Ed Batista

Thank You, Veterans

I studied history as an undergrad, and in my senior year I wrote a long paper on the development of the M16 assault rifle. (It was a decent work of collegiate scholarship, if I say so myself; at the time I was acquainted with a colonel who taught at West Point, and he put a copy on file in their library.)

While writing the paper I interviewed a number of Vietnam War veterans, and I still remember sitting down with those men as a callow student. How old they seemed! Of course, today I'm the same age they were then, and I have to laugh at how ignorant and naive I was at 22.

I remain grateful to those men for their indulgence of my ignorance and naivete, for their generosity and for their service, and that gratitude extends to everyone who served then and serves today. Thank you, veterans.

Photo by EverJean. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

I Am The 1% (Why Self-Coaching Matters)

No, not that 1%. But I am the the 1% in another way: My coaching clients and students typically talk with me for 60 to 90 minutes every two weeks--approximately 1% of their working hours.

So 99% of the time they're managing interactions, making choices and responding to situations on their own. While those actions may be influenced by our coaching conversations, at most I'm a distant echo in the back of their minds, and in the moment my clients and students are coaching themselves through these experiences.

I began thinking about self-coaching three years ago, when some of my students in the Leadership Coaching course at Stanford wondered how they would continue the process of personal development without the resources and structure provided by a graduate program. I realized that much of my writing on this site was intended to serve that very purpose, and I compiled a series of Self-Coaching Guides on the topics of change, communication, happiness, leadership, learning and motivation.

My thoughts on self-coaching (and on the specific topics above) have evolved considerably over the last few years, and I plan to spend more time on this subject going forward. But for now I'll simply note that I've come to believe that effective self-coaching is the key to meaningful growth and development, whether you're working with an executive coach like me, participating in a formal degree program, taking a class or simply reading websites like this in your spare time.

So no matter which of these groups we belong to, I think it's essential to assess the practices and habits that comprise our own self-coaching routines and to experiment until we find the mix that's best suited to our needs, temperament and circumstances. For example, I've long believed in the value of writing a journal as a way to understand and find meaning in our experiences, and I strongly encourage my coaching clients to do so. (My students at Stanford don't have a choice in the matter--some type of journal is almost always a course requirement.)

I don't mean to suggest that journaling is the only--or even the most important--element of self-coaching; it's just a convenient starting point for this discussion. I don't prescribe any particular form of journaling, because it's important for each individual to decide what will work best for them--a weekly review, a few words at the end of the day, sporadic essays, a private diary or a website like this, whatever works. And while I certainly have clients who choose not to journal and still find value in the coaching process, I believe that those clients who do journal, in whatever form, will be better prepared to coach themselves after our work together has ended. They've developed a practice that will allow them to retain memories, process emotions, and understand themselves more fully. All this happens in a coaching conversation, of course, and (thankfully) there are times when an in-person discussion with a coach is uniquely valuable. But as I said earlier this year to my colleague Dan Oestreich, "I believe my role as a coach is both necessary and modest. Necessary in the sense of helping clients know how to get started. And modest in the sense that the goal is for clients to be able to coach themselves after I leave."

The Work and The Job

We often talk about "my work" and "my job" as if they're interchangeable concepts, but it's important to distinguish between them. I define "work" as a vocation--a calling or a personal mission that provides us with an intrinsic sense of meaning and purpose. A "job," in contrast, is a set of responsibilities we fulfill in exchange for various forms of compensation. We get paid to do the job, but the work is its own reward. On the job we ultimately answer to someone--customers, superiors, board members, investors; in our work we ultimately answer to our own consciences. We can change jobs readily; we change our work only with great effort. In the end our jobs are lines on a resume, while our work is our legacy, our epitaph.

I'm well aware that for many people there's no meaningful difference between their work and their job, and I've had plenty of experience from that perspective. In high school and college I was a houseboy in a hotel, a laborer on a construction crew, an assistant in a copy shop, a delivery truck driver, a sandwich-maker, a window-washer and a doorman at a campus bar. All decent, honest jobs--but my only motivation for doing the work was the paycheck, and if you'd asked me to distinguish between "my work" and "my job" I wouldn't even have understood the question.

