Masterful Coaching, With Robert Hargrove

Are you ready to take your leadership journey to the next level? J.R. Lowry delves into a compelling conversation with Robert Hargrove, the acclaimed author of Masterful Coaching and a renowned leadership coach. Known for his transformative approach, he blends integrity, ambition, empathy, and strategic vision to help emerging leaders and CEOs achieve historic change. He targets CEOs and enterprise leaders who are seeking to break through barriers and create a new future for their organizations. Gain valuable insights into the qualities that make effective leaders, the impact of genuine coaching, and how to inspire and mobilize teams to realize ambitious, game-changing goals. 

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/masterful-coaching-with-robert-hargrove/

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Masterful Coaching, With Robert Hargrove

Co-Founder Of The Harvard Leadership Project

Introduction

My guest is Robert Hargrove. Robert has dedicated his career to unlocking the full potential of leaders and entrepreneurs. The Wall Street Journal described Robert as the man who wrote the book that changed the world of coaching forever. Pretty big words. He is called the CEO Whisperer and has coached presidents, cabinet secretaries, generals, top CEOs, and teams worldwide.

Leadership Coaching: Masterful Coaching.

He has been doing this for a long time in different venues, as a Co-Founder or Founder of the Harvard Leadership Project, the Leadership Weekends, America’s Future Leaders Initiative, and Masterful Coaching. Along the way, he has also co-founded a venture capital firm, and he has written multiple books, including Masterful Coaching, which is in its third edition. Robert lives in the Boston area. Robert, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you. 

You founded or co-founded the Harvard Leadership Project. When was that, and what led to its creation, and what was your aim?

I was contacted by a guy by the name of Dr. Jeffrey Spell. He wasn’t associated with the Harvard Business School. It’s Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry. He wanted to find out how you develop leaders. He said that his view was that the traditional methods of leadership development, such as marching people off to an abstract training program based on corporate and marginalized leadership competencies didn’t have much impact on people’s leadership ability.

He had the idea that we would develop young and emerging leaders through, basically, going for an impossible dream and going for achieving results, a results-oriented approach to leadership development based on the idea that leaders develop through crucible experiences. We did programs starting with young people, then we went to vice presidents of Fortune 500 Companies and CEOs. I’m still working on that. 

What were you doing when you started it? What were you doing before that? 

I think I was doing a similar version to what I’m doing now. I started my career as an editor at the Boston Globe, and I then wrote some magazine articles for some other publications. I got invited to give a speech someplace because some leadership guru was caught in a snowstorm, and his name was Stewart Emory in New York City. I discovered I had a certain amount of charisma.

I got up in front of the group, and I saw that I could captivate, beguile people, and get people to think differently, to make a shift, and to make something transformational happen. My life is about being a leadership guru, masterful coach, and mentor that’s all about having a transformational conversation with people. That’s very different from what I would call a transactional conversation where you just provide people tips and techniques that they can read about in a book. 

Leadership

Out of curiosity, how would you define leadership? What’s central to it for you?

I don’t think it has anything to do with characteristics and traits. I think my definition of leadership is someone who can bring about historic change. That’s very different than being a manager who’s put in charge of this department. The historic change could apply to whether you’re a president of the country, a CEO of a company, or even a strategic philanthropist.

Someone who brings about historic change consistent with the enduring vision and values of a people. My favorite examples of leaders are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. I picked the classic examples. What we call not leadership is what we see a lot of in the world nowadays people in leadership roles who don’t necessarily show up as leaders.

Is that vision component for that transformative change that you’re describing? Is that what’s most important then? 

I’m going to start by saying that in a different way. There are certain qualities that all great leaders have and they had throughout history, certain very basic qualities. 1) Integrity is wanting to do the right thing because you can’t be a leader unless people trust you, and people will not trust you for very long if you don’t have integrity.

2) Ambition. We were talking a little bit before the show, and most great leaders have what I call doubleness of ambition. They have ambition for themselves and ambition for their country or their company or organization. Curiosity. One of the questions. I often ask people when I meet them because I’m fascinated with people. I’m a people watcher.

I used to ride on the London tube and look at people and try to figure out what they did for a living and where they were going or where they were coming from. One of the questions I often ask people is what’s your goal? It’s amazing how many people cannot answer that question. They start to stammer and stumble. I said, “What’s your ambition?”

