Top Executive Coaching with Tony Mayo

Many companies and organizations are dealing with multiple changes right now to adapt to the huge shifts in our economy: layoffs, salary reductions and freezes, office closings, budget cuts, etc. My CEO executive coaching clients are making painful decisions, managing personal stress, communicating more often with employees, customers, and suppliers. All of that is useful and important.

I also find it useful to remind managers that change is not quick or easy for companies.

Leaders, especially the most dynamic, creative, and  entrepreneurial, must keep in mind that stability is in the nature of organizations. That’s why we call them organizations, rather than alterizations or adaptizations. People, especially in groups, need Read the rest of this entry »

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Someone exercising leadership is orchestrating the process of getting factions with competing definitions of the problem to start learning from one another.

– Ron Heifetz
Harvard University

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Years ago, an experienced coach and mentor began our meeting by asking about my first child. Just 18 months old, he was eagerly crawling and using a few words.

“It’s a fascinating time,” I replied. “You can almost hear the wheels turning in his head as he experiments to find out what combination of noises and movements is going to get him what he wants.”

I heard myself and paused to absorb the insight.

“Wow!,” I continued. “That is still how I spend most of my day.”

But not every day. How often do you actually examine how well your “noises and movements” are serving you? Don’t we all expend a lot of energy just repeating tired and familiar strategies rather than observing our results and experimenting with new communications?

It is rare to be as eager and innovative as a baby yet how can we fail to be impressed with the child’s rapid progress? Experimenting, responding, growing, moving forward, relentlessly alive–children know how to learn.

How do you stay green and growing? One reliable technique for enhancing our learning, of course, is to work with a supportive and insightful executive coach.

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My executive coaching clients often ask how to translate their new insights into regular practice so that the benefit of the coaching is integrated into their lives. This is crucial, since the adult executives I coach have well established and largely successful habits that are expressed automatically.

How do we make new strategies and methods just as habitual? One of my favorite techniques is the traveling pennies.

Is there a practice you and your coach have developed that you want to make a part of your life? Perhaps you choose to center three times per day, express gratitude more often, or ask a clarifying question before responding to a inquiry. Here’s how to “operationalize” your good intentions.

Each morning for the next few weeks place Read the rest of this entry »

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Business Week has a short article about Jerry Levin, the former head of Time Warner. He led the merger with AOL. The merger is generally considered a disaster for Time Warner and Levin left under pressure. What did he learn?

From the article and his life after leaving the executive suite, it sounds like he learned how to learn:

…understanding that it’s O.K. to be open and vulnerable, to ask for help.

To state it in different terms, it’s probably helpful to invoke the feminine principle and be compassionate, empathetic, understanding, give respect to everybody, don’t get deluded by the natural hierarchy. And don’t get too self-satisfied that you have all the answers.

He has gone on to establish a holistic retreat, Moonview, with his wife. What learning is he most eager to share with executives?

My strong advice would be to find a calm, meditative state every day. With the tempo of executive life, that seems almost impossible, but it’s probably the most important thing that you can do.

Namaste, Mr. Levin, and thank you.

See also Gandhi on silence.

See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.

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Lessons for managers from how the Army re-made itself between Vietnam and Desert Storm.

I was moderating a conference of business owners in the late 1990s as they lamented the poor work habits and other failings of “Gen-Xers.” Finally, I’d had enough so I said, “Say what you will about body piercing and Starbucks, I don’t think that’s the key issue. It looks to me that our generation’s contributions were the drug culture and Vietnam while the present generation has given us the Internet and Desert Storm.” The question becomes, how did this happen? Into the Storm provides part of the answer.

I am a baby-boomer who came of age in the Vietnam era, so my interest in things military was slight and my general opinion of military organization, I’m ashamed to say, came more from Catch-22 and MASH than reality. Yet, the U.S. Army has done some huge and useful things, so I was willing to take a fresh look with this book.

In the aftermath of Vietnam, “the Army began a revolution in Read the rest of this entry »

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