THE SHOCK SKILLS

I coached a CEO a couple of weeks ago in a private session. I don’t do that very often, but I was working with a group of senior managers in a particular company when some “issues” emerged which the team agreed had to be addressed. As I asked a series of questions that confronted the issue, I dove headlong into the CEO’s matrix with an ever-probing exploration using lots and lots of meta-questions to understand where he was coming from.

On the surface all of his answers were “proper and right.” Then we got inside his matrix of frames—we got to the heart of things, to the meanings creating the issues for him. So on the surface he uttered all of the right words that fit a leader guiding a company where “people, family, and work-life balance” were the key values. But something was not right. It sounded too good, too much like a P.R. statement and not “real” enough. It sounded like a cover-up.