Open to learning

I had the privilege of working with a global manufacturing company, along with my firm, Cambria, to help implement a major strategic initiative. This organization was moving into the BRIC countries, and they're a very U.S. centric organization, and they needed to think about things differently.

They needed to be open, and they needed to really model that from the very top of the organization. So the CEO decided that he wanted to work with me and my team as coaches, for himself and for the senior team.

And when we first started working, he made this huge effort to see me before a certain date. I mean, we had to kind of do all these machinations with calendars. And the reason why he wanted to do it is he wanted to stand up in front of his global 500 leaders and say that he had a coach, and to talk about the fact that he was learning, that the whole organization needed to learn, and that he was starting and he had a coach and he had met with his coach.

And what ended up happening is that he and I worked together for about two years, along with the senior team. The senior team all got coaches. And he asked everybody to learn how to be open. And this was not something that this organization had ever done.  They had never had coaches in this way, they had never done it at the top of the organization, and they never had 360 feedback and open comments about what people could learn and how they could grow.

What he did, which was amazing, I think, was he continued to reference me in terms of the coaching. He went to his senior team and talked about what his strengths were from his feedback and what his development areas were. He immediately put in place a couple of things that were important to his direct reports. He also worked on things that were difficult for him.

He would say, "I'm not good at this. I need your help. I'd like to be able to do this better. Tell me if I'm doing this better." And he would try different things. All of this led to, for this particular organization, an amazing openness and cultural change, which was noted by the board. And I was privileged to be part of it.

By embracing the coaching process and demonstrating commitment to their own professional development, leaders can open the dialogue for learning within the organization.