Your Coach (in a Book): Mastering the Trickiest Leadership, Business, and Career Challenges You Will Ever Face

Introduction: Democratizing Coaching 1

1 What's the Opportunity in Coaching for You? 8

Part One: Your Extraordinary Business Challenge 23

2 Declare an Impossible Future—That Captures People's Imagination 39
Situation: How do you transform a climate of profound resignation into a climate of inspiration? What do you do with big aspirations and small resources? How do you shift from "running the business" to "creating the business"? Let us be your thinking partner here.

3 Face Reality—Identify What's Missing That, if Provided, Will Produce a Breakthrough 46
Situation: You declared your strategic intention and made great forward progress. Yet you have hit a wall and need to declare breakdowns to discover what is missing that will produce a breakthrough. Your masterful coach will offer you a powerful assist.

4 Create a Source Document—Vision, Major Milestones, Key Initiatives, Guiding Principles, and Methodologies 53
Situation: It was a terrific vision statement you came up with at the big meeting, but today it is just another good idea gone up in smoke. You keep asking yourself what's missing that will have impact. Your masterful coach has a great leadership tool to offer you.

5 Get Everyone to Formulate a Significant Business Challenge—Create Line of Sight to Strategic Goals 62
Situation: You want to create focus and energy around your strategic goals and priorities. People say they want to focus on things that make a difference, but they are bogged down in a laundry list of objectives. Here's a proven method that will pay off in spades.

6 Desperate to Break Out of the No-Growth Morass?—Blow Up Your Business Model Versus Tinker at the Margins 69
Situation: You face a dilemma. Either blow up your business model and come up with new wealth-creating strategies or continue tinkering at the margins despite diminishing returns. We'll guide you in getting to the core of your dilemma and cracking it open.

7 Looking to Get a Chunk of Capital at Your Next Board Meeting?—The Best Presentation Is the One You Never Make 77
Situation: You have a plan to grow your profitable business, but to do that, you need capital from the CEO and executive committee. Recent attempts to convince the CEO to give money to high-flying growth ideas have met with resistance or been shot down. How are you going to approach your upcoming meeting? Let us help you.

8 Create Customers Who Brag About You—Shift from a "Me" Point of View to a "You" Point of View 84
Situation: The people in your company have fallen in love with your advertising, products, and rules. However, they forgot to fall in love with your customers, ignoring their rising needs and expectations. Here is a golden nugget to transform this situation.

Part Two: Your Extraordinary Leadership Challenge 91

9 Be an Extraordinary Leader—Recognize That Your Winning Strategy has Gotten You Here But May Not Take You Where You Want to Go 107
Situation: The ways of being and thinking, the attitudes that were the source of your success in the past, have now become the source of your limitations. You're unaware of this, and you are unaware that you are unaware. Your masterful coach will rip the blinders off.

10 Stand for Something!—Leadership Arises in Discovering Yourself as the Stand You Take 114
Situation: You have declared an impossible future and taken on a powerful business challenge, but sense you now need to take on an equally powerful leadership challenge that will require relentless coaching and feedback. If you are ready develop faster, fasten your seat belt and let's go.

11 Get Your Grand Design Over the Line—Vision Is Not Enough! Execute on Your Source Document Until It Exists Independent of You 121
Situation: You spent three months working on your Source Document as if you were writing your enterprise's version of the U.S. Constitution. You put out your vision, teachable points of view, and key priorities at town hall meetings with a bang, but what has come back is more like a whimper. We'll show you how to get what you are committed to "over the line" so that it exists independent of you.

12 Become a Master Politician—The Art of Politics for Non-Politicians 127
Situation: You see an opportunity to make a difference and have jumped into action. It seems that each step you take creates a widening arc of support and opposi-tion. You know you have to deal with the opposition, but as you see it, playing politics is beneath you. Get over it. To reach your goals you need to master the political chessboard.

