Book of the Week: Mindful Leadership Coaching (Journeys into the Interior) by Manfred Kets De Vries

What connects me the most with the author, Professor Manfred F R Kets De Vries, is the fact that he finds and recommends the group coaching format for CEOs as most effective.

I have always loved getting the CEOs / Business Owners together in a group coaching format instead of working with each one only individually. The learning is accelerated in this format because the participants get to observe others getting coached instead of being on the hot seat 100% of the time. The combination of being on the hot seat (getting coached) and being a fly on the wall watching others getting coached gives the participants breakthrough insights and deeper understanding of their own blind spots, opening them to a new way of looking at everything. New actions can only arise from a new way of looking at oneself, others and Life itself. New actions, not taken before, create unimaginable impossible outcomes.

The group coaching format of CEOs / Business Owners also gets them to be part of a Mastermind Group. It is pretty lonely at the top, so to have a peer group constantly challenging you to be better than your best and yet covering your back all the time is undeniably a gift. You do become an average of 5 people you spend your time with. Always being surrounded by your subordinates is definitely not a way to grow. A cross-industry peer group with similar challenges and providing to each other a safe space to drop your masks is an incredible growth structure.

That is why I connect deeply with Professor Manfred F R Kets De Vries from INSEAD. Not only because he has a similar experience of the effectiveness of group coaching formats for CEOs but also because he employs psycho-analytical tools to delve deep inside the inner workings of his clients’ mind, heart and spirit to unleash productivity, performance, creativity, innovativeness not available before. There are very few in our industry who go beyond the mind to coach their clients to realize their greatest dreams in deepest communion with their highest self. That makes him one of my favourite leadership experts / super coaches in the world.

I loved reading his book and couldn’t resist smiling as I read the book to see so many of my unconventional ideas validated. If you are a CEO, Business Owner, High Performer on your way to the top job or a Coach, this book is a must-read for many reasons:

1. There is very little understanding of what coaching truly is and its incredible power to enable leadership development to support organizations to cut-over from good to great.

2. A certification is no guarantee that the coach will deliver.

3. At the rapid pace with which technology is evolving and its impact on social structures, current style of leading is no longer viable. Leaders have to evolve to become coaches instead of managers.

4. Coaching begins at the top, not at the bottom. If the CEO doesn’t have a coach, coaching will deliver so much less value to the organization than what it can.

5. Before hiring a coach or implementing a coaching structure in your organization, you should know what coaching is really about.

Here are introductory key ideas from his book - Mindful Leadership Coaching (Journeys into the Interior) -  in the form of excerpts. Hope this article inspires you to read the book cover-to-cover for breakthrough insights and deeply fulfilling outcomes in all areas of your life.

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1. Leadership Coaches offer expertise that is not necessarily found inside the company. Another, which probably accounts more for its attractiveness, is that most find it easier to confide in an objective outsider. External coaches are more likely to offer a confidential relationship within which executives can discuss delicate issues freely, let their defences down, and explore blind spots, biases and shortcomings.

2. The higher executives climb on the organisational ladder, the less they can depend on technical skills and the greater their need for effective interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence. This is where leadership coaches can make a major contribution.

3. At its most basic level, the role of a leadership coach is to help the executive acknowledge and deal with realities that might otherwise be avoided, denied, or accepted with resignation. … Effective leadership coaches contract with their clients to not only improve their clients’ performance, but also to guide them on a journey toward personal transformation and reinvention.

… The coach also has a role in helping executives to build shared understanding, that is, learn how to think and interact better in a work setting, through courageous conversations, assisting them in giving constructive feedback. Coaches may <also> help executives to create better functioning teams and design organisational cultures that will get the best out of their people.

4. Mindful Leadership Coaching … means drawing the clients attention to the experience of the present moment in an open and non-judgmental manner. This can be viewed as a distinct state of consciousness, distinguished from the normal consciousness of everyday living.

Mindfulness leads to wiser judgment about what is and isn’t important. Taking a reflective pose, rather than resorting to a flight into action, gives clients room to roam from perspective to perspective, from one incomplete thought to the other, until those thoughts begin to crystallise and become the basis for insight and growth.

… While most of what we achieve is by “doing”, mindfulness achieves its ends by “not doing”, simply by taking the time to observe - before doing.

… The aim of mindful interventions … is to help us become more aware of our thoughts and bodily sensations, and in so doing be able to cope better with day-to-day emotions and problems.

… Although the burden is on coaches to be mindful in their work, they should help their clients to acquire mindfulness skills at the same time.

5. Mindful consciousness is quite different from the ordinary consciousness that is appropriate for our day-to-day activities, where attention is actively directed outward, in regular space and time, normally in the service of some agenda or task, and ruled by habitual response patterns.

