COACHING FORLEADERSHIPDEVELOPMENT 145

• Courage.Yo u have to be willing to say the unpopular, unpleasant thing.
  Most people in the organization won’t tell the CEO the truth if it might
  endanger their careers. You have to be willing to get fired as a coach or
  adv isor. You have no value to the CEO if you can’t be brutally honest
  and candid. Of course, it helps to do so in a way that allows her or him
  to hear you.


• Fight your own arrogance.After 20 years, it’s mighty easy for me to
  think I know everything there is to know about leadership development
  and to stop learning because I’m the expert. I have to fight with myself
  constantly over this. If I stop learning, I’m of no use to my client and a
  lousy role model to boot.


• Flexibility.I have proven, time-tested methods for doing things. I know
  they work. It’s easy to get into a “it’s my way or the highway” frame of
  mind with a client, and that can be dangerous. Sometimes, there are
  other ways to get things done that may not be perfect from a technical
  standpoint but may work fine (or even better) in that organization,
  given its culture or circumstance. Thus, I try to remind myself to know
  when to back off so that I don’t get too stuck in my ways.


• Keep promises and keep your mouth shut.Perhaps this is all too obvious,
  but I still have to keep it at the forefront of my thinking. I must do what
  I said I was going to do, and when I said I would do it. Secondly, I have
  to keep confidences. It is very seductive to be in the know, and when
  you’re in the know, it’s even more seductive to want to let others know
  you’re in the know. This is a potential death trap to a coach or advisor.


• Know when to say no.It is very tempting to say yes to everything, but I
  learned a long time ago that a client really appreciates it when I turn
  down business. The clients I don’t take on are pleasantly surprised, and
  my credibility goes way up, when I tell them that I’m not qualified for
  a job they offer me and recommend someone else who is.

When I sat down to write this, I didn’t intend for the list of qualities for
me as a coach /advisor to be twice as long as the list for the client. The lists
just came out that way. In retrospect, though, it seems appropriate, in that I
think I bear the bulk of the responsibility for making a coach-client relation-
ship work.