I had collected the data from the coaches, I put together a presentation on the five principles and took it on the road, to corporate audiences across Canada and the United States, to get feedback on the applicability of the concepts for everyday leaders. This book is the result of that feedback.
Go Deeper We have developed a website in conjunction with this book so that you can assess yourself in each of the five areas as well as get some coaching on key skills. Go to www.ignitingthethirdfactor.com. Your username: perform. Your password: lead.
What follows is a summary of each of the five characteristics of a developmental bias to whet your appetite for what’s to come. Over numerous presentations, I have arrived at the “five rings” diagram, which I find appropriate since so much of the wisdom contained in these pages comes from Olympic coaches and athletes.
Manage Yourself
People cannot move to high performance if they have to spend time and energy adjusting to you. Coaches are human. Even those with a strong developmental bias and the best intentions can sometimes get in their own way when they are coaching and developing others. In Chapter 3: Manage Yourself we talk about the tools you can use to be a more effective leader at critical times. Being skilled at managing yourself is a precondition to being able to access your developmental bias. This is especially true when you’re under pressure, feeling rushed or uncertain— which pretty much describes the work world every day!
Build Trust
Here is what Olympic decathlon coach Andy Higgins had to say about building trust: “Robert Frost said it better than I can. . . . It’s putting our belief into them so that they can have a belief they can use until they acquire their own.” Wow. I had to read that several times to get the full impact of it. There are many other aspects to trust, of course, including competence. No matter how nice someone may be, or how much they say they believe in you, you will not trust them if you don’t feel they are knowledgeable or competent enough about the area you are engaged in to give that kind of reassurance. We cover this in much more detail in Chapter 4.
Encourage and Use Imagery
Chapter 5 outlines one of the most powerful tools great coaches use: the language of imagery to create clear pictures for their performers. Imagery is the language of performance. People can’t do things they can’t imagine. The potential for development here is huge.
Uncover and Work Through Blocks
The fourth characteristic is all about dealing with the blocks that inevitably come up when developing others. When you are trying to get better at something, you are going to run into blocks. In Chapter 6 we discuss how to uncover the blocks in the first place and then build the performer’s commitment to deal with them.
Embrace Adversity
In Chapter 7 we look at how exceptional leaders and Olympic coaches take an active role in situations of adversity to ensure that the adversity is channeled in a developmental way. When you have prepared for adversity, you’re able to deal with it when it arrives—as it surely will. Choosing to be in the competitive arena in any endeavor means that sooner or later you will face adversity. It’s the nature of the game. In today’s business climate, for example, with its frequent and fast-paced changes, mergers and downsizings and unexpected setbacks, learning to turn adversity to advantage and ride the waves in a storm is an essential survival skill.
Interrelationships Among the Five Characteristics
We’re going to talk about each of these characteristics separately, but in reality they are intertwined. They are like the ingredients in a cake: they combine in interesting ways that change them and make them into something more than they could ever be as separate entities. You can’t effectively extend trust, for example, until you learn to manage yourself (and particularly your ego). It won’t be possible to allow someone to do something their way unless you are prepared to let go of the conviction that only you know how something ought to be done.
The Tough Lab of Sport
Sir John Whitmore made some interesting comments on sport as a “developmental” laboratory. “Because sport is compressed in terms of time, the emotions involved are much more intense, so life after a time in sport is actually easier because you have been there before; it’s familiar territory. I never experienced an extreme of emotion in life, in terms of highs and lows—that has been new to me. I experienced all of them in sport.” He goes on to point out, as Dabrowski did, the importance of emotion in development and what we are calling the Third Factor. “I feel some people go through life cushioning themselves from their emotions, and I think they miss something. It is the extremes of emotion that give you your deepest experiences in life, and sport did that for me” (p. xi, Sporting Excellence, David Hemery).
In Paradise Lost, John Milton argues that virtue is not virtue until it is tested. How well things work when under fire is a test of their value. It is hard enough to succeed in the everyday world, but in the competitive arena both coach and athlete are on display before large audiences, exposed to scrutiny, their performance continually analyzed, evaluated and critiqued. The more important the event is perceived to be (the Olympics especially), the greater the impact on both performer and coach. But even at a minor sporting event one can see how competition brings out the worst in many people. That’s why the five characteristics discussed here are so important: great coaches and performers have demonstrated that they hold true even under fire. And if they work so well in the heat of competition, just imagine how effective these fundamentals will be when applied on a daily basis.
In some organizations, particularly those where there are engineers, hi-tech people and others who pride themselves on being practical and task-oriented and on “getting things done,” there is a stigma attached to the so-called soft skills. Developing others, coaching, and other such activities are seen as “fluff ”—not really connected to getting the job done, hitting the numbers or bringing things in on schedule. This is a misguided view. It’s the so-called soft skills that produce the “hard” results.
The coaches I interviewed for Ignite the Third Factor were united in their view that their role was to develop those under their tutelage to the best of their ability, using all of each person’s potential. But sometimes the developmental requirement calls for the equivalent of a kick in the pants. I am not talking about being vindictive, but of being willing to have that “difficult conversation” even when you’d prefer to bail. Confrontation is difficult for most of us, but the ability to face it and use it effectively is an essential skill in developing others. We will cover that skill in Chapter 7: Embracing Adversity, but it is also outlined in detail, for those who are interested, in Appendix B: When All Else Fails.
Unfortunately, too many leaders focus on the end goal, and more particularly on what it will do for them. For such people it is certainly not about developing anyone. It’s only about getting results. In most environments these leaders and coaches have a very short shelf life. I say in most environments because in a few situations, such as college sport, for example, the performers are forced to adjust their game to fit the predetermined designs, plans and idiosyncrasies of their authoritarian coaches. Winning coaches in these situations are tolerated even if they are not developmental. They get to replace 30 to 35 percent of their “workforce” every year. Try that in your workplace!
Commitment and the Developmental
