What is Coaching?  

A friend of mine just endured an awful hour of interaction with a coach.  The coach apparently listened for a moment and proceeded to offer a solution to my friend’s situation. Have you every noticed that when people give advice (1) it is rarely listened to and (2) it almost always fails.  My friend’s coach must be new or worse, someone untrained in coaching and unemployed who decided to surf the trend and hang out a shingle as a coach.  

There are some great coaches out there, my friend did not find one of them.  What is coaching?  Coaching is an intentional and facilitated conversation. It encourages rigor in the way leaders organize thinking, envisioning, planning and expectations. Coaching challenges the limits of competence and learning horizons. 

Good coaches know how to pull out the best from their clients.  Good coaches know how to get…

I stumbled on a post this morning by James Lawther on the Great Leadership blog. The post reviews the Avianca flight 52 from Bogotá to New York that crash-landed on January 25, 1990 outside of New York, killing 73 of the 158 passengers.

Inadequate communication between the flight crew and the tower controllers regarding the urgency of the situation contributed to the tragedy. Lawther claims the communication breakdown was the result of a challenge that is heavy on my heart and common in my experience – high power distance.

High power distance is a phenomenon that we deal with less often in the United States, but it is a big challenge in the cultures of places like Latin America, Asia, or the Middle East. High power distance means that there is an unseen but very real chasm between the leader/boss/director and the team or those who work for…