Thursday, October 7, 2010

Can't vs. I Don't Know How

Some derailed executives say they can’t change and reject coaching from an outside coach or their manager. But why? First, let’s tackle that word can’t. To my thinking here’s no such thing as “can’t.” There’s either “I won’t do it” or “I don’t know how to do it.”

In my experience as an executive coach, “can’t” means the person is afraid and just doesn’t know how to change. But even if somebody knows how to change, for them to self-develop and make the change on their own is very difficult. We all need feedback, and we all need support and encouragement. Unless we know what we did and what we need to do and somebody teaches us how to do it, we can’t improve.

For derailed executives there is a useful theory called the Stages of Change Model about the mind/body stages we go through when we do change. The Stages of Change Model was originally developed in the late 1970s by James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente at the University of Rhode Island when they were studying how smokers were able to give up their habits. According to the model there are a number of steps: precontemplation to contemplation to determination.

The idea behind the change model is that behavior change does not happen in one step. Rather, people tend to progress through different stages on their way to successful change. You first say to yourself, “Well, I don’t have a problem. And if I don’t have a problem, I don’t need a solution.” Then you get information feedback and data, such as complaints, and you begin to say, “Maybe there is a problem.” So you start to contemplate that there is a problem. If you get even more strong data and a coach comes in, then you have to go from contemplation to determination and decide, “I need to do something about this.”

On one hand it is easy to understand why some derailed executives would reject coaching. Many derailed executives don’t understand why they should change because the company has promoted them three or four times for being the way they are.