Ed Batista

Kicking Off a New Year at Stanford Business School

Tomorrow the new school year begins in earnest for me at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where I've been an Instructor and Leadership Coach since 2007 and where I was an MBA student myself 15 years ago. This past year has been full of lows and highs for me, ranging from a painful back injury to a book and a brand-new blog, so tomorrow's milestone is prompting me to step back and think about what I appreciate about Stanford right now and my hopes for the coming year.

Our Students

I'm keenly aware of what a privilege it is to have such talented and dedicated students. I've worked in some capacity with roughly 1,000 Stanford MBAs over the years, and I can count on one hand those who I'm reluctant to think of as my fellow alumni. I'm not suggesting that our students are candidates for sainthood--they're young people who can lack perspective, make questionable choices, and spend way too much time on elaborate social activities, as young people do. (I sure did.)

But 99.9% of them work their asses off and seek to make the most of their abilities. And they all believe that they can do well by doing good in some way, shape or form. They are MBAs, of course, which means that they're competitive people who keep score, but very few are seeking simply to maximize their earning power; they want to make a difference in their professional lives, to leave the world a better place than they found it, and they expect to make a good living in the process. Will all those dreams come true? No. But I know how important it is to have those dreams in the first place, and I'm eager to do what I can to help as many of my students as possible realize theirs.

For the next six months I'll coach 12 Leadership Fellows as they in turn each support nine first-year students, and in the first half of 2014 I'll work with 24 students in two sections of Touchy Feely, our most popular elective (officially known as Interpersonal Dynamics), helping them develop a range of interpersonal and leadership skills. I'll wear some other hats too, but those will be my biggest responsibilities, and they're certainly the ones I look forward to the most.

Our Alumni

I keep a list of the students I've worked with most closely over the years--a total of 311 at the moment--and this year I had several opportunities to reach out to them. I wanted to let them know about the writing I've been doing, which I hoped would be a useful resource to them--and I also just wanted to learn more about their post-MBA careers. The response was gratifying, although not surprising, because so many of them are doing such cool things:

• Building an ecologically sustainable fashion company.
• Allowing people to make better decisions about healthcare.
• Investing in growing South Asian ventures.
• Consulting to companies on improving their organizational culture.
• Taking over a family business to keep it running smoothly.
• Attending basic training for the U.S. Army Reserves.
• Launching a micro-lending practice in New York City.
• Running an alternative online dating service.
• Building an app that suggests inspiring activities to try.
• Helping to grow a big-data healthcare startup.
• Creating a training and coaching platform for front-line teams.
• Starting a company in India.
• Managing multiple cities for a rideshare service.
• Leading a branding consulting firm.
• Coaching venture founders and CEOs.
• Pursuing an MD after a career in consulting and strategy.

Now, is everyone out there doing something this awesome? No, of course not--as I said, not all dreams come true, and there are plenty of alums I know who are less-than-thrilled by what they're doing at the moment. In some cases they're working off their B-school debt, while others knowingly played it safe because they wanted a brand name on the resume. But even those who aren't finding their work fulfilling now have the opportunity to ask their peers for advice and guidance--a resource that was invaluable when I made my own transition from management to coaching in 2006.

I often work with GSB alumni in my private coaching practice, but this year I'm also looking for more opportunities to tap into the wisdom of the alums I know so that it can be shared with my current students.

Our Culture

Despite the warm feelings I have about our students and alumni, I'm not one of those people who think Stanford is the center of the universe. It's an organization, like any other, and it's subject to the same dysfunctional pitfalls as any other. I think it's critical to step back and assess where Stanford falls short of its lofty rhetoric, not to assign blame but to look for opportunities to live up to our ideals.

To take just one example, the number of women enrolled at the GSB continues to hover around 35%. This is consistent with other MBA programs, and it certainly has more to do with the number of women applying than with a blatant bias at the school--but it's still a problem. I don't think the GSB's culture is as sexist as Harvard's, but I consistently hear from my women students that at times they feel unwelcome, and the school can do better.

That said, while I've had my share of frustrations with the GSB over the last seven years, I also truly believe that it's become a better place and continues to improve. Like any elite institution, it can be slow to change--but it does change. The culture isn't entirely flexible, but it's not rigid, either, and there is a collective desire on the part of everyone involved to aim high and get there. My colleagues and I on the school's coaching staff were hired seven years ago as part of a major revision to the school's curriculum, a process that grew out of the recognition that, as Dean Garth Saloner has said, "What [employers] really tell us they need are leadership skills. It's what you might think of as the softer skills, or the people skills. Those are the things that are in short supply in managers who they want to rise to the most important and significant ranks in their companies."

