102 50 TOPEXECUTIVECOACHES
that can be followed with practice. Even the most productive people are as-
tounded by the liberating effects that fine-tuning can bring. When we bring
this to teams and every member goes through the process, commitments get
met, trust becomes deeper, and communication moves to higher levels.
People need to feel tremendous trust in their coach in order to deal with
the many things they’ve been avoiding. For a coach to be effective at pro-
ductivity improvement, they must learn that they can’t editorialize about
how somebody should do something. In other words, if I tell someone, “No,
here’s the way you should do it,” they’re going to shut down and lose their
willingness to be vulnerable. Instead, coaches have to be very process-
or iented. They need to point out the piles of magazines lying around the of-
fice and suggest that they be read, trashed, or filed. Anyone who thinks that’s
a mundane concern can’t do this kind of coaching. For that reason, it’s almost
impossible to train internal coaches to do the job. By nature, they are politi-
cally invested in the people they are coaching. A good coach has to be ele-
gantly noninf lictive.
For people to benefit from this kind of coaching, they need to have an in-
terest in having their world improved. People who are willing to stay in their
comfort zone, who are not driven by inspiration or pain to be somewhere
different, are probably not going to develop any of these new behaviors.
Sometimes, that inspiration or pain is about becoming more effective in a
leadership role, or giving more back to the world or the community, or
spending extra time with the family to be there as children grow up. The in-
spiration or the pain is what made them hungry for whatever tricks they
could find to make that happen.
I’m on a mission to teach the world that there’s a different way and a best
practice for managing knowledge work. Everyone can benefit from this capa-
bility because everyone has lives in which there are open loops that must be
tracked. Most people still think that the mind is the best manager of their
open loops, but the mind is stupid. It reminds us of things when we think of
them, not when we need the data. The only way to free our minds is to de-
velop an external system for dealing with our many commitments. By doing
so, we off-load our brains.