Off to Build Bridges Between Chile and England! Happy Christmas and Happy Holidays to all family, friends and clients around the world!!

As I prepare for my yearly trip back to England to take care of my amazing parents, I once again face the dilemma of where is home!! Where I was born and my parents and environment formed, to a large extent, who I am today? Or here in Chile, my adopted home since getting married to Carmen in 1976, where I have attempted to pass on some of these same beliefs, attitudes, values and habits to my equally amazing children and grandchildren?

In the past it was simple ... my parents were able to escape the cruel winters in England to join us for our warm summer holidays in Chile... and what a privilege that was!!  2 months of intensive sharing, exploring and learning.

This sketch by my mother is a treasured souvenir of one our holidays up North. What wonderful memories. If you add up the total number hours the average English family manages to spend relaxing with their parents, children and grandchildren every year on their monthly weekend trips cross country. I am sure it is less than 20% of the time we spent with Mum and Dad every summer for at least 15 years. My dear sister, Christine, has reason to be jealous!

So now comes the giving back! My independent profession and lifestyle fortunately gives me the opportunity to make these trips, but it ain't free! I am therefore thrilled to have the opportunity this year of representing my new found Canadian friends, Nicole and Leslie Bendaly from Kinect to explore the opportunity to contribute to healthcare in England with their excellent solutions, If this is successful we shall be translating their product shortly into Spanish, providing the bridge I have been looking to build so long between the two continents.

With this note of optimism to close what has undoubtedly been a challenging year for all of us, I would like to wish you all a peaceful and loving close to 2015, a very joyful festive season and a very positive start to the New Year!

Peace, Health and Happiness!

Philip Ray and family!

Back to Beginnings

"Greet and Meet" Cocktail at Riversdown House to a new cohort of international executives brushing up their English

It was a great pleasure to revisit Riversdown House during the summer and renew contact with an old friend and boss - Richard Lewis, Chairman of  Richard Lewis Communications and meet his daughter Caroline who is now coordinating much of the business for both the Residential Language Training Programmes and the Cross Cultural Activities.

Since 1971 over 35,000 international business executives, global professionals, politicians, academics and private individuals from 67 different countries have achieved a remarkable polish to their English Communication Skills at this unique centre.

Richard (or Don as he is known to friends and family) is as sprightly as ever and continues to lecture on Cross Culture around the world and welcome his international guests to Riversdown at the weekly cocktails.

Good news for those of you who have been looking forward to this spectacular learning experience: During the winter months they are offering a 25% discount on the second week of a two week intensive course. I shall be in England from January through to March and would love to meet up with anyone who takes up this offer. (Visit my website for further information)

Time to Celebrate - Seeds of Trust begin to Blossom Again!

I am excited to announce that 19 years after my first meeting with Tom Morell and Walter Santaliz, who had the courage to trust me with the responsibility of taking on  the representation of Covey Leadership Center in Chile, the wheel has turned full circle!

When I first discovered the transformational power of "The Seven Habits", I was almost down on my knees begging for the opportunity to bring the programme to Chile at a time when the country desperately needed to restore trust. Our success in achieving significant cultural change in such diverse organizations as BCI Bank, Minera Disputada de Las Condes, the Hospital Católica de la PUC and Drillco gave me the enormous retribution of having made a significant contribution, not just to the companies but to the 6,000 or more people who did all the work!

Two decades later, with low trust once again back on the agenda as a big "Achilles' heel", Walter and his partner Carlos have just renegotiated the license and it was a great honor to be offered the role of "Ambassador" to Franklin Covey Chile.

Due to my on-going commitments with Coaching Plus, VitalSmarts and HemsleyFraser, I am unable to accept a full time position, but was delighted that my suggestion to take on the role of Chief Brand Officer, responsible for the company's "image, experience and promise" has been accepted.

I am looking forward to meeting up again with so many old and new clients, workshop participants, friends and colleagues with whom we have shared the principles of "Greatness", catching up and sharing "The Ultimate Competitive Advantage".

What's Behind the Logo?

In the process of updating the website for Coaching Plus for Peak Performance, I have suddenly realized how I have come to take the logo for granted. 

Hopefully, most people get the metaphor of mountains having peaks that are not easy to reach and can easily imagine that a good coach, or perhaps better still, a magnificent sherpa might be useful.