This started to change in my senior year of college when I was promoted from doorman to head bartender on the Monday night shift (a lucrative spot in American campus bars thanks to Monday Night Football.) After football season was over I came up with the idea of a "Mixed Media Night" on Mondays, an evening of music, film, comedy and performance art. I recruited the performers and served as host and MC in addition to heading up the bar, and it was a hell of a lot of fun. It also kept the bar full, which meant good tips and a happy staff--but I soon realized that while I appreciated the money, what truly motivated me was the opportunity to provide artists with a stage and an audience. I loved that part of it so much I would have done it for free--but there were plenty of other duties that weren't quite so intrinsically rewarding, like hauling beer kegs and cleaning up at the end of the night, and I began to see that "my work" wasn't the same thing as "my job." The work that I loved was being responsible for creating a small but meaningful community each week, a role that overlapped with--but was distinct from--my job as head bartender.

While these two concepts always overlap for those of us who define ourselves as professionals, they also always diverge, sometimes quite substantially, no matter how happy or fulfilled we are in our professional lives. For example, if I define my work as "coaching" and my job as "Leadership Coach at Stanford" or "executive coach in private practice," the overlap between the two is, of course, significant. I spend the bulk of my time at Stanford and almost all of the time I dedicate to my practice working directly with students and clients in a coaching capacity, which is work that I find deeply, intrinsically rewarding. That said, I spend plenty of time at Stanford and in my practice on tasks that are only marginally related to the work but critical to the job. This is the red crescent on the right in the graphic above: meetings, coordination, logistics, etc.

But because I'm intrinsically motivated by my work, I dedicate plenty of time and energy to efforts that have nothing to do with my job at Stanford or a coaching engagement with any given client. This is the blue crescent on the left in the graphic above: research and writing (like this blog post), learning from colleagues, receiving coaching myself--basically anything I can do to develop myself as a professional.

The point isn't that these two spheres should overlap perfectly--I don't think that's realistic or even desirable. But I think this model encourages us to recognize the fundamental distinction between our work and our job and allows us to see that even when these concepts overlap substantially they fulfill different sets of needs. In addition, this model highlights the discrepancies that do exist between these two concepts, which hopefully invite our curiosity. Where do my work and my job overlap? Where (and why) do they diverge? What do I see when I begin to look at my life through this lens? Am I happy with the balance--or do I want something to change?

Dan Oestreich Interviews Me

Dan Oestreich is a coach I respect immensely, and when he asked to interview me for the March issue of his newsletter, I couldn't agree fast enough. He graciously agreed to let me re-post our interview here, and the results are below. It seems noteworthy that while I've enjoyed getting to know Dan through his thoughtful essays and interesting tweets, this interview reflects our first in-person conversation. That says something to me about how our online networks allow us to connect with like-minded people and develop meaningful friendships when we take the risk to be ourselves. Many thanks, Dan.

Q. Ed, in your blog posts you frequently use yourself as your own best learning laboratory. You are open about exactly what is going on for you personally including experiences both rewarding and uncomfortable. What's behind this level of self-disclosure for you?

A. In part, it reflects how I got started in coaching - which was first by being a client. I'd graduated from business school and accepted a role as the founding Executive Director of a new non-profit with big names on the Board, including people from Microsoft and Cisco. As a freshly minted MBA, I thought that the way I needed to add value as a leader was by having the best ideas and by winning support for them by proving their superiority. As a result I found myself championing my ideas in a way that repeatedly led me into conflicts with Board members. One of them, acting as a mentor to me, took me aside and said, "Hey, we think you're a talented young leader, but you have some rough edges, and we'd really like you to invest in yourself and get a coach." I went back to a professor of mine who had taught a class at Stanford on interpersonal dynamics and enlisted her support as a coach - which, by the way, she still does for me.

Accepting that suggestion from my mentor was a real gift, a pivotal moment, and I was able to act on it because it was offered in a way that made it safe for me. I wasn't told, "Shape up or be fired." Instead, I was told that, first, I was an effective leader with a lot of potential; second, I was leading in a way that was undermining my effectiveness; and finally, coaching could be a means of getting some support and investing in my own development. I had the ability to opt in and to find my own way. It didn't come across as a threat but instead as an investment in myself, and as a result I could engage. When I eventually transitioned out of organizational management to coaching as a career, I remembered that lesson about finding ways to reduce the threat for people in order to help them and support them in their learning and growth. So now I try to model that. I am a learning laboratory, just as we all are, and I don't think coaching is something that is just good for other people. I think it's important for coaches to have coaches, for us to walk our talk.

