Transformation Coaching for Business Leaders/Executives

Posted on February 26, 2020 by Barry Borgerson, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.

We all operate in two distinct modes – we have two “selfs.” We have an intentional, voluntary “thinking” self that consumes most of our awareness, provides the mechanism for us to formulate and enact intentions, and creates our abilities to solve very complex problems. However, we also have a mysterious, involuntary “automatic” self (our “auto-self”) that is elusive (we normally don’t notice its activities) and illusive (it often confuses and misleads us). Our auto-self controls and executes our involuntary habits, our underlying assumptions and beliefs, our skills, and our “intuition.” In this article, we focus on the impact of involuntary habits and how to align them with success needs.

Advisory coaching (aka, consulting) by experts on specific topics can provide great value to the thinking-self capabilities of business leaders. However, increasingly in our challenging times, a leader’s deficiencies reside in the auto-self not the thinking-self, which requires totally separate processes from knowledge acquisition. Transforming counterproductive or dysfunctional involuntary behaviors (“auto-behaviors”) benefits greatly from understanding automatic human activities and from deploying specific processes for reconstructing a leader’s errant auto-self characteristics – transformation coaching.

The transformation process takes time to produce enduring results and produces considerable discomfort in the leader being transformed. As a result, most leaders will involuntarily flee from that discomfort and terminate the process if they try reconstructing their own bad habits even if they understand the auto-self processes involved, which is why self-help for transformational change normally fails due to the unfair fight between thinking-self intentions to change and auto-self-based discomfort that drives people to quit the process. That unfair fight is one of the main reasons transformation change normally requires an external coach. However, successful transformation coaching that creates lasting results requires much more. Habit-change coaches produce their greatest successes when they understand the underlying mental processes involved, when they have the ability to patiently but persistently guide their clients through the discomfort of transformational change, and when they have learned (often by being coached themselves) to endure their discomfort when driving their clients through the clients’ discomfort and sometimes vigorous pushback. As a result, if you are vetting transformation coaches, you may want to find out what they understand about automatic human activities and whether they have undergone coaching themselves so they have experienced what it feels like internally. To overcome the debilitating unfair fight between thinking-self-based intentions and auto-self-driven discomfort, we can fight fire with fire by applying the counteracting principle where we use thinking-self-initiated feelings to counteract auto-self-driven discomfort.

In our increasingly competitive global economy, it has become necessary to reconstruct counterproductive habits of business leaders to execute at progressively higher levels. How can we create a reliable process to overcome career limiting deficiencies and allow highly skilled professionals to realize their fullest potential? Psychologists have provided powerful existence proofs that we can reconstruct automatic habits through behavior “conditioning.” We have known about classical conditioning since Ivan Pavlov in the early 20th century and then John Watson. We have known about operant conditioning most notably from B. F. Skinner starting in the 1930s. Both of these forms of behavior conditioning operate on subjects – they impose behavior change. As such, they work equally well on animals and humans (because they operate on our animal-like auto-self) and explicitly ignore (and in fact often deny) internal mental states. Behaviorism dominated the psychology profession during the first half of the 20th century, and we can see now that it focused exclusively on the auto-self, which is why Skinner could perform many of his experiments on pigeons and rats and extrapolate his results to humans, at the expense of ignoring the thinking-self and its rich interplay with the auto-self. In the second-half of the 20th century, cognitive approaches to psychology reemerged and we now have techniques such as cognitive–behavioral therapy that capture the result of the scientific behaviorism research and add insights into the thinking-self (i.e., cognition) and how to make the interactions between the two a more powerful therapeutic process. Unfortunately, this dual approach to psychotherapy has not effectively worked its way into improving performance in the workplace. When we wish to understand and transform automatic human activities beyond psychotherapy, we need to generalize the understanding and management of the interplay between our thinking-self and a more detailed understanding of our auto-self, which 2Selfs Theory now provides. To reconstruct auto-behaviors in the workplace, we can only do that with the consent and participation of clients, so neither of the above imposed forms of behaviorism conditioning will work for us. Also, the coach normally is not present to apply the “conditioning” stimulus. We can leverage what we now understand about the human mind from 2Selfs Theory to use a new form of conditioning, virtual conditioning, which applies the counteracting principle. Virtual conditioning is unique to humans because it utilizes both the auto-self and the thinking-self and in doing so substitutes internal auto-self-produced feelings for the external stimuli used by classical and operant conditioning. 2Selfs Theory rigorously models automatic human activities and uses the interplay between them and the thinking-self to transform the auto-self using uniquely human techniques including virtual conditioning. You can learn more about different types of coaching at www.2Selfs.com/coaching.