I asked a guy who worked for an investment banking firm not a while ago, and he said, “My ambition is not to lose the money that I have.” I said, “That’s not an ambition.” I mentioned integrity and doubleness of ambition, ambition for yourself, and ambition for your organization. Empathy. It is a very critical word for leadership. 

Franklin Roosevelt was born into a very rich family in New York. He became president. He became known as a traitor to his class because he wasn’t out to help people who were already rich get more money. He was there to help people who couldn’t help themselves. When he was fairly young, I’m sure you know, he contracted polio. 

When he contracted polio, he said, “Now, I know what it is to suffer.” When he saw people standing in bread lines, he said, “I’ve experienced their suffering as my own.” Then when he became president, he passed an economic new deal for all Americans. Let me say all these words are very important: Integrity, Ambition, Empathy. 

Empathy is probably the single most important word. Responsibility. When you feel empathy, you naturally want to take responsibility to help other people. 4) Drive. You’re not just sitting in your chair looking at your computer. You have a drive to get out there and do something about it. 5) It’s what I call Self-selectiveness, the willingness to look in the mirror and hold yourself in question, to be the first person to admit you made a mistake and to learn from the mistakes that you’ve made. 

You’ve coached many, many leaders over the years. When they come to you, what are they coming to you with? What’s the impetus for that first conversation with you? 

I think the impetus for many people is that they have an impossible dream that they want to realize. They want to make something happen that isn’t supposed to happen. They want to create something out of nothing versus create something out of something. Having said that, if I look back over all the years of all the people I’ve coached, and I’ve coached quite a few, the thing that people like talking about the most, do you know what it is? 

Themselves. 

No, it’s complaining about their boss. People love to complain about their boss. If they’re a CEO, they like to complain about the people on the board. The way I see my work as a coach, I wrote a book called Masterful Coaching. I base it on a sports metaphor. I said, “What’s the job of a coach in sports? It’s to help people realize an impossible dream.” 

Winning the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the NBA finals, it’s not to inculcate a homogenized list of corporate leadership competencies. It’s to win but win, again, consistent with what I like to call America’s ennobling ideals and enduring values. I know you’re sitting there across the pond, but I think we have a shared set of vision and values with the UK. 

Do you think a lot of them come to you of their own volition, or do they come to you because their boss, the board, or whoever told them that they needed coaching?

That’s an interesting question because probably it’s a bit of both. There are certain CEOs, but it doesn’t have to be CEOs. I prefer the word enterprise leader because an enterprise leader could be the CEO or business unit manager, department head, or who knows that there’s more available to them in life than they’re currently experiencing. 

They wake up in the morning. They may put their clothes on, and look like they could be in a gentleman’s quarterly magazine. They have to drive a great car. Maybe they have a driver. They eat in great restaurants. They have a staff. They have a team. They have a budget. All those things everybody would like but they wake up at 2:00 in the morning asking themselves, “Is this all there is?” 

There’s a certain slice of the people that I’ve worked with over the years are people who realize that they have a bigger horizon of possibility than they’re currently experiencing. There is more to life than they’re currently experiencing, but they don’t know how to get access to that. I think where we click is I’m good at recognizing people with a great deal of potential who aren’t realizing their potential yet. 

When someone who has a lot of potential or realizes that they’re not quite realizing it yet, is looking for help in doing so, that’s when there can quite often be a click. It’s very much the same as in sports. There are certain people in sports, I know I used the terms Michael Jordan or Tom Brady, or people in European football. The best players always seem to see coaching. 

The mediocre players, let’s call them, the great players always seek a masterful coach. The good players can take it or leave it, and the bad ones aren’t aren’t interested. One of the signs that I see for someone or one of the indicators for someone to be a great leader is they show up for me as a request for coaching. It’s only a small percentage who do, but then some get sent because their boss or the HR department told them to. 

I had a coaching relationship with the CEO of a European company whose board said, “You have a high IQ, but you don’t have a high EQ.” The board assigned me to coach him. I coached him for years. As soon as the contract was over, he ended this and didn’t want anymore. He hasn’t requested coaching. I’m not trying to be here to give anybody a lecture. I hope people listening to this can take some value from it because I want to help the people who are reading. I want to talk to you, not about you. 

How does your process unfold when you start to work with somebody in that leadership capacity? 

I’m not interested in any process. I spend a lot of time just noticing people, observing people, watching people, and getting clues from what people say. If you and I were to sit down at a restaurant and I asked you, “What is your ambition, JR?” “What’s your vision for yourself?” “What are your true values?” “Where were you born?” Those are the questions that I often ask people. 