Q. Ed, where do you think that sense of threat related to coaching really comes from?

A. Over the course of our evolution as a species we've developed a very powerful threat response, and neuroscience research has shown that when we experience a social situation that we perceive as threatening, our brains respond just as they do when we experience an actual physical threat to our safety. David Rock is a coach who's done a tremendous job of studying neuroscience research findings and understanding their implications for coaching and organizational life, and he's devised the SCARF Model to characterize situations that are likely to trigger a social threat. SCARF stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness (the sense of similarity and connection we feel with another person) and Fairness. Whenever one of these values is undermined in some way, we're likely to experience a social threat, and it's clear that the suggestion that we need some coaching could do just that. A suggestion like that is a form of feedback, and we all know what it feels like when someone says, "Can I give you some feedback?" Even if we truly want the feedback, we tend to feel anxious and even uncomfortable -- manifestations of a threat response -- and it's because we may feel a loss of status, we're uncertain about what the other person is going to say, we feel obligated to accept the feedback and thus have less autonomy, and we may even feel disconnected from the other person, or that the feedback is unfair. The same feelings can come up when it's suggested that we could use some coaching, and they all stem from this concept of a social threat being triggered.

Q. I notice, similarly, that you often talk about the role of shame and embarrassment for yourself and for others as a hard-limit on personal learning. Could you say more about that?

A. This is exactly one of those areas where I can use myself effectively as a learning laboratory. I think there's a spectrum of related emotions that range from social awkwardness and mild embarrassment to deep shame. Wherever I am on that spectrum because of some circumstance or event, I know that it's helpful to talk about those feelings. If we don't, these feeling reinforce themselves and can collapse in on us. We are ashamed because we are ashamed, and so we stay ashamed. Or we're embarrassed because we're embarrassed, and so we stay embarrassed. It's a downward spiral. Yet what the neuroscience research says is that by talking about these feelings we relieve them, and so we're confronted with a paradox. I manage my feelings most effectively by acknowledging them, rather than going along with the natural impulse to hide them.

Such strong emotions can be powerfully deforming to us, but as a result can also be powerful points of leverage. What's clear is that they really shape our behavior. Think of the leader who makes a mistake. If I'm that leader and can acknowledge the mistake, the effect can be transformative for me and for those around me. But unacknowledged, shame and embarrassment can feed other negative emotions. I could end up becoming angry with others because I can't handle my own embarrassment, for example. I become deeply frightened that my shame and embarrassment will be seen no matter how I try to conceal them, and this creates a cycle that spins out of control.

A small example: I was doing a presentation recently and I had a slide in my deck labeled, "Ineffective Communication." A member of my audience said, "Ed, you've misspelled the word, 'Ineffective' and it's distracting me." In the moment, I could have pretended his comment didn't affect me, but it did. I was trained as a writer, and I care about things like spelling, and I was embarrassed. In the moment, I had to hold my place and not fall into blaming him for raising the issue. But as soon as I acknowledged my embarrassment out loud, those feelings began to recede and I didn't stay stuck in them or hold onto them.

This example fits into a larger pattern I see when we're not fully clear about another person's intentions. It's typically safer to assume a negative intent -- when we do, we protect ourselves from harm or from unwanted experiences. And so when we don't fully understand another person's intentions, we typically fill that void with negative assumptions about their motives. This is an understandable form of self-protection, and evolution clearly selected for the genes that contribute to this type of threat response. But at the same time this response heightens our stress levels, keeps us at a distance from others and prevents the learning and growth that occur when we question our negative assumptions, rather than follow them blindly.