That's a big change in what we mean by management education, and even though I learned a great deal at the GSB 15 years ago, I believe that today's students are much better off than I was. I feel lucky to be playing a small part in that process, and I'm excited to make a modest but meaningful contribution this year.

Photo by Neotake Murayama. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Mac McKinsey's Deathbed Epiphany

Duff McDonald's new book, The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business, discusses the management consulting firm founded by James "Mac" McKinsey in 1926, which a number of my MBA students at Stanford have joined over the years. [1]

I haven't yet read the book, although I've seen a number of reviews, including one in The Wall Street Journal just a few days ago. [2] But the commentary that I found most interesting was a letter to the Journal by Bob Wittebort of Chicago:

Stewart Pinkerton's Sept. 7 review of Duff McDonald's The Firm refers to "Mac" McKinsey's controversial engagement with Marshall Field & Co. in the late 1930s, during which he was elected chairman of the board and vested with broad executive power. He wielded that power ruthlessly and, many thought, without respect for the long-settled "Field way." In their history of Marshall Field, Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan poignantly describe the lesson McKinsey himself drew from the experience: "McKinsey was informed that unless he changed his management tactics dramatically, his resignation would be demanded at the end of the year. Two weeks later, McKinsey was critically ill with pneumonia at Woodlawn Hospital. To his friend James Margeson, who called at his bedside, he observed, 'Jim, never in my whole life before did I know how much more difficult it is to make business decisions myself than merely advising others what to do in their businesses, without having to take the final responsibility myself.' The following day he was dead." The very best consultants share this wisdom; indeed, it might be what makes them the very best consultants. [3,emphasis mine]

While I'm not a management consultant, there's a lesson here that's highly relevant to my work as a coach, and, I'd argue, to all our helping relationships. I'm able to help others face challenges and make difficult decisions, in part, because their challenges are not my challenges, and while I'm deeply invested in my clients and students, I'm not attached to any particular outcomes for them. [4] In a sense, I'm able to provide help precisely because I don't fully experience what my clients and students experience.

In Coaching with the Brain in Mind, David Rock and Linda Page describe this process from a neurological perspective. When we're faced with a challenging situation and weighing our options, they write,

The input we think is purely from our senses in fact arrives already saturated with amygdala and "top-down" (i.e. highly interpreted) processing... Coaches are trained to ask questions that elicit information stripped of its top-down implications in order to set the stage for creative responses rather than mindless reactions. The next step is to generate options for interpretations other than the ones that the client automatically arrived at. Because amygdala arousal can reduce processing power in the prefrontal cortex, clients benefit from "borrowing" the less-aroused brain of the coach to aid in generating these options. [5]

Returning to Mac McKinsey, it was probably easy for him to imagine that he had all the answers--and perhaps that his clients were foolish for ignoring his patently sound advice--when he wasn't ultimately responsible. What's tragic is that he seems to have fully understood this--and truly felt empathy for his clients--only on his deathbed.

A fundamental challenge we face when we're helping others--particularly in informal helping relationships with colleagues, friends and family--is to make effective use of the critical distance that separates us from those we're seeking to help, while also remaining deeply empathetic to the difficulty they face as the responsible party. If we err on the side of distance, we fall into McKinsey's trap, and we fail to appreciate how much more complex and daunting the situation may appear to the other person. And if we err on the side of closeness, we may get caught up in the other person's experience and feel it so fully that we're no longer as helpful in the process of filtering information and generating options.

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Footnotes

[1] The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business (Duff McDonald, 2013)

[2] Book Review: The Firm by Duff McDonald (Stewart Pinkerton, The Wall Street Journal, 2013)

[3] The Shoe Was on McKinsey's Foot (Bob Wittebort, The Wall Street Journal, 2013)

[4] Investment vs. Attachment

[5] Coaching with the Brain in Mind: Foundations for Practice, pages 355-356 (David Rock and Linda Page, 2009)

Don't Inflict Help, Provide It

A colleague of mine on the leadership coaching staff at Stanford had a student who was wrestling with an important personal issue. I knew a dean who was well-positioned to be of assistance, and I offered to put her in touch with my colleague. I emailed the two of them and felt good that I’d been able to help.

Shortly afterward, though, my colleague called me, and I was stunned to realize that she was upset and angry with me for intervening. While I had thought that she had accepted my initial offer, she had actually said she’d think about it and would let me know if and when she wanted me to take action. She felt that by taking the initiative without her assent I had interfered with the work she’d been doing with the student and, far from helping, had potentially made the situation worse.

When I tweeted about it, Torbjörn Gyllebring responded, “I usually refer to [that] as ‘inflicting help,'” —  a perfect way of describing what I’d inadvertently done to my colleague.