Companies face increasing competition from global businesses and other companies finding novel ways to incorporate new and disruptive technologies. As a result, businesses must take repeated actions to maximize the effectiveness of their human resources. A huge part of that is to make sure the auto-behaviors of leaders and key employees in a company operate at a peak level consistently in a variety of evolving environments. We need to learn to take unprecedented and repeated actions to transform auto-behaviors so that they align with the escalating needs of businesses. Auto-behavior misalignments with success needs come in two distinct forms: deficiencies of omission and disruptions of commission.

Deficiencies of omission occur when people don’t do what they need to do consistently. Generically, we often refer to this type of counterproductive behavior as “procrastination.” More specifically, these deficiencies manifest themselves in many ways including failure to work on boring or difficult parts of a job, inability to engage effectively with aggressive people, and managers repeatedly failing to give candid, developmental feedback to their subordinates. At the auto-self level, the shortcomings are rooted in internally generated discomfort (often in the form of fear of failure, of embarrassment, of aggressive people, of confrontation, and of giving difficult candid feedback), so failures repeatedly occur because people succumb to the unfair fight between their thinking-self-based intentions and their auto-self-based discomfort. Rather than fight each battle one at a time, transformation coaching overcomes these debilitating unfair fights by ameliorating the “execution” discomfort.

Disruptions of commission occur when one’s auto-behaviors create negative consequences for those around them. These counterproductive and often quite dysfunctional auto-behaviors also manifest themselves in many ways including intimidation, active and passive aggression, duplicity, and micromanaging. These behavior patterns undermine progress made on overcoming deficiencies of omission because they relentlessly create external discomfort for others. Just like with errors of omission, the auto-self drives these errors of commission, so people normally do not recognize these deficiencies and in fact normally will deny them when they are brought to their attention. However, discomfort controls the first category whereas pleasure or other forms of internal auto-self characteristics control this category.

We should start considering it organizational negligence to begin people on a “boss” track and fail to provide the tools to empower them to lead successfully. Unfortunately, this is the norm. Organizations normally promote people who have the knowledge and intelligence needed, but that just aligns the thinking-self (technical, management) aspects of the job. Every new manager should participate in a multi-rater survey and then undergo transformational coaching to align the inevitable auto-behavior characteristics that don’t match the needs of the new leadership role. Often, the best way to do that is to batch together a set of new managers and have them coach each other in a round-robin coaching program. That is, after some group training, each new manager will coach another new manager and will receive coaching from a different manager, all under the guidance of an expert coach. That way, all managers experience internally what it feels like to have an auto-behavior characteristic reconstructed while they are coaching somebody else through that process. An additional benefit of round-robin coaching is that when coaching and receiving coaching, you will very likely discover issues in the person you are coaching that you suddenly recognize you also have yourself. Then you should try to muster the courage to tell your coach and have her/him coach you through it while you simultaneously coach your client through the same auto-self issue – very empowering.

Companies should program their leaders and other key contributors into transformation coaching programs. However, employees also ought to have the ability to volunteer to receive transformation coaching. Here are some examples of events that might create opportunities to initiate an auto-behavior reconstruction coaching engagement for an individual.
Within six months of the first management assignment
After a performance review that reveals serious shortcomings
After a promotion
After changing an assignment or job
When your results are not at the level you expect and desire
When you want to prepare someone, including yourself, for a promotion

In today’s technology-driven hypercompetitive and rapidly changing business environment, auto-self transformations in business must become the norm, and those companies that get out in front in becoming transformable will enjoy a competitive advantage over those that lag. This process represents a small investment that will ensure a full return on the large investment in human capital that companies have made and will continue to make. You can finally do that systematically because we now understand the underlying involuntary mental mechanisms and how to transform counterproductive auto-self characteristics.