Nothing wrong with that I suppose! But it does miss out a whole lot of background thinking, research and experience which explain the blue and gold lines in the logo and the main concept I was trying to drive home. Let's look at the research first.

In 1979, (when I was still a young man!) Jack Rackham wrote an article called "The Coaching Controversy" in which he stated: 

"Knowledge can be taught effectively in the classroom, but skills can best be learned by on-the-job coaching. Coaching is a cost-effective way to reinforce new behaviors and skills until the skill feels more natural and begins to result in better performance".

He used the graph above to demonstrate this. People attend training (or nowadays resort to social media) to pick up new ideas, spark their own creativity and discover quicker and more effective ways to get better results. 

Once they have discovered the "magic pill", they feel inspired to put it all into practice the very next day and discover, to their dismay and frustration, that whilst their behavior apparently improved,  their results went down. Makes sense doesn't it - change takes time and persistence and needs to be systemic. 

However, how many of us have the personal discipline to resist the pressure of work and multiple distractions, and keep up the right behaviors which should produce the wonderful results we are looking for? Rackham's research (verified by Cavanaugh and Leahy in 2000) showed that average productivity from "serious" training programs with no follow-up increased by 22%. Not bad and many companies today would probably be delighted!

But look what they discovered when the training was followed up with the support of a coach with the specific mission of keeping the learner's eye on the ball (to use a golfing metaphor!) and continue putting the new knowledge into practice and developing new skills until they became habits. Productivity increases of 88% and more.

I witnessed this in my first experience as an entrepreneur, offering language training to some of the leading multinationals (English to Chilean executives and Spanish to expatriates), shortly after arriving in Santiago. Those students who had no option but to practice the language on the job with a foreign boss or during an extended trip abroad, readily assimilated the new knowledge, and through trial and error quickly improved their understanding, confidence and fluency with a huge impact on their effectiveness. Many of the others came to classes year after year for the standard 90-hour programme and just stagnated at intermediate level, convinced they were just not gifted for languages.

Likewise, when I took on the representation of Stephen Covey in Chile. Virtually everyone loved the content of "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", and many participants claimed it had changed their lives at home, especially when they shared the content with their families and friends and committed to support each other during the follow-up period. 

However, there was an undoubted difference between the ROI of those companies that just contracted the 3-day workshop and went back to the "real world" on Monday against those that contracted a follow-up process. The best results of course, and thinking specifically of BCI, Disputada and Hospital Clínica de la PUC, were those that trained internal facilitators and coaches (including senior managers) to roll-out the program and co-designed a formal process which aligned systems and processes with the new culture.

Many from the first group have confessed to me that they used to hang up the 7H with their coats when they arrived at the office every morning as it was a complete waste of time trying to practice the habits!! (Yes, I know - a complete lack of proactivity - but I'm sure you get the message!). In the second group they didn't only "wear the tee-shirt" but 20 years later tell tales of how the programmed transformed their organization's culture...

Well, that's the story behind the blue and gold lines! I should just like to thank Tom Morell, Walter Santalíz, Marta Sánchez, Barbara Hauser and so many other colleagues at Franklin Covey and Vital Smarts for the opportunity to learn with them, Thomas Crane for sharing his methodology with me on his "Heart of Coaching" certification program, and, most important, the hundreds of executives and professionals I have had the privilege of working with over the past 2 decades. 

Happiness for Peak Performance

Click here to watch Harvard's Happiness 101 Course

I must start by thanking César for sending me the link to Tal Ben-Shahar's Harvard course "Happiness 101". I didn't only listen during my work-out yesterday, but continued totally absorbed all the way home and during my "recovery time"!

I must admit there wasn't a lot that I hadn't heard before, but for me Tal's low key, "self-deprecating" style with a lot of good evidence to drive home simple truths, capped by Peter Drucker's opening words to his weekend executive retreats, really got to me. At least that is my explanation for the discomfort I felt as I reflected on how little of this "stuff" I really practice consistantly.