13 Lateral Leadership: How to Lead When You Are Not in Charge—Build Coalitions That Increase Support and Diminish Opposition 137
Situation: You've discovered that leaders get things done in three ways when they are not in charge: charisma, force of argument or pressure, and coalition building. What is the best way forward for you? Here's a great mentoring tale.

14 Take an A Player in Every Job—Coach B's, Redeploy or Release Chronic C's 144
Situation: You are beginning to wake up to the fact that you cannot create an Impossible Future with a team of chronic C players. You'd give anything for a team of A players, if only it were possible. Now it is!

15 Stop Being a Victim of Your Calendar—Start Focusing on What Makes a Difference, Not What's Merely Important or Trivial 151
Situation: Your increasing inability to control your agenda has left you resigned and frustrated. You are spending way too much time reacting to the day-to-day demands of managing the business. You are wondering how you will ever be able to spend more time on activi-ties that will truly make a difference. Here are the hidden keys.

16 Get Ready for Big Meetings Like a Championship Game—Focus on Who You Need to Be and On What You Need to Do 159
Situation: You have a big meeting coming up that is like a championship game for your business. You want your preparation for the meeting to match the opportunity and to come home with a big win. Learn how to get the edge.

Part Three: Your Extraordinary Career Challenge 167

17 Do You Have a Burning Ambition?—Seize the Crown, Stop Being Just a Good Soldier in the Long March of History 177
Situation: You see others are getting ahead faster than you and can't figure out why. Perhaps their secret is not that they have more talent but that they have more ambition. Your masterful coach will enable you to set your ambition free.

18 Network to Match Your Ambition—Power Comes Not from Your Position but from How Connected You Are 183
Situation: You've got an idea of the dream job you would like to have two to five years from now. It is time to start thinking of networking as a strategic action you take toward your intended career goals and objectives. Can we offer to be your mentor on this?

19 Sourcing a Powerful Relationship with Your Boss—The Art of Managing Up to Get Ahead 190
Situation: At best, you have good chemistry with your boss. At worst, you suffer feelings of being dominated. In both cases, you give your power away to your boss. Can you change that and have a better career? Our answer is yes.

20 Create an Extraordinary Career in a Turbulent World—Go for Mastery, Not Competence 197
Situation: You have noticed lately that once-safe midmanagement jobs are being replaced by microchips or farmed out to Pakistan, South Korea, and Mexico. How can you increase your chances of success in a Fortune 500 firm or survive as a free agent? Now hear this!

21 Dealing With Derailers—Shine Your Light, Manage Your Darker Side 205
Situation: You've read that the average tenure of Fortune 500 CEOs is 2.7 years. Like you, most of these guys learned how to leverage their strengths. Yet they didn't ask for feedback on their gaps that would cause them to derail. Don't make the same mistake.

22 There's a Conversation Out There About You That's a Career Wrecker—Publicly Acknowledge It, Take Responsibility for It, Campaign to Change It 211
Situation: You have worked hard to transform your leadership style and derailers, but you've got a rap sheet from the past. Too bad! You may not like it, but the way others perceive you, rightly or wrongly, will shape your career (and your future)! Here is how to shift those perceptions, one conversation at a time.

23 Beat Burnout—Get to the Source of Frustration First, Then Deal With Overload 218
Situation: You have a job that gives you an opportunity to make a difference, but all you do is travel and work all the time and it's a body beater. You are extremely frustrated about the petty tyrants, as well as the walls and organization absurdities that are thwarting your intentions. The combination of all these things is not only demotivating but also burning you out. What do you do about it?

24 Fed Up with Your Job? Take the "Go to America" Attitude and Get Out—Write a Résumé That Is a Ticket to a New and Better Universe 225
Situation: You've spent your career in one company, which feels like the whole universe. Your boss has offered you a choice: stay where you are or take a job that is a side step. Your masterful coach says you always have more career choices than you can see.

Notes 231

Glossary of Concepts 235

Acknowledgments 241

About the Authors 243

Index 245