What are the various ways we can, with the best of intentions, inflict help?

The Right Help at the Wrong Time.This is what I provided to my colleague. The dean I knew was in a position to support my colleague and her student, but providing help before it had been asked for created confusion and frustration and was ultimately counterproductive. For help to truly be helpful, the recipients must be ready for it — and as helpers we need to assess that readiness accurately. It’s easy to misread potential openness for an actual invitation.

The Right Help, But Too Much Of It. Alternatively, we can offer help and it’s received with gratitude. But we may not know when to stop. The desire to help takes over, and we pass the point of diminishing returns and keep right on going. I’ve often made this mistake when providing coaching clients with readings intended to supplement our work together. My enthusiasm can lead me to send someone far more material than they have time to absorb, and they feel overwhelmed. I’ve learned that I help not only by providing access to material, but also by limiting that access and by gauging each client’s individual capacity. As helpers we need to be keenly attuned to recipients’ ability to make effective use of our help and to stop helping when it’s no longer helpful.

The Wrong Help. Someone wants our help, and we’re able to offer it at the right time. But as the situation evolves it becomes clear that what we’re offering isn’t actually what’s needed. This was the mistake I made with several teams of MBA students that I supervised in the first few years of my work at Stanford. I thought they needed help with tactical execution, but what they lacked was strategic guidance; to use Peter Drucker’s distinction, I was offering management when they needed leadership. Thankfully, in my second year I got some candid feedback that allowed me to change my approach. As helpers we may think we know what’s needed, but even—and perhaps especially—when we’re viewed as experts we need to access our ignorance and be open to the possibility that we may be wrong.

What motivates all this unhelpful help? Why do we step in when it’s not necessarily helpful? Two factors not only explain this dilemma but also suggest potential solutions.

The Relationship, and Our Role In It. First, in many cases the motive to inflict help is a function of the relationship, or, more precisely, our interpretation of our role in that relationship. If there’s a difference in status within the relationship, such as between a manager and a subordinate, in the senior role we may feel that our primary function is to offer help. But when we find ourselves repeatedly inflicting help, we need to step back and question how we’re interpreting our role in that relationship.

Perhaps we’re fulfilling the role in an outdated way that no longer reflects the state of the relationship or the capabilities of the other party. Perhaps we’re applying a set of archetypes to the relationship — such as expert/novice or guide/follower — that no longer fit (or never did.) While the desire to be of service is laudable, we need to check our assumptions about how and when we can best be of service in this particular role.

Emotion Regulation. Second, it’s essential to understand and regulate the emotions that underlie our helping impulse. Logical analysis can influence our behavior, but our actions inevitably have an emotional dimension, although at times these feelings may lie just beyond our conscious awareness. Comprehending the emotions that motivate our desire to help can allow us to (1) sense when they’re causing us to inflict help, (2) arrest our habitual helping responses, and (3) create opportunities to make different choices.

We’re driven to diminish our negative emotions and enhance our positive emotions, and helping relationships can trigger powerful feelings on both sides. When we feel the need to help we perceive a problem that we want to alleviate, and its persistence can trigger discomfort, anxiety, anger, and fear. The task here is to gain a greater sense of comfort with our discomfort, to simply notice these feelings and sit with them without being compelled to take action in order to soothe ourselves.

On the other side of the emotional spectrum, when we feel the need to help we perceive an opportunity to distinguish ourselves while being of service, and this can trigger excitement, enthusiasm, and even joy. The task here is to calm ourselves in the face of these stimulating emotions, to simply notice these feelings and, again, sit with them without being compelled to take action to maintain this pleasurable state.

As leaders, as colleagues, as friends, and as family members, we’re asked to help in almost every sphere of life. Those who feel, as I do, a powerful desire to be of service, may have chosen a profession that presents us with the opportunity to fulfill this drive on a daily basis. But being mindful of the difference between providing help and inflicting it is what allows us to truly make a difference.

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This post first appeared at HBR.org. Inspired by Torbjörn Gyllebring, who used the phrase "inflicting help" in his response to a tweet of mine. Many thanks to Tim Sullivan for his ongoing guidance and encouragement.

Photo by Tawheed Manzoor.

If Intimidation Is Your Game Plan...

Photo © Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

I moved to San Francisco in 1990 with no meaningful loyalties to any sports teams, and I quickly fell in love with the city, so it's no surprise that I became a 49ers and Giants fan. I don't write about sports often, although occasionally they provide useful examples and counter-examples that are relevant to my work with leaders and MBA students. So today I want to express my appreciation for Colin Kaepernick, #7 above, and Alex Smith, #11, the current and previous quarterbacks for the 49ers.