Mindfulness helps us to become more aware of the unhelpfulness of some thoughts. It helps us direct awareness inward and focus on the present moment. Mindfulness makes us aware of what is, as opposed to what needs to be done - to experience non-doing, or non-effort.

In a state of mindfulness, we self-consciously enable ourselves to suspend agendas, judgements and common understanding. In being mindful, we are being several things all at once: passive, alert, open, curious and exploratory.

In addition to the passive capacity to witness experience as it unfolds, the purpose of mindfulness is to allow us to have a different, less conflict-ridden relationship with our thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations. The expected outcome is an increase in well-being - to have more control over our own mind as we spend less time dealing with difficulties and focus more on constructive activities. Thanks to mindfulness, what were once seen as difficulties may disappear altogether.

… When mindfulness is used appropriately, it can be a very powerful and effective method to bring about personal insight and change. Being mindful will help coaches unravel negative thoughts and painful emotions. It will help us and others free ourselves from unnecessary fears and unhelpful, habitual patterns.

6. Mindfulness, and the capacity to coach in depth, are closely intertwined. … Effective leadership coaches are like gardeners. The presenting problems are weeds, we’ve got to get to the roots to prevent them from popping up again.

7.  Much of what happens to us is beyond our conscious awareness. … All of us have blind spots. There are many things we don’t want to know about ourselves and to preempt this kind of knowledge, we resort to defensive processes and resistances to avoid experiences that we find disagreeable.

Unfortunately, many people derail due to the blind spots in their personality. … It is important to realize that these resistances come to the fore due to conflicts within ourselves; we need to accept that inner dissonance is part of the human condition. … To have a better understanding of unconscious patterns, our defensive reactions, and our blind spots, we need to explore our inner theatre and pay attention to repetitive themes and patterns in our lives.

… Exploring the relationship between our past and present will be very illuminating, as it will enable us to become liberated from habitual, ingrained behaviour.

8. Nothing is more central to who we are than the way we express and regulate emotions. Emotions determine many of our actions and emotional intelligence plays a vital role in who we are and what we do. Intellectual insight is not the same as emotional insight, which touches us at a much deeper level. To understand others, and ourselves we need to explore the full range of experienced emotions. These emotions will also play an essential role in why we do what we do, why we take on certain roles, and why we are passionate about certain things.

9. Napoleon Bonaparte said - “Leaders are merchants of hope.”

Leaders need to speak to the collective imagination of their people to create a group identity to help people become better than they think they are. … help people to have dreams about the future. … see people acting on those dreams.

10. You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself. - Nelson Mandela

11. Unfortunately, there are far too many leaders who fit Albert Einstein’s alleged definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.”

12. …in much of my research and writing, I have made a plea for leadership group coaching as an experiential training ground for creating more effective leaders.

13. … work with the coachee’s past, present and future in order to provide insight about the reasons for specific, behaviour patterns. …<such> interventions contribute to a deeper understanding of the significance and meaning of personal patterns and the inner structure of a person’s personality, complex human relationships (including deeply buried and repressed emotions), and the role of teams, group dynamics and organisational processes.

14. … essential for both the coach and coaches to understand the degree to which their actions are affected by what is going on below the surface. This necessitates an exploration of the clients’ own personality, their implicit underlying values, the experiences that have shaped their character, and the kind of effects they have on others. Furthermore, … these dynamics influence the undercurrents  operating in teams or organizations.

Such deeper understanding will help the people who are being coached to function in a more effective manner in whatever situation they will find themselves.

15. Organizations that recognise the benefits of leadership coaching can profit in many different ways: improved interpersonal skills; out-of-the-box thinking; better conflict management; more effective team behaviour; an improved ability to manage and advance personal career goals and the career goals of others; and the ability to create a coaching culture, and authentizotic organizations - places of work in which people feel at their best. In this kind of organization, people find meaning in their work, celebrate the people they work with, have pride in what they are doing; and trust the people they work for and with.

16. Good leadership coaches take leaders where they want to go. Great coaches, however, will take them to undiscovered shores.

… coaches <should> take a reflective stand. Leadership coaches are not sport coaches. Taking a reflective stand - practising mindfulness - cautions against knee-jerk reactions in leadership coaching.

Exceptional coaches have the ability to acquire knowledge and analyse it both logically and emotionally, the true test being the ability to recognise a problem before it becomes an emergency. We should all aim to be exceptional coaches. 

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Wishing you a deeply fulfilling, authentic uncovering to joyously come home to yourself so that others in your life, at work and at home, experience the courage to do the same.

Love, Jyoti.​