I won't spoil it by giving away all the "secrets" but will just share a few notes I am jotting down as a public reminder to put into practice: "Give yourself permission to be human"; "Take time to recover"; "Remember the impact of daily meditation on the left brain"; "Take 3 Deep Breaths - all day long... and especially at the red lights"; "How appreciation appreciates... 5 a day"

You all have my permission to ask me - "What are you doing differently, Philip?" - and please do... at least for the next 8 months until my new habits are truly second nature!

Double Work-Out

Finally found a way to keep up my exercise routine at the gym and get back into to the habit of stimulating not just body, but also brain, heart and soul!!!* Simple as logging into You Tube on my smart phone, putting on the earphones, and letting serendipity do the rest as I peddle my 10K on the exercise bike. Miss one... miss the other!

A couple of weeks ago, a trailer for “Mr Turner”, led me digging into the hitherto unknown background of one of my favourite artists. A press conference in Hollywood, with director, Mike Leigh, and cast in Hollywood, including Timothy Spall, who played a brilliant leading role and explained his interpretation of Turner’s grunting as follows: “I think the grunting grew... organically out of this incredible, instinctive and emotional man who had a zillion things to say but never said it. So he captured it all in an imploded grunt...He's got this burning thing inside him, so rather than say it, it's just ghrrm, ghrrm.”

This week, preparation for a class on the "Ladder of Inference" had me up and down the steps to check to whom I should attribute the concept, Peter Senge who popularized it in the Fifth Discipline or Chris Argyris who devoloped the concept with Donald Schon.

In the process, still peddling away at the gym, I enriched myself with a lot of stuff both on and off the subject, but none more exciting for its clarity, simplicity and  brevity than Ed Muzio's Whiteboard Videos. No imploding grunts for Ed, who, in his 4-minute crisply produced video clips, free for all on You Tube, is set to put us all out of business... or who knows, will maybe create a lot more for us all? Highly accessible and digestible and a great complement for my CoachingPlus clients who are keen to continue improving their English.
Check this one out: Perceptual Position Resolves Conflicts and see if you can resist going back for more. As amigo Patricio said "Me encanta el poder de lo simple….breve, claro y concreto……viva el HAIKU!!"
* (Yes Stephen, looking down from on high, I often taught your philosophy and finally got round to practicing it)

"HOW TO EFECTIVELY MERGE COMPANY CULTURES" - David Maxfield - Vital Smarts

For full article click here to access the Vital Smarts blog 

An organization’s unique culture can be a powerful driver of success. At the same time, there are often elements of a culture that hold back the organization. This mix of challenges is especially apparent during mergers and acquisitions. The different cultures have different strengths and weaknesses, and you want to emerge with the best of both.
I’m going to use one of our clients, a healthcare organization, as an example. We’ve worked with this organization as they combined several formerly independent hospitals, each with its own culture.

Culture lies below the waterline. We use an iceberg metaphor to illustrate the relationship between the visible parts of an organization and its more hidden cultural elements.

Above the waterline is the tip of the iceberg you can see. In an organization, this includes explicit goals, strategies, structures, processes, and systems. This is the organization’s not-so-secret sauce. These are the parts that are talked about the most. They are planned, tracked, and evaluated. They are on every leaders’ radar screen.

Our healthcare client had a very explicit above-the-waterline goal and strategy. They wanted to become a “destination” health center—a place that would draw patients from several states. This explicit strategy guided their structure (they built a children’s hospital, cancer and heart centers, and a medical school, and purchased several regional community hospitals); it guided their processes (implementing integrated IT systems); it guided their reward systems (creating incentives that encouraged community hospitals to refer patients to their centers of excellence); and it influenced its people policies (switching from using community physicians to using employed physicians).

Below the waterline lies the bulk of the iceberg you can’t see. In an organization, this includes implicit norms, values, hidden assumptions, unwritten rules, and behaviors. This is the organization’s secret sauce, its culture. An organization’s culture often goes unseen, unrecognized, and undiscussed. It’s like the adage, “fish discover water last.”

An organization’s culture is often derived from local regional norms, professional practices, values the founders held, and the like. It’s a source of great strength and vitality, but can also include contradictory and unproductive elements.

Because culture lies below the waterline, it is often ignored or neglected by leaders—especially during times of change. And this is certainly the case during mergers and acquisitions.