You can tell a tremendous amount just by knowing where people were born. If you’re born in London, you’re going to wind up being a little bit different type of person than someone who was born in Inverness, Scotland, or someplace like that. If you’re born in Minnesota, you’re going to be different. Then I’ll say, “Tell me about your parents.” 

I was called by someone at Honda a week or 2 ago. Who is going to become the CEO of the Honda Autonomous Vehicle Division? One of the first questions I asked him was, tell me about your parents. What was your mother like? What was your father like? “My mother was very independent. She was an entrepreneur. She pushed me. My father was a postman and was very soft.”

Which one are you more like? He said, “My mother.” just right there, I have a lot of information about the person. Are you married? Do you have any kids? The question I probably most often ask is, “What do you do for a living?” Then that goes to, okay. Those simple basic questions give me a lot of information, and then I would say, “Now, tell me something about your goals.”

Maybe I probably wouldn’t ask that, but I asked something like, “Where are you stuck?” Where could we begin? If I look over the years at the companies that brought me in, I worked mostly through the agencies of Fortune 500 and Global 1000 Companies. Royal Bank of Scotland, for example. There were always companies that it was either CEOs, enterprise leaders, or HR whose companies were at some strategic inflection point. 

That’s where I seem to have power. They’re in a situation, and I’ll give you an example in a minute, where transformation is necessary. Meaning, they have to create a new future. The company cannot continue to generate sustainable revenue, profit, or shareholder value without creating a new future. Usually, what’s happening is companies are trying to reach those goals of sustainable revenue, profit, and shareholder value by optimizing the present. 

As they do that, they start to hit a wall in terms of their returns, and their shareholders start to become unhappy with them. My job is to help the CEO and the enterprise leader to define, design, and create a new future, or bring back the parts of their history that were important. A quick example, several years back, the CEO of Adidas attended a leadership program that I did in Zurich, Switzerland, called Commitment Test. 

They called me up. He said, “Robert, if you don’t come over here and help me beat Nike, I’m going to have to take a gun and shoot myself.” This is the CEO of Adidas. They started the whole running game. The company began when Dassler brought Jesse Owens a pair of Adidas shoes to run in the Olympics but as time went on, the company drifted away from selling sports-related apparel and shoes and then got into fashion.

They said, “I don’t know what Nike’s coming into our territory and they’re beating the hell out of us. You need to help me solve this.” I did an executive coaching program and a program we have called, Collab-Lab that resulted in a fundamental brand change. It was called Adidas Equipment. It was the same time as I was doing that, I was coaching him to be a CEO, coaching him to be a leader. I hope that gives you a sense. 

As you’re working with them on creating this future. The impossible dream and it gets to a point of getting others on board with that. How do you help them with their teams, with their organizations, and the communication, and the getting buy-in, the getting commitment, and that part of the process? 

The first thing that I have to do is to find that CEO or enterprise leader who has a hunger. This guy called me up on the phone and said, “I was sitting in my office, and maybe you don’t take your gun, I’m going to have to shoot myself.” That was the beginning. You have to have a CEO or I don’t know if he is the CEO. To me, he’s just someone who’s in charge of the organization. 

To coach you, you need to have someone who has a lot at stake. It can’t be just someone that your boss sent you to do it. Typically, what happens is that I start working with the person at the top, and then I might ask them a question like, “Tell me about how it’s going with your team.” “Do you have a group?” “What I like to do is work with CEOs who have recruited a group of aberrant geniuses who play as a team. Is that what you got?” 

They typically come back and say, “Robert, I’ve got maybe 1 or 2 A-players, but the rest are B’s and some chronic C’s.” I said, “What are you going to do about it?” “I’m not sure.” By the way, when you’re coaching, the model is always selling. I said, “Would you like me or someone from my organization to work with your team?” Then, when you do that, you find out that maybe they don’t have the right people on the bus.

The idea is do they have the right people on the bus going in the same direction? Quite often, they don’t. Very often, the CEO or enterprise leaders need to make tough people decision. Then we look further at what’s the impossible future that you want to create or a new future. What would be the goal that you want to achieve? Some of the strategies or the goal. Strategy is not the goal. 