Q. What does this mean for the role of the coach? What does a coach do for a client experiencing these emotions?

A. A lot of what we do as coaches is to intervene in this cycle. Our point of intervention is to help our clients to step back, reflect, examine, acknowledge whatever embarrassment or shame is there, and in doing so create a different kind of safety for themselves, one that breaks through the self-imposed limits. I help as a coach by accepting the person and their emotions and by asking questions such as: Is this the whole picture? Are there other interactions, other people in the system that should be part of your frame of reference? What assumptions and real data are involved? What is the whole array of choices available to you? Often, driven by negative emotions that seem to make it safer, we reduce the range of options for ourselves just when we need to expand them. And we all need help stepping back from the grip of our negative emotions in order to reflect on them. And just being with a supportive learning partner, a coach, on a regular basis, clients can learn how to give themselves the safety and the time they need, so that they can intervene in this cycle on their own, after our coaching engagement has ended.

Q. Beyond creating safety, "holding the space" for a client's capacity to reflect, what does a good coach do?

A. This certainly doesn't mean the coach does nothing but be there. Often I find that I am wrestling with the tension of how much to intervene. I know that I will step forward when I need to point out some called-for action by the client. But just as frequently, the question is really what's the meaningful kind of presence I can bring. How do I ask an open-ended question that has a little friction to it, but isn't distracting? A question that occupies middle ground. I love laughing with clients and developing a friendly partnership, but if I try to simply preserve that quality in the coaching relationship, I fail the client. I want to maintain that, but not in a way that avoids addressing any heavier issues that a client might be grappling with. And at the same time I don't want to push with so much friction that it becomes an ineffective confrontation because I've actually diminished the safety for them.

On the "not enough friction" side, for example, I worked with a client on her career trajectory in some very concrete ways, but learned later than I would have liked in the coaching relationship that she was actually wrestling with wanting to be a mother. I had to ask myself whether I pursued the right questions and presence, ones that brought the real challenge to the surface.

Q. That's an important question of balance and finding that middle ground. What other dangers or challenges do you notice in your work?

A. A very important challenge for a coach is one I call the distinction between healthy "investment" in the client and unhealthy "attachment" to a particular outcome for the client. I can get so attached as a coach to what I think will be or should be my client's success that I lose my effectiveness. I take too much responsibility for that success and suddenly I can become more directive than facilitative. That certainly was apparent to me--after the fact--in the example of the woman I just mentioned. I was so invested in her career possibilities and my ability to help her with those that I may have missed the deeper possibilities of the coaching process for her. Good coaches are able to modulate their attachment and ownership of the client's results. I make an investment in my client - that's good - but I also need to recognize the point at which that investment becomes attachment.

Q. Seems like a similar challenge could be true for any organizational leader.

A. Yes, that's a nice connection. Leaders are often asked to be problem-solvers, but they can so easily limit themselves, their reports, and their organization by being attached too much to what they think should happen, rather than what can happen when they are appropriately invested. I see that in clients who need to be, for example, a kind of "doer in chief," playing the classic heroic leadership role even though the organization has outgrown the need for that. I've been working with one such client and it's amazingly gratifying to see how he has expanded the definition of his role as leader and stepped into new types of work that are both more fulfilling for him personally and more productive for the organization as a whole. The great thing is he knew he had to change, that his growth is coupled to the organization's growth. And the thing that was been holding him back really has been his self-image. As he has liberated himself from that image, he has been able to see a much greater value in his capacity to connect with people and to truly lead the organization, not just someone who can get more busy-work done than anyone else. It's an intrapersonal and an interpersonal growth process.

Q. Ed, how do any of us make such a shift, knowing as your client did, that we need to change?

A. I'm a believer in breaking change down into bite-sized pieces. My work has been to help my client clarify small steps, celebrate small accomplishments, translate change into a daily practice based on his ability to see his own mental model of himself and his leadership. I help him construct experiments to test a new view of who he is. It's blocking and tackling, practical work based on a structured process.

Q. In the end, how would you define the value you have brought this--or most any--client?

A. Honestly, I don't feel I have added that much in this case except to ask questions and offer the client the opportunity to pause and to look, and to realize that he's already doing it: connecting, operating differently. I believe my role as a coach is both necessary and modest. Necessary in the sense of helping clients know how to get started. And modest in the sense that the goal is for clients to be able to coach themselves after I leave. This isn't about reaching my idea of what some endpoint should be for them. In part, that's one of the reasons I love coaching and why it's a calling for me. It's about their movement toward the most important goals they establish for themselves. It's a privilege for me, an honor, to be of service in the time I have with them. I feel good anytime I see someone commit to a coaching engagement because it's an investment in themselves. It's also a big step that I took for myself, with the encouragement of my mentor on my Board of Directors ten years ago. Today I have the benefit of seeing from the coach's perspective how much people want to grow and improve, how they learn and persist through struggles, and how in the course of our work together they ultimately become capable of coaching themselves, without any further intervention from me. It's truly gratifying, and I feel very lucky to do this work and to be invited into people's lives and careers in this way.

