I’m being on my soapbox right now, and I’m going to stand right off and not get too far. Or I’ll step on it with you for a second because this is the coaching racket, at least in my mind, because it’s an easy thing to scale and sell. You could certify all these coaches, just make them curious, and just all you got to do is ask questions, man. And there’s value in it because people aren’t curious enough, and we don’t ask enough good questions, and we don’t know how to. The people we’re trying to help as coaches or anyone you’re trying to help in life, there often is untapped insights, ideas, and capabilities within them that if we could sometimes just be someone who can really listen and we can ask them great questions, sometimes they could discover the real problems for themselves and the answers for themselves. And the degree to which they don’t need us to do that for them, the better, because ultimately our job is to make ourselves useless. Our job is to help them be able to solve their own problems. And that is the asset test of how helpful we have been.
Yes. However, everybody’s got blind spots. You’re designed and I’m designed and other people, we’re all designed a certain way. There’s something that flows through us. We’ve got a a ticker song to sing, which is not their song, but maybe it adds to the song Sheet, and they’re the richer for it. When I was at IBM, again, I was this… I don’t know if I said this to you before, but I was an executive coach to a segment of the Worldwide Management Committee, which is the top 30 executives there. Then a subset of the top 300 executives below was called the SLG, strategic leadership group, and their leadership teams. I remember working with… Gosh, this was 24 years ago now. I was working for a guy named Steve Ward, who was running the industrial sector, I don’t know, $13, $15 billion industrial sector. By the way, I’m like 30 years old. What am I doing coaching this guy? Well, I had some chops around Kander and about having these challenging conversations. He He became the guy when IBM sold Lenovo computers, the ThinkPad, it became Lenovo, the Chinese company. He was their first CEO. I was his third coach in the space of a year.
I remember him saying to me, this is what hit me, Steve, and this is also important for people who love just to ask questions and only questions. He said to me, I like you. I was like, Okay, why is that? He goes, Most of what you say to is wrong, but at least you have the courage to say it. Then, which was like a back-headed compliment, right? You’re rather stupid, but your stupid ideas are helping me think better. He said, But at least it gives me something, because sometimes you’re right and you’re pointing out something to me that I didn’t see, but sometimes you’re wrong, and it gives me something to react to so that I’m able to better and more quickly figure out what I think. I’m like, Okay, great. It’s like, What is everybody else They just question me to death. He goes, I have a mirror in the bathroom. I don’t need one. I need somebody who could share, tell me things that I might not be aware of or I’m not taking seriously enough. That’s the value because I picked somebody at my level. So much of the truth of what people feel is getting screened out because they’re afraid of me because of my authority.
I can’t have that in you as a coach. I got to have somebody who was going to ask me questions, sure, who’s curious, but then they’re going to give something back to me as a result of that curiosity journey.
