Coaching

Some think coaching is for weak people who need a crutch. In fact, coaching is for everyone, particularly for leaders who are already successful and are looking for further improvement. It has helped me become a better team leader, advisor, and partner, in my professional life, and is transforming my personal life.

For me, coaching is a partnership (with a coach) to chart my path forward. I employed an executive coach while I was founding director of the Data Science Institute. That helped me improve my leadership and build multiple partnerships to launch a new type of campus entity. DSI is now thriving under its director, and will be an integral part of the new School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences building.

Recently, I have been working with a retirement coach to chart a different type of path forward. This web site is only part of that path.

Coaching Books and Resources

Bob Anderson

The basic idea of Anderson and Adams’s “Mastering Leadership” is to transform oneself to a more creative mindset involving socializing and self-authoring mind. This is represented in a wheel with the bottom for reactive (less desirable) and the top for creative self-authoring (more desirable). The goal is to transform oneself from the bottom to the top in multiple ways to realize each next level of effectiveness. Anderson developed an integrated model of leadership effectiveness and how it develops, with ways to measure and track progress. That is, change belief and behavior to yield predictable results. This method recognized four universal promises of leadership

  • Set the right direction and create meaningful work
  • Engage all stakeholders and hold them accountable for performance
  • Ensure that processes and systems facilitate focus and execution
  • Maintain relationships of trust to achieve and sustain results

The process involves balancing the outer game (leadership competencies and process: rhythm & management) with the inner game (evolving leadership consciousness). The inner game runs the outer game based on four foundational premises

  • structure determines performance
  • you are a structure
  • consciousness is the operating system of performance
  • to achieve higher performance, you must be restructured

Mind development passes through four stages: egocentric (self-sovereigning); reactive (socialized); creative (self-authoring); and integral (self-transforming). These lead ultimately to a transcendent unitive mind. Leadership involves transforming oneself through these development stages, moving oneself around the wheel from complying to achieving, controlling to relating, and protecting to creative (self aware, authentic, systems aware).

Anderson and Adams focus on six systems of organizational effectiveness: leadership (vision & value, strategy & approach, structure & alignment); effective communication (leading to organizational meaning in context); accountability (clarity of import, expectations and consequences aligned with performance); delivery (simple processes, internally efficient, locally responsive, globally adaptable); performance; and measurement. They identify three core reactive types in moving from patriarchy to partnership: heart (complying); will (controlling); and head (protecting). The path toward balancing these involves six practices: discerning purpose; distilling vision; knowing doubts & fears; engaging in authentic, courageous dialogue; developing intuition, open to inspiration; and thinking systematically. Integration involves seeing the entire development spectrum, holding onto unresolvedness, conflict, and tension.

Unity is a more ethereal, philosophical level in which “we surf on the ocean”, experiencing ups and downs of wave life, with ultimate fulfillment by awakening from the dream of our separate wave-ness. This involes recognizing that if you want to develop mastery in the art of leadership, a mature Structure of Mind is required. However, development into this mature identity is preliminary to breakthrough to unity, the arduous work of surrendering identity altogether.

Susan Cook-Greuter

The MAP (Maturity Profile for Leaders) explains an important assessment tool developed by Cook-Greuter over four decades.

‘After 4 decades, … I now focus on writing about my discoveries and concerns…. I shifted my attention from adult development theories to re-exploring values and character development…. I [am] writing the book on ego development theory from a perspective that includes an appreciation of non-WEIRD definitions of what it means to be a person in Indigenous cultures…. Our separate self-sense in the West has caused much of the trouble we are in now having exploited nature for our own benefit and to the detriment of overall well-being of our home…. As a member of Integral Africa, we explore “how to do human better” and “how to become better ancestors.”’ Susanne Cook-Greuter (LinkedIn). Listen to her on the Deep Transformation Podcast.

Cook-Greuter emphasizes Vertical Development, which fosters growth of new perspectives and greater ability to handle difficult problems, as opposed to the typical Horizontal Development, which involves acquiring experience and knowledge, as well as new skills and competencies. This area is known as the adult developmental process, embodied in Integral+Life.