In Defense of Normal (A Coaching Manifesto)

By definition, coaching and other services aimed at helping people be more effective and fulfilled as professionals must challenge established norms, from clients' internal mental models to the surrounding organizational culture. But even as we're challenging these norms, coaches and our clients must also find ways to work within them.

In a word, for coaching and other interventions to achieve their goals they must be perceived as normal--stimulating and thought-provoking, certainly, but also applicable under everyday conditions. But too often coaching and related services are perceived as special--applicable only under unusual circumstances or too far beyond everyday norms to be practical or sustainable.

I'm not suggesting this balance is easy to maintain--it may be one of the hardest tasks coaches and our clients face. But it's also one of the most important. If we fail to challenge our mental models, our organizational cultures and our working relationships, there's no learning, no change, no growth. But if we fail to work effectively within that context--even as we challenge it--we're finished before we start.

Here's how I strive to find that balance in my own work as a coach with my clients and my students at Stanford: 

1) The Normal Coach

While it's essential that I stretch myself as a coach and challenge myself to make full use of the tools at my disposal, it's equally important to avoid coaching jargon and catchphrases, to respond naturally in coaching conversations, and to be myself without disappearing into the role. I aim to be a person who coaches, not a "Coach." In other words, be normal. 

Being normal myself allows coaching to be seen as a normal form of helping and interacting, rather than as something special or extraordinary. As Edgar Schein writes in Helping (one of the best books I can recommend for any coach or leader):

[T]he cultural stereotype of helping is to be an expert or doctor. We have, in a sense, overlearned to play these roles... [But] starting in the expert or doctor role creates the potential for both the client and the consultant to fall into traps as a result. [pp 54, 64]

The dilemma for coaches isn't merely that the expert or doctor roles are such vivid archetypes--it's that both coaches and clients can collude in the portrayal of coach-as-expert or coach-as-doctor because it plays into everyone's secret desire to be seen as special in one way or another. The portrayal of the coach as special implies that the client is also special, with special needs that can only be addressed via this special process.

When I'm merely normal as a coach, not only am I more accessible when working directly with clients and students, it's also easier for those clients and students to envision themselves as coaches, to step into the coaching role and to coach each other, making it much more likely that the work we've begun will continue after I'm gone. 

One further point on jargon: In 1984 Parade magazine (!) published Abbie Hoffman's "How to Fight City Hall," (currently available in The Best of Abbie Hoffman), which laid out 14 principles for anyone seeking to make change. Number 6 is Be very conscious of your language:

It cannot be stressed too strongly how much language shapes your environment. Language should be action-oriented, exciting, creative, simple and upbeat... You can't afford the luxury of being boring or of creating a language that the average person cannot understand. Avoid, for example, using initials for the full name of an agency. Even if all the people you are addressing know that EPA stands for Environmental Protection Agency...say the full name. Why? As a reminder not to slip into the language of the bureaucracy. Those in power can, but not the challengers.

The equivalent of Hoffman's bureaucratic acronyms are the catchphrases my coaching colleagues and I throw around like so much confetti. And I'm not pointing fingers--I know I'm as bad as the next coach. But every time we take one of those linguistic shortcuts, we miss an opportunity to help our clients understand and describe the work we do together in simple, straightforward terms that can be readily communicated to others.

2) The Normal Client

While it's my duty to challenge my clients' mental models and assumptions and to fully leverage my skills as a coach in the process, I also have an obligation to avoid pathologizing my clients and to accept them as they are. In other words, they're normal.

In the words of the authors of Co-Active Coaching, "From the...coach's perspective, nothing is wrong or broken, and there is no need to fix the client." Further, coaches must regard our clients as "creative, resourceful and whole." (This latter phrase can certainly sound like jargon at times, but let's call it "colorful" instead and make use of it for now.)  

