Leading wholeheartedly

Even with clear purpose, vision, competencies, integrity, passion, and intimacy, leaders can't succeed if they lack the courage to give and receive feedback and take appropriate change actions.

Hopen: What, in essence, is the heart of leadership?

Staub: The heart of leadership is a framework for understanding and acting on the fundamental drivers of powerful, effective, and lasting leadership impact-both at work and at home. It was developed after exhaustive research on 200 biographies or autobiographies, looking at the past 100 years of research, and working with several thousand people. It is a distillation of the collective wisdom of many people and what makes it unique is that it provides a comprehensive framework for thinking about leading your life as well as leading in your career or at work while offering an approach, methodology, and skill sets for developing your effectiveness and personal power.

Hopen: Based on your extensive research and experience, what have you concluded are the critical drivers of successful leaders?

Staub: There are really seven fundamental drivers of leading successfully. They are, in order:

1. Defining your purpose.

2. Outlining a vision.

3. Understanding the core competencies required to live the purpose and to help realize the vision.

4. Focusing on integrity in all that you do (walk the talk, do what you say you will do, etc.).

5. Demonstrating and liberating passion to get full commitment and buy in.

6. Developing intimacy in key relationships in order to ensure high levels of connectivity and understanding.

7. Developing and accessing courage; where your courage fails is where your leadership stops.

Hopen: How do these drivers form the chambers of the living heart of leadership?

Staub: The heart of true leadership is formed around a core sense of purpose and then a vision for how you want that purpose to flourish at some future time-what you are aiming to achieve. The four drivers, just like the chambers of the human heart, enable you to live the purpose and achieve the vision. The four chambers are competency, integrity, passion, and intimacy. Leave one out and your leadership has a serious flaw, the "heart" doesn't work as well, and power and effectiveness leak away. Without competency, you can't get the work done; without integrity, no one will trust you or buy your products or services; without passion, there is no energy, commitment, or emotional drivers; and without intimacy, there is poor connectivity, understanding, or appreciation. The last driver, on which it all rests, is courage. Without courage, our fears will run us, and we refrain from doing what we need to do. When the going gets tough, we drop the ball.

Hopen: What elements and actions of leadership have you found to be of concern to all successful leaders, and how do those elements and actions relate to long-term success?

Staub: Leaders are ultimately known for their actions, what they do, not what they have said. Those actions have two primary vectors: results and relationships. Leaders are known for the results they helped achieve and for the quality and caliber of the relationships that they forged. In fact, to lead, you don't do the work yourself but work through others to get the desired results. This requires, in the long run, creating relationships where people want to give you the best that they've got and to reach beyond their personal best and collectively create something extraordinary. The elements of leading effectively I have already described in terms of the seven core drivers. Leave one of them out, and it damages results or relationships, limiting or crippling leadership effectiveness.

Hopen: Why do you believe that finding courage is the single most important challenge facing leaders today?

Staub: Over the past 31 years of working with people in highly diverse settings, whether as individuals, families, teams, organizations, or communities, I have found all causes of failure to be driven ultimately by EQ (emotional intelligence) breakdowns, not IQ (intellectual quotient) insufficiency. In other words, intelligence alone is not enough, and in fact, the places you will stumble most badly at home and at work will be in the area of EQ (reading social situations, relationship skills, self-awareness, self-control, personal mastery, etc.). The lack of courage is the single biggest cause of failure for CEOs as well as for marriages and the rest of us. It is a failure of nerve or, as I prefer to say, of heart. And there are seven distinct acts of courage that we need to understand and appreciate. We can have great courage in one area but lack in another critical area. For example, we often find police officers who have the courage to face a gunman in an alleyway, but who lack the courage to confront the chief of police. Where your courage stops or is weak, so too is your leadership and personal effectiveness weak, both personally and professionally.

Hopen: How does one find courage, and why do you refer to courage as the exercising of the heart muscle?

Staub: Courage is found when you are willing to face your fear in a specific situation and instead of letting fear rule you, you remember your core sense of purpose and vision, and choose to do the right thing instead. Every time you exercise your courage and act in spite of your fear, you tone up and strengthen the heart of leadership within you. In fact, the word courage is derived from the French word, "coeur," that in fact means "heart." Thus, to find your courage is to find your heart. To encourage someone else to move beyond his/her fears is to help him/her find heart. The more you exercise and act using courage, the more courage and capacity to act in spite of fear you have. Just like in a cardiovascular exercise, where you are toning and improving the functioning of your physical heart, accessing and utilizing courage improves the functioning of your emotional and spiritual heart, of your capacity to lead powerfully and effectively, too.

