articles they had read on managing people through difficult change and transition. Not a hand went up in the room, and yet this was the very leadership issue they were tasked with. This was now their job. They were no longer solely engineers; they also had the responsibility, as leaders, to help their people through this difficult time.
A novice’s view of leadership can be very restricted and based primarily on what they see on the organizational chart. When I was a young coach, I thought coaching was all about the Xs and the Os. I focused on creating the best strategy and designing the best plays. It took me a few years to discover that when you put a name on every X and O, things change dramatically, and suddenly the need for developmental skills becomes obvious.
Here is a diagram of the perfect executive team from Corporation B.
As the leader of this executive team, what will be your biggest challenge? That depends a great deal on who will be representing each of these functions. If it’s Sally from sales, it’s a breeze—she brings terrific team and communication skills to every team on which she is placed. Shawn, on the other hand, who also works in sales, is outspoken and at times too domineering in group situations. The point here is that the executive team works perfectly—on paper—until we start bringing the people into the equation. Then everything changes for the leader.
It’s All About the People
Early on in the two-day corporate coaching workshops that my company, Performance Coaching, offers, we emphasize that there are three things that make coaching unique as a management style: a strong developmental bias, personal contact and caring. I then ask, “Why coaching? Why now?” In other words, why would a leadership style that emphasizes developing people through personal contact and caring be right for your organization, given what it is going through? In every single workshop, the first response on the flip-charts is some variation on “People are our primary resource.” In the end, it’s all about the people—and the relationship between the leader and his or her people.
What I’m suggesting is that the very best relationship you can establish with your people is a developmental one—one where, through your own drive and desire, you’re igniting their Third Factor. You’re inspiring them to want to be the best they can be (salesperson, accountant, cus- todian, CFO . . .), and also to continue to grow and develop as a person. There are many good organizational reasons for doing this, as well as moral and ethical ones. We cannot always guarantee people employment, but we ought to be able to guarantee that they are employable.
So let’s talk about igniting your Third Factor and becoming a leader with a strong developmental bias who is very effective at growing and developing others. If this interests you, what’s blocking you? What do you need help with? Is your biggest block around what to do and how to do it? Then you’re in the right place; showing you how is the primary purpose of this book.
Caring is at the heart of really good leadership. To quote the message I once saw on a billboard in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, “. . . people want to know how much you care, before they care how much you know.”
Any journey is difficult without accurate maps. This book provides you with the maps you will need to begin the process of becoming a leader who not only is very good at developing others but derives personal satisfaction from doing so. It’s an endeavor of the highest order.
Editor: A rousing start, but there must be more to the concept of the Third Factor than you’re disclosing here.
Author: Yes, a lot more in terms of Dabrowski’s theory of moral and emotional growth, which he called the Theory of Positive Disintegration. He believed that if people had certain, what he called “over-excitabilities”— intellectual, emotional, sensual, psycho-motor, imaginative—they had the inner capacity to transcend their upbringing and culture and move to higher levels of development. The disintegration is positive: although the person temporarily disintegrates, questions what they are going through, and experiences what Carl Jung called “the long, dark night of the soul,” they reintegrate at a higher level as a result of those over-excitabilities.
Editor: That’s out there. How did he arrive at such a theory?
Author: Oh, that’s a very long story. The short version is that he looked at the lives of those who most would agree had evolved to very high levels morally and emotionally, and saw that they had all gone through this process of temporary disintegration and then a higher level of integration. He wrote numerous psychological developmental biographies on such people as Kierkegaard, Christ, Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Editor: That’s interesting. Tell me more about the over-excitabilities.
Author: Dabrowski had another term for over-excitabilities. He called them “tragic gifts.”
Editor: Why so?
Author: He called them gifts because, for example in the case of emotional over-excitability, these people really feel the world. They are in touch with all the joy and the suffering; they experience at an emotional level all that they and others are going through. He called them tragic because the world was not yet ready for people who felt at such a deep level.
Editor: When I was younger I read a book called There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves.
Author: I know the book, and it’s a beautiful example of what we are talking about. Now tell me: how do you feel about what we have covered so far?
Editor: There is hope.
Author: On that ringing endorsement, let’s move on.
1 Developing a Developmental Bias, or a 3 a.m. Wake-up Call
Editor: So where to now?
Author: I thought I’d talk a bit about how this focus on developmental bias evolved and led to the five “rings” we’ll be discussing in the book, and why this is important in the business world.
Editor: Hmm . . . I’ve been thinking . . .
Author: Oh-oh! Every time Sandra, my wife, says “I’ve been thinking” I know something is about to happen or change for me.
Editor: That’s because wives often have a strong developmental bias as far as husbands are concerned, and that’s what I was going to point out. The wife thinks: “I see so clearly where he needs to get better. Why doesn’t he get it?”
Author: I want to point out that getting married does not often lead to the type of developmental bias of which I’m speaking. Sandra, for example, has clearly identified countless ways for me to be better. Observing my many and obvious flaws, she sees my need to be better in an increasingly
