A Coaching Plan for Obama’s Second Term

• By Scott Eblin
• November 9, 2012
• comments

This post is based on a presumptuous and preposterous premise which is that I’d have the opportunity to coach the President of the United States. One of the occupational hazards of being an executive coach is that I have this habit of thinking about leaders in the public eye and asking myself, “How would I coach that person?” Naturally, in the wake of his re-election, my attention has landed on President Obama.  If Mitt Romney had won, I’d most likely be thinking about how I’d coach him.  Game planning how I’d coach the President is a harmless little exercise that gets my brain going and has no actual impact on national security.

In the hope that some of my thoughts might be useful to leaders who aren’t charged with leading the free world but are facing some significant new challenges nonetheless, here are some questions and frameworks I’d share with the President to help put together a coaching plan:

Two of my favorite question sets to ask at the beginning of a coaching engagement are:

1.     What are you trying to accomplish? If you were wildly successful, what would things look like at the ...

Three Things That “No Drama” Leaders Do

• By Scott Eblin
• November 8, 2012
• comments

As I write this, it’s Election Day morning in the U.S. Looking back over the last four years, there’s a lot that comes to mind. One specific thought is that in the 2008 campaign, the soon to be President’s nickname was “No Drama Obama.” I guess that comes to mind because there have been a number of data points about leadership and the drama factor that have hit my radar screen lately.

For example, a top executive at Apple, Scott Forstall, was fired last week because, according to all of the reported accounts (here’s a good summary on GigaOm), all of the drama he had created over the years finally came to a head.

The Forstall story and some other data points highlight three things that “no drama” leaders do to get results over the long run.

Forstall was a favorite of the late Steve Jobs and was well known within the company for presenting himself as “mini-Steve.” The problem, of course, was that he wasn’t Steve so his yelling, intransigence and non collaborative behavior wore thin with his peers over the years. He was the exec in charge of ...

Five Things to Learn from Bloomberg About Crisis Communications

• By Scott Eblin
• October 31, 2012
• comments

While the impact of Hurricane Sandy in the U.S. spread far and wide, the New York/New Jersey area definitely took the worst hit. The scenes of flooding, fires and dangling construction cranes on Monday night and Tuesday morning were truly stunning.

In the run-up to the storm, a friend of mine wrote that we were likely to see lots of examples of leadership this week. She was certainly right. Some dramatic examples that come to mind are the U.S. Coast Guard’s helicopter borne rescue of the HMS Bounty crew off North Carolina (see the video here) and New York City firefighters rescuing residents from a waterlogged inferno in Rockaway, Queens.

A less dramatic but equally visible example of leadership this week has come from New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg. With multiple press conferences a day before, during and after the storm, Bloomberg has kept his citizens informed and, in the process, given a seminar on how to do leadership communications in a crisis. If you haven’t seen one of the mayor’s press conferences, it’s worth a look to see how he does it. I’ve watchedexcerpts from a few of them ...

You Have to Speak for the Work

• By Scott Eblin
• October 24, 2012
• comments

Lots of us grew up believing in the idea that if you just do good work, the work will speak for itself. That’s one of those beliefs that’s true until it isn’t. When it isn’t is that when so much is going on that top management probably won’t notice good work unless you speak for it. The more senior top management is, the more likely this is to be true They simply have too many things to pay attention to to recognize or acknowledge all the things that are going right. The further up you go in any organization, the work stops speaking for itself. You have to speak for the work.

Here’s what I don’t mean by that. Speaking for the work is not about jumping up and down saying, “Hey, look what I did!” You’re speaking for the work, not speaking for you. More specifically, you’re speaking for the work of your team. Part of your job as their leader is to advocate for them and get them the exposure they need to succeed. Another part of your leadership role is to make sure that your boss has the ...

New Leaders: Believe You Should Be There

• By Scott Eblin
• October 17, 2012
• comments

Have you ever noticed what doing something for the first time does to your confidence level? If you’re like most folks, it gets a little shaky when you’re doing something new.  Especially if that something new has stakes that seem or actually are high. If you read this blog earlier this month, you might think this observation was inspired by President Obama’s performance in his first debate as an incumbent. That would be a good guess but not it.

The confidence factor came up last week in a Tools for Next Level Leaders workshop I was conducting for about a dozen leaders who had all just been promoted to their first executive level position.  We were talking about all the firsts that occur in a new executive position. The first senior leadership team meeting; the first all hands meeting; the first one on one with the big boss and on and on. It can all feel a little overwhelming and it can definitely affect your confidence and, therefore, your performance.

In talking about this with the group, I mentioned that one of the ways to shore up your confidence when you’re the new leader is to ...