Strategy is the, how and what’s the implementation process, which involves immobilizing the whole organization around this impossible future. One of the processes we’ve been very successful with is something called the Collab-Lab, which is a group genius process. Usually, in companies, it takes hundreds of little meetings to make everything happen. The Collab-Lab is something where you get all the stakeholders in the same room, and you decide what the new future is going to be. It’s a very creative, dynamic process. I don’t want to go on too much. 

It’s always interesting to me how companies work through this process. Sometimes it’s getting everybody in a room together and pushing an idea a bit further than people were getting on their own. Sometimes it’s some bolt of lightning that hits somebody in the room or maybe the group collectively. 

Often, there are no forms for people in an organization to talk to each other except in formal meetings. Like, if you go to a Fortune 5 100 Global 1,000 board meeting, it’s the same 7, 8, or 10 people talking every month. They never talk to anybody else. The same thing all the way through. I like the idea of cross-functional collaboration around A greater goal. 

Building High-Performing Teams

What are some of the other things that you advocate to people in terms of building high-performing teams? There are the A player, and B player assessing and upgrading where you need to, but how do you get more out of the teams you’ve got? What do you recommend there? 

Have you ever heard of a guy named Chris Argyris? He wrote about organization defensive routines. There was a book, I think, by Patrick Lencioni about the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. I thought Argyris’ work was much more profound. What I’ve discovered is it’s easy to say, “Let’s get a group of A-players on the team. Let’s meet regularly and discuss the undiscussable.” What you find out is that most organizational teams have what Argyris calls, The Organization Defensive Routines that prevent them from being a team or prevent them from learning. 

For example, making hot issues undiscussable. I found there were about 10 organizational defensive routines that if you could help people to identify them, if you could speak about them, talk about them openly, you could, what I call, recognize and disperse them. One organizational defensive routine that gets in the way of teamwork is making hot or controversial issues undiscussable. You’ve seen that in your experience? 

Of course. Everybody talks about the elephant in the room. There is always an elephant in the room. 

One of the things I found, I remember when I was working at State Street, was a culture of politeness. At least at that time when I was there but the CEO had an issue with someone in State Street Global Advisors or whatever. They wouldn’t talk to him about it until they got fired, fed up, and they would just fire them without ever having the conversation of, “Look, these are my goals or problems. These are my expectations of you. People were unwilling to have an uncomfortable conversation. 

I remember people said about the CEO, he loves to come in and talk to you about your weekend or your dinner last night but he doesn’t talk to you about what’s on his mind. Chris Argyris was a legendary educator from Harvard. He said that people make hot or controversial issues become undiscussable and the undiscussability is undiscussable. My job in a lot of teams is very simple, to get people to discuss the undiscussable. That’s only one out of ten of those defensive routines, but it’s an example. 

What are some of the others, out of curiosity? 

Another one is maximizing winning and avoiding losing. Many people in business have a very competitive nature but if you go into a CEO meeting or executive team meeting, what you’ll find out is people start competing with each other subtly or not subtly the moment they walk into the room. Everything is a situation where they’re trying to maximize winning and avoid losing. That’s another one. Another very common one is when, let’s say you have a CEO who wants to maximize winning and avoid losing. What do you think his most common behavior is? Dominating people. Typical CEO behavior is to dominate and avoid domination. Have you seen that? 

Of course. Not just CEOs, but managers, they take up too much air in the room.

Then, what’s the response? The response by other people on the team is to become passive and submissive. Avoid losing. I remember when I was working for this European company. It doesn’t exist now because it was sold out. The CEO wanted one of the members of the group who’s the CEO of an Italian subsidiary to take charge of China. This company was at a strategic inflection point moving from making gas-powered engines to electronic engines with my inspiration.

Just before the meeting, the Italian CEO said, “I will never set foot in China again. I may go there to have dinner. I have never run an organization in China.” His name was Oliver. The CEO comes into the room, talks about his vision and his strategy, and then says, “Oliver, I’d like you to go to China.” Oliver didn’t say a word until there was a break, and he went to the water cooler and started complaining to me and everybody else. 

He was just totally passive and submissive. I always try to help them. You have to go and have a talk with the CEO, and you’ve got to discuss the undiscussable. Fear can be your enemy, but fear can also be the fuel. That’s another example. Another defensive routine is being invulnerable. The CEO doesn’t say hello to you in the morning or whatever it is. You feel hurt, but you never show any feeling. Never show any negative emotion, fear, sadness, or anger. 