Here is the problem: most leaders focus too exclusively on above-the-waterline strategies for change. Yet, the most typical dangers—the obstacles that sink change efforts—lie below the waterline. Change plans run into cultural norms, and as Peter Drucker is credited with saying: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Our healthcare client also had to deal with many cultural elements. For example, many of the community hospitals they purchased felt as if they’d been “taken over.” Many of these small hospitals had been founded by religious orders (from several different religions), and saw their secret sauce as being a sacred sauce—not something they wanted to lose.

Identify Your Secret Sauce. While culture includes norms, values, hidden assumptions, and unwritten rules, it is expressed through behaviors. Behaviors are the key. The rest—the norms, values, etc.—are the influences that create and maintain the behaviors. When dealing with culture, we begin with ... (Click here to read more)

UPDATE AND INVITE TO "Four Crucial Skills of a High-Performance Cultural Operating System"

Los últimos 3 años han sido muy interesantes para mí profesionalmente, gracias a mi asociación con Patricio Salinas, quien fuera mi interlocutor principal en el Banco BCI, uno de mis clientes más emblemáticos y exitosos en la implementación del modelo de los "7 Hábitos".

Top Execution, la empresa que montamos juntos, ha logrado ganar una excelente reputación entre nuestros clientes, por los trabajos realizados en Alineamiento Organizacional, Engagement y Ejecución. Esta combinación de enfoques “duros” y “blandos” nos ha permitido ofrecer unas soluciones bastante únicas. 

Al mismo tiempo, he continuado colaborando con Vital Smarts en la facilitación tanto en inglés como en español, de una versión nueva y muy superior de Conversaciones Cruciales para clientes globales en todo el continente. 

Con el objeto de darles a conocer el poder de esta metodología, que es clave para construir y ampliar el alcance de confianza en su organización o comunidad, ofrezco a mis lectores la posibilidad de acceder, sin costo alguno, a una serie de los más exitosos webcasts de Vital Smarts. Estos les permitirán conocer los últimos estudios y escuchar directamente de sus clientes los resultados obtenidos por ellos en su búsqueda por lograr la Excelencia Organizacional y Resultados Extraordinarios.

Para ver el primer webcast de la serie pinche aquÍ: “The Four Crucial Skills of a Cultural Operating System”. El proceso de registro es muy fácil y seguro y pueden ver los webcasts cuantas veces quieran y a la hora que deseen, y reenviar la invitación  a colegas y amigos. Es, además, una excelente forma de practicar las capacidades de escucha en Inglés. Las personas que tengan dificultad para entender el inglés hablado, pueden bajar el “position paper” ...

....y esto me lleva a la última parte de mi "update" - la oportunidad de practicar y perfeccionar el inglés a través de conversaciones reales sobre temas vitales para su trabajo o desarrollo profesional con un coach ejecutivo cuya lengua materna es el inglés.

Me ha sorprendido el entusiasmo de los clientes de Coaching Plus por contar con este apoyo, no solamente para practicar el inglés sino también por ser de gran utilidad frente a la necesidad de realizar presentaciones en inglés, escribir propuestas e informes claves y/o prepararse para conferencias telefónicas (y posteriormente escuchar la versión grabada, logrando una retro-alimentación muy efectiva).

No podría terminar este "update" sin mencionar nuestro "nido vacío" y familia más unida que nunca. Algunos de ustedes se acordarán del nacimiento de Philipito, mi primer nieto, hace 15 años atrás mientras que yo facilitaba un taller en el Country Club!! Ya van 4 nietos, y tenemos la tremenda suerte de compartir con ellos, nuestros hijos, yerno, nuera y queridos consuegros y primos de nuestros nietos, casi todos los fines de semana!

Y, a pesar del infarto cerebral de mi padre hace casi 3 años, que ha dejado a mi viejo bastante incapacitado, "Mum and Dad" siguen disfrutando de la vida con mucha alegría y energía gracias al apoyo constante de mi hermana, cuñado y sobrino. Ha sido, para mi una bendición extraordinaria poder viajar a Inglaterra todos los años para compartir con ellos y devolver todo el cuidado y amor que ellos nos han entregado a nosotros desde que ellos tuvieron la edad de Frances, nuestro "bebe"!

Todo esto, gracias al apoyo incondicional de mi compañera de toda una vida. "Carmen, my love, what would I do without you?"