Smith was a long-suffering (albeit well-compensated) talent on the poorly coached, horrendously mismanaged and perennially terrible Niners teams of the second half of the last decade. He deserves some blame for those failures, of course, but in my opinion he was repeatedly let down by leaders who simply had no idea what they were doing. New leadership eventually turned the team around and seemed to rekindle some magic in Smith, who in 2012 was having his best season by far when an injury knocked him out of the lineup.

Kaepernick, a second-year player, took over and never looked back, keeping the starting job even after Smith had fully recovered. Some fans felt, as I did, that Smith was being unfairly denied this opportunity to finally lead a decent team, and we couldn't quite embrace Kaepernick, the new guy. Through it all Smith was a model teammate, although I have to imagine it felt like a cruel twist of fate to lose his position just as the team was on the cusp of greatness. And I can't even fathom what Smith felt when the team he led for years fell just short and lost the Super Bowl with Kaepernick at the helm. Half-misery, half-schadenfreude, I guess.

But the off-season heals, and I'm happy that Smith was able to move on and find a new professional home in Kansas City, and as the 49ers traded scores with the Green Bay Packers (Boo!) in the season's first game this weekend, I found myself equally happy that Kaepernick was on our side. The Packers had been threatening before the game to shut down Kaepernick by intimidating and overwhelming him, and what finally marked the transition for me and made me think of Kaepernick as our guy was this quote after the game:

#49ers QB Colin Kaepernick: "If intimidation is your game plan, I hope you have a better one."

— Matt Maiocco (@MaioccoCSN) September 9, 2013

I love it.

I'm not suggesting that Smith and Kaepernick are role models--they're entertainers. (And as Charles Barkley once said, athletes and rock stars aren't role models.) But I find it interesting to think about their different approaches to leadership, at least in the narrow realm of NFL quarterbacking, and to wonder what we might learn from them and apply in the wider world: Smith, the stoic veteran who refused to complain and refused to quit, and Kaepernick, the joyful upstart who refuses to be intimidated, who refuses to be anyone but himself. These approaches aren't mutually exclusive, and I suspect Smith and Kaepernick could both learn something from the other.

There's value in finding the balance between those two poles in ourselves, being able to regulate and self-manage and stoically persist through times of intense stress while also being able to tap into our defiance, our anger, our power and, when necessary, let someone know that we won't be intimidated.

5,000 Tweets Later

The occasion of my 5,000th tweet prompts a look back to...April 4, 2008. My first tweet: "about to plunge into the madness that is Palo Alto to Santa Cruz at rush hour. send good traffic karma my way. pls."

So apparently I thought it was an outlet for First World problems.

Fail Whale by Yiying Lu.

The HBR Guide to Coaching Your Employees

UPDATE, January 2015: A revised edition of the HBR Guide to Coaching Employees is now available.

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Harvard Business Press has just published the HBR Guide to Coaching Your Employees, and I'm proud to be one of the co-authors. My contributions include the book's introduction, Coaching Is Leading, as well as Giving Feedback that Sticks and Help People Help Themselves, on self-coaching (a topic I'll discuss at greater length in my forthcoming book.)

While I'm clearly not an objective reviewer, over the years I've found HBR's compilations to be tremendously valuable resources, and I believe this Guide lives up to that standard. HBR organized an talented lineup of contributors, and I feel honored to be among them. If you need proof, here's the Table of Contents:

HBR Guide to Coaching Your Employees

Introduction: Coaching is Leading by Ed Batista

Section 1: How to Coach Your Employees

1. Cultivate the Mind-Set and Skills to Coach Effectively by Candice Frankovelgia

2. Using Brain Science to Get the Best from Your People by Edward M. Hallowell, MD

3. You Need a Coaching Plan

4. Giving Feedback That Sticks by Ed Batista

5. Tailor Your Coaching to People’s Learning Styles by David A. Kolb and Kay Peterson

6. How to Coach People in 15 Minutes a Day by Daisy Wademan Dowling

7. Deep Smarts by Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap

8. Help People Help Themselves by Ed Batista

Section 2: How to Customize Your Coaching

9. The Young and the Clueless by Kerry A. Bunker, Kathy E. Kram, and Sharon Ting

10. Saving Your Rookie Managers from Themselves by Carol A. Walker

11. Coaching Your Stars, Steadies, and Strugglers by Jim Grinnell

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Thanks to Tim Sullivan for asking me to get involved and to Lisa Burrell for her tremendous insights and patience as an editor. And thanks to my students and colleagues at Stanford and my clients in private practice--everything I've learned about coaching derives from my work with them, and I'm continually grateful for the opportunity to have worked alongside them.