Coach to the Contrary

I often reflect on the “built in” assump­tion that, as a Coach, I must have all the right answers. After all, I WAS hired to pro­vide the answers, was I not?

Hardly. A Coach under­stands the value of ask­ing ques­tions. Great questions.

You can­not ask great ques­tions of some­one unless you first believe that they have (to some degree) the com­bi­na­tion of knowl­edge, wis­dom, and expe­ri­ence that will enable them to engage in the rig­or­ous process of ques­tion and answer.

As a Coach, I bring this respect and belief to each client. In doing so, it not only makes for a deeper, more effec­tive rela­tion­ship, but I get the con­tin­u­ous side ben­e­fit of learn­ing a ton from my clients.

Exam­ple.

I was just wrap­ping up a ses­sion with one of my most sea­soned exec­u­tive clients. He has put in 32 years serv­ing 5 NASDAQ com­pa­nies in var­i­ous exec­u­tive posi­tions. As I have got­ten to know him, I’ve found that one of his key strengths is his knack for recruit­ing and hir­ing out­stand­ing people.

In this par­tic­u­lar ses­sion, with just a few min­utes left, I asked him, “In your 30+ years you have hired many senior man­agers. If you had to pick your best ques­tion to ask when hir­ing a senior man­ager, what would it be?”

He did not hes­i­tate with a response.

“It’s a two part ques­tion. Part I: To date, what was the worst mis­take you ever made in your man­age­ment career? And Part II: What was the worst dam­age you did to the Bal­ance Sheet and to the P&L?”

He then went on to elab­o­rate that, by ask­ing these two ques­tions and drilling down, you learn a num­ber of crit­i­cally impor­tant things about the per­son you are con­sid­er­ing to hire:

1. The scale of the mis­take directly iden­ti­fies the level that per­son occu­pied in the decision-making author­ity (his assump­tion here is that you can­not make huge mis­takes at low levels).

2. This same scale of the mis­take demon­strates the extent to which lead­er­ship was exercised.

3. Given that most peo­ple who are can­di­dates at this level do not repeat a “mag­ni­tude” mis­take again — view­ing mis­takes as a learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties — you can read­ily learn the depth of expe­ri­ence acquired by the candidate.

4. Hav­ing the can­di­date elab­o­rate on all of the above allows you to learn a lot about their char­ac­ter and the extent to which they are intro­spec­tive and self-aware.

If you have been in the posi­tion of hir­ing a man­ager, what was your most pow­er­ful ques­tion? What did you learn by ask­ing it?

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