CAREER/LIFECOACHING 101
Peter Drucker said that the biggest challenge for any knowledge worker is
to define their work. We make people actually do that. What’s your work?
Give me a list of your 67 different projects. Didn’t know you had that many?
I’m not surprised. Most people don’t have a clue what their inventory of com-
mitments actually includes. Between registering their children for summer
camp, restructuring the department, hiring a new assistant, refinancing the
mortgage, and researching a potential strategic alliance, there are probably 30
to 100 things on the plate of the average executive. Very few have that inven-
tory clearly and objectively distributed outside of their head, in some sort of
cognitive system where they can actually see it. Fewer still have figured out
the action steps necessary to make for ward motion on all those commitments.
To d o so, we get people to make those kinds of operational decisions, and be-
come, in essence, their own Chief Operating Officer.
Essentially, we are providing martial arts training in knowledge work ath-
letics. Most people make their knowledge moves instinctively and intuitively.
They understand that at some point they have to make decisions about their
commitments and action steps. But few have trained themselves to make
those decisions on the front end and actually clear their minds of the com-
mitments that are other wise cluttering their thinking. This discipline is not
automatic, but it is learnable. Once the discipline has been embraced, it can
be improved, so that people move up in level as a martial arts student pro-
gresses steadily toward a black belt. In fact, the best and the brightest take to
these ideas most enthusiastically. They know that they are already at a point
where fine tuning their system will allow them to get home at 7 o’clock in-
stead of midnight, or provide an extra 2 hours a week of really creative time
instead of 18 hours a day dealing with mission critical dramas.
Our coaching is usually done as an intensive two-day installment of this
methodology with occasional follow-up. I tell leaders, if it were easy, you
wouldn’t have stacks on your desk. Most people avoid making a lot of these
kinds of mundane decisions. Smart, creative people are the most handi-
capped because they are afraid of closing off options and ideas. Workf low
management is not a closing off but an opening up. We teach how to recog-
nize when a commitment is distracting attention, and how liberating it is to
make an action decision to move for ward. People don’t need perfect solu-
tions; they just need for ward motion. We make people collect their backlog
ofissues, practice making those decisions, and develop a customized process
for how they are going to park their commitments in the future.
In other words, we get very down and dirty. It usually takes one to six hours
to collect the inventory of open loops. Then, it takes 6 to 12 hours for people
to go through and make all the decisions they’ve been avoiding. We actually
guide people through that process until they’ve created a systematic approach