You’re always in a steady state. These examples are brilliant. When you walk into a room at a typical executive level, you see these guys and women sitting around this table, they look great but you mentioned the elephant in the room. There’s an elephant in the room. There’s a hippopotamus, a fox, a lion, and a zebra. It’s like the law of the jungle is applying.

Then, the CEO came up to me after the meeting and said, “Robert, why didn’t the people speak up?” “I want them to speak up.” In most cases, they didn’t speak up because they were waiting to hear what the CEO had to say before they expressed their views. It was a great story about the former head of Ford Motor Company who went on to Boeing or came from Boeing, Alan Mulally. 

He would have these meetings every Monday morning, and he said there were 3 things we wanted to discuss. He’d have 30 guys in a room and he said, “There is a green light situation where things are going good, a yellow light situation where things are breaking down, and a red light situation.” Every meeting for a month, it was all green lights. 

In one of the meetings, I think the 4th or 5th meeting, someone put up a yellow light and talked about a problem. It was a problem that the manufacturing plant was producing broken taillights and he brought up the problem of the broken taillights. At that time, that was the beginning of a transformation of Ford Motor Company, which probably needs another transformation. They’re continually in transformation. 

Probably. I think the automotive industry in general has been in continued transformation for decades. Succession planning is something that a lot of senior leaders also avoid for themselves or their teams. How much do you get into that topic with them? 

A fair amount. There was a book that I discovered. It’s called Superbosses, and I think the author is Sydney Finkelstein. It’s worth checking out. I read a lot of books by looking at the book and going on YouTube and listening to the guy give a speech. He said that the best CEOs and managers were those who created a master-apprentice relationship with someone who worked for them. 

Someone who takes someone under their wing and decides to see someone on your team, you said, you know, that person has CEO potential or that person has vice president potential. I feel like I’m talking too much about CEOs, but it’s just a label of the boss. He said that the great CEOs are not those with vision, not those just with values. 

They’re super bosses who create a master-apprentice relationship with people in their organization, and they invest a lot of time and energy in developing those people, which includes not only having real conversations over dinner but also giving them big responsibilities with high expectations and space to do it. I think this is a great way to do it. 

What I found out over the years is that when companies go outside to hire someone, they go to one of the big search firms, Russell Reynolds or Korn Ferry. 60% to 70% of the time, there’s disappointment. Some people are out the door in 18 months. I think one of the areas I’m most interested in as it relates to succession planning is helping the CEO or enterprise leader become a masterful coach. 

A masterful coach not only gets pleasure out of helping people realize an impossible dream or transforming an organization, but seeing people develop. One of the qualities you need to be a great coach is you have to be more excited about people than they are about themselves. You have to spot people. I try to inspire people to do that. 

Robert Hargrove: A masterful coach normally gets pleasure out of helping people realize an impossible dream.

Somebody recently, who became a coach after being a Wall Street analyst, ultimately decided that she was more interested in the trajectory of people than the trajectory of securities and wanted to get under the covers of that. I know I’m not getting it exactly right, but that was the crux of it.

I guess it depends on what stage you are in life and what money you have. I got more interested in securities as I got older. I thought it was nice to have securities who were making money for me when I slept. 

Leadership In The Modern World

You’ve been coaching leaders for a long time. If you think back over the last few decades, what stayed the same, and what’s changed about leadership in the modern world?

When I started coaching, which was probably in the 80s, there were very few CEOs who were an iconic class. Most were conformists. When I started coaching, I didn’t even think they used the word leadership. Maybe in the past 10 or 15 years, they started to use leadership. Usually, it was the manager. Peter Drucker never talked about leadership. 

He talked about the practice and science of management. The watchwords were command, control, planning, and organizing, being the low-cost producer. When I started, people looked at being the low-cost producer like, “God.” I guess that’s probably because we were coming out of the manufacturing industrial age.

That was the wisdom of a few decades ago coming from a place like Harvard Business School. You either wanted to be the low-cost producer or the differentiated product that could command a price premium, and too many companies were caught in the middle. 

The difference between selling paint in a can and selling paint in a ball. It wasn’t like a paint game but what I noticed during the, let’s say, the period where Apple, Amazon, or Google were born, all of a sudden, you have leaders that were iconoclasts versus conformists. The CEOs of the past were pretty much conformists. I remember at IBM, even if you were a consultant, you had to wear a white button-down shirt, a regimental tie, and a blue suit. 

I think it’s exciting now that to be a great CEO, you need to be an iconic class. You can’t be a conformist.

