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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".
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.
