (dialing into a bridge) and at the same time see me talking.

What do you think of this idea? Did you ever participate in a workshop organized this way? Anything I need to consider (besides looking good, of course)? Shoot at me with your comments, please!!

Interested in First-Class Leadership & Innovative Sales?

Yesterday I gave a public full-day training on Innovative Sales in the Excelsior Hotel in Hong Kong. The attendants were from such different backgrounds like Human Resource Management Outsourcing and Merchandising. All were very interested in my concept of "Stop Selling! How to Help Your Customers Buy" which is an approach going clearly beyond the so-called consultative selling method.

In this training I figured out again how difficult it is for people to let go of their old habits and to adopt an entirely new approach.

We created role plays which we tried to make as close as possible to the real life situations the participants face every day. This way, the trainees could actually experience a new sales approach which is on one hand very smooth without any pressure on the prospective customer or client and yet very straight forward as this approach reveals very quickly whether a business is possible or not.

During my 13 years in Sales and General Management (before I started my own company in 2002) I continuously made the experience that sales people waste way too much time with prospects they won't do any business with at that point. The unique strength of my approach is that the sales person figures out in no time whether a further follow-up of the project makes sense or not. And this while truly serving the customer in his buying process.

The feedback at the end of the day was overwhelming, one attendant said that she finally got the answer how to sell with integrity, i.e. how to sell AND to feel good at the same time.

I am not sure whether I will do this kind of public workshops again because my experience tells me that people have difficulties to implement such entirely new concepts without follow-up coaching. That's why I prefer to provide complete packages consisting of training and follow-up coaching to corporations. This way it is assured that the new concepts are actually implemented. I realized that the effectiveness of learning of a full-day training without follow-up is between 0-20% depending on the quality of the trainer and the trainees. However, if coaching is being added to the training the effectiveness is increased to 70-100%.

If you want to know more about my Innovative Sales Program, visit http://www.progressu.com.hk/SalesDP.htm or contact me (Charlie.Lang@progressu.com.hk).

If you want to share your opinion about effective training and innovative sales, I would be happy to hear from you!