You need to be creating new futures for your customers, not just optimizing the present. Look at Elon Musk. He would have been impossible 20 or 30 years ago. He’s an iconoclast. He’s not a conformist, but he is going to leave a legacy of accelerating the shift to sustainable transport. I can also go back in history and find other people like Cornelius Vanderbilt. 

There have been iconoclastic leaders throughout history. We remember them as the decades wore on because they did stand out. They did drive a massive change. Now, Elon Musk has a huge following. He’s a bit of a controversial player too, but he’s got a huge following. He built several successful companies. You have to give him credit for that even if you don’t always agree with everything that comes out of his mouth.

The same thing with Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and many others. One thing that maybe hasn’t changed is that the forces of socialization are still very strong. To walk into an organization, you feel tremendous pressure to conform, to fit in, and to play it safe. My son is 16. He’s writing an essay. He’s building a personal brand. He’s only 16, He’s got to get all a’s. He’s got to be in the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra.

He’s got to be on the hockey team. He’s a math scholar, and he’s writing an essay. The essay question was, should the media be funded by taxes? I woke up in the middle of the night worried about him as it was a tough topic. I wrote him a hook, and he said, “Dad, you’re fired.” “Why?” He said, “It is because my article started.” I said, “First of all, I have a confession to make. I never read a newspaper. I never look at CNN or Fox News.”I get all my news from TikTok. 

According to my conversations with my Dad and mom, I’m pretty well informed when we talk about the news every night. He said, “Dad, you’re fired as a coach. You can’t talk about this academic essay.” My son is one of those conformists. I wish he was more than 10% like me, and I was more than 10% or 20% like him. I probably wouldn’t last a week in a job in a Fortune 500 company. 

I remember when I had a meeting at Ciba-Geigy. They changed the name now to Novartis. I went to the front door and I had to sign in. I had to put on a name tag. I hated putting on a name tag. I don’t know why. I just didn’t like it. Then, I went to the cafeteria and I pulled out the food. Then they said, “After you’re done, you have to put the tray on the conveyor belt.” I said, “Why do I need to put the tray on the conveyor?”

I said this to myself. “I’m a guest here, why do I need to put the tray on the conveyor belt?” I hope I can inspire people who are reading this to have integrity, to have a big personal and organizational ambition, to have much greater empathy, a softer heart, and to take responsibility. For most of my career, I’ve always felt responsible wherever I was. 

Wherever I walk into this situation, I feel like a responsible person. What I’m trying to do is I want to speak to the people reading this so I can help you create value for the people here. What do you think the people in your audience could learn from me that would be of value? What do you think are the questions on their mind that they’re struggling with? 

I think for most people who are not at the pinnacle of an organization, at the pinnacle of their career, or trying to figure out. They often are frustrated by, “Why did this person get promoted and I didn’t get promoted?” “Why does the boss seem to like this person better than I do?” “Why did they get this project and I didn’t get this project?”

Ultimately, to your point from before we started recording, there are always going to be people in the middle. The junior ranks of an organization no matter what you try are never going to be deeply engaged and committed to the success of the company because they have a transactional relationship with work. 

There are a lot of people who get to the middle. They were good students. They were successful in their early years. All of a sudden, they hit this brick wall they just don’t completely understand. The idea is that the rules of the game change relative to what they’re used to or what they believe ought to be. 

I think it is a source of frustration and some of them need to figure out about themselves. “What is the limiting behavior that I’m demonstrating, whether I realize it or not?” For others, they may have an okay trajectory, but they want to accelerate that trajectory. I think those are the things that people who are probably the common readers of this show would be thinking about. They want something more than what they’re getting, and they can’t completely figure it out. 

What I am going to suggest is that over the years, I’ve noticed a lot of people who got promoted and who didn’t. People get promoted who are very good at the job that they have, not necessarily trying to wangle their way to promotion. They perform well and that they do a good job at whatever they’re doing. People who get promoted have reasonably good IQs. 

I think the biggest discerning factor is that people get promoted who have good social skills and EQ. They’re good at creating relationships with other people. If you want to get promoted, probably, assuming that you do a good job, I think you should work on your relationships. Building relationships, taking the opportunity to network with people.

I should have done that better, I think, in my career. I was out playing golf with a guy who turned out to be an investor. I said, “What do you do for a living?” “I invest in public companies. What should I do?” I said, “I’m a coach for CEO teams and whoever is at a strategic inflection point. What I do is