I'm also influenced by Kurt Lewin's 3-stage model of change in which our existing behavioral patterns (1) must be "unfrozen" before (2) meaningful change can occur and (3) we then "refreeze," creating a set of new patterns, altered but consistent with our previous ones. Turning again to Edgar Schein, who has written in an extensive discussion of Lewin's theory:

The main point about refreezing is that new behavior must be to some degree congruent with the rest of the behavior and personality of the learner or it will simply set off new rounds of disconfirmation that often lead to unlearning the very thing one has learned.

This has crucial implications for how I view my clients: For any change that occurs through the coaching process to be sustainable for a client, it must be "to some degree congruent with the rest of [their] behavior and personality." And for this to be possible, I must view my clients as normal--as creative, resourceful and whole.  (This is a corollary to Schein's point above on the helping role: If I portray myself as the doctor or expert, I'm implicitly defining my client as a patient or as inept; in other words, no longer normal but rather a problem to be fixed.)

And while I make an important distinction between coaching and therapy, I've found great value in the thinking of Uri Merry and George Brown, who applied the principles of Gestalt therapy to the practice of organizational change. As Merry and Brown make clear, "When we speak of using Gestalt therapy with organizations or at the organization level, the fact remains that we ultimately are going to be using this approach with individuals or groups of individuals," and, again, the implications for how I view my clients are profound:

A Gestalt therapy approach to management development...[employs]...a focus on recognition and mobilization of the individual's strength and powers...an emphasis on strengthening the person's competence and autonomy...[and]...an emphasis on increasing the individual's competence.

Strength, power, competence, autonomy--i.e. normal.

3) The Normal Organization

Finally, just as I must challenge my clients while also viewing them as intrinsically normal, we both have to adopt the same basic attitude toward the organizational context that surrounds them. It's critical that each client and I assess how their organizational culture and their working relationships influence their individual effectiveness and fulfillment--failing to assign appropriate responsibility to the situational context is a classic example of the fundamental attribution error.

But just as I can't pathologize my clients, we can't pathologize their organizational context (and I have to be mindful of the occasional temptation to collude with a client in that process.) All behavior is adaptive in some way, and organizational cultures are merely manifestations of the cumulative adaptations made by every individual. In this sense, even the most dysfunctional organization is, in its way, normal.

The implications of this are significant for both the client and myself. While we need to challenge the organizational context, hold it sufficiently accountable and seek to change it where necessary, we also need to conform to it just enough. I'm influenced by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones' approach, as articulated in Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?:

[Leaders must] read the organizational context. This involves understanding the complex social architecture to which the leader must adapt in order to obtain traction in the organization.

The crucial word here is adapt. Leaders must conform enough if they are to make the connections necessary to deliver change. Leaders who succeed in changing organizations challenge the norms--but rarely all of them, all at once. They do not seek out instant head-on confrontation without understanding the organizational context. Indeed, survival (particularly in the early days) requires measured adaptation to an ongoing, established set of social relationships and organizational networks. [pp 109-110]

This applies not only to my clients but also to me; I must conform just enough to the organizational context to gain traction as a coach and agent of change. If I challenge it too aggressively, I'll be rejected out of hand--and if I conform too readily, I'll be of minimal value to my client.

To be clear, I'm not excusing or condoning toxic levels of dysfunction. My aim in viewing organizational behavior as fundamentally adaptive and normal is helping my clients gain the traction they need to change the context and the perspective required to adapt to it without undermining themselves. And in some truly toxic organizations, a client's efforts to conform, even minimally, would be counterproductive, and I'd do them (and myself) a disservice if I ignored this reality. In those cases we can opt to stand and fight, while recognizing the effort is likely to fail, or let go and move on with our lives--but in my experience such situations are rare in the extreme.

Thanks, Michael

This "Defense of Normal" was inspired by Michael Bungay Stanier, whose recent post on The Evolution of Coaching included this compelling passage:

I suspect many managers look at people who’ve drunk the coaching Kool-Aid and go...

They’re slightly weird. I don’t want to be like that.

Somehow coaching has become Coaching, a peculiar and slightly unnatural way of behaving. It’s like a fetish. Fine if it’s practiced between two consenting adults in private, but just don’t include me in it.

But Peter Block said it best: "Coaching isn’t a profession, but a way of being with each other."

Photo by D'Arcy Norman. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.