Hopen: As a corporate consultant why do you emphasize the need to develop the courage not only to confront but also to be confronted?

Staub: The June 21, 1999, edition of Fortune magazine had a cover article titled "Why CEOs Fail." It concluded that they were fired for a failure to execute or because they had lost the faith and trust in their people and then their boards. The common failing that drove all of this was "a lack of emotional strength." In other words, a failure of nerve, a lack of courage, was why they ultimately failed.

The major acts of courage that were cited as the reasons for failing were either the courage to confront people-- problems quickly and firmly enough (especially with people close to the CEO) and/or failing to seek out the bad news and to hear about problems down in the organization (the courage to be confronted). In every organization (federal government agency, Fortune 500 company, family run business, church or community group), the biggest stumbling blocks center on either lacking the courage to confront or the courage to be confronted, and in too many places, both acts of courage are either missing or weak. Without them, it is impossible to have integrity. If you won't tell me where I need to improve or challenge me, then we can't act or move forward with integrity. If you won't hear the challenge or be open to hearing the confrontation, you are flying blind and are at great risk. The reason these problems are split into two different acts of courage is that some people will dish it out-that is they will confront, but they lack the courage to hear it coming back. Others have the courage to be confronted but they won't speak up for fear of rocking the boat or of damaging a relationship. You need both, and they are two distinctly different acts of courage.

Hopen: Our focus for this issue is coaching and counseling. Can you share your definitions of both terms?

Staub: Coaching is when you have a commonly agreed upon goal or understand the other person's goal and you are helping them to achieve it by offering guidance, insights, corrective feedback, encouragement, and skill sets. Counseling is when you are stepping in to help someone address an issue but the goals may not have been mutually set, or they could be confused and not have a goal. Counseling is when you are being an active, supportive listener and helping them to clarify what they want, what the issues are, and offering them support in getting focused.

Hopen: From a leadership perspective, how do coaching and counseling differ?

Staub: Coaching is very directional and goal oriented with skill sets and agreed upon learning outcomes specified. Counseling is more supportive, focused on active listening to clarify thinking and feeling and may or may not be directional. You can do both counseling and coaching in the same setting, but you can also do one without the other. As a leader, you will be coaching, counseling, and also challenging. If you are a smart leader, you are also letting yourself be coached, counseled, and challenged.

Hopen: In addition to your current role as an executive consultant, you also have served as a therapist in the past. Can you share a story with us of a case where coaching and counseling were used in tandem to solve a performance problem and create a successful future for a formerly troubled employee?

Staub: I am changing a few elements of the story to preserve anonymity and yet it is fairly typical of many coaching and counseling events in which I have been involved. The executive with whom I was working had been effective for many years with a lot of success under his belt. Now he was failing. He didn't know why. My first task was counseling: I needed to clarify what was going on, help him to discover or see it, and help him reach some understanding of what he faced. Over two sessions, using feedback from his boss, peers, and direct reports, I helped him to look at the core issues, doing a lot of questioning and active listening. He needed to have a safe place to explore the issues and to deal with his fears, frustration, anger, and self-doubts. At the end of our second meeting, he understood the problem. Out of past successful behaviors and his anxiety to ensure the job was done well, he was overcontrolling, micromanaging, and coming across as critical and demeaning in his interactions with both peers and his direct reports. He had become increasingly defensive whenever someone wanted to offer corrective feedback and couldn't accept criticism even from his boss. He was losing respect, damaging relationships, and results were suffering.

After he understood and saw the dilemma and his part in creating it, we shifted to a coaching modality. I helped him to set two key goals with specific skills sets to learn and timelines to measure it all around behaviors and ways of thinking that he wanted to change. Then, over a period of six months, I worked with him and his team every other week to help him make the changes, deal with relapses into old patterns, and make course corrections. His 360 feedback and the reactions from his boss, peers, and direct reports demonstrated that he had made some remarkable changes by the end of six months. Then, I continued to coach him once a month for the next three months, and then every other month for the following six months to ensure the changes stuck and to help him refine and devise new goals to increase his leadership effectiveness and personal mastery.

Robert Staub

interviewed by

Deborah Hopen

Robert "Dusty" Staub is president of Staub Leadership Consultants, a consulting; strategic implementation, and training firm that specializes in personal mastery and organizational effectiveness. Staub is a licensed therapist who has trained more than 10, 000 executives and provided coaching on leadership development for more than 300

senior executives in the past 10 years. He is author of The Heart of Leadership: Twelve Practices of Courageous Leaders and The Seven Acts of Courage. He can be reached at www.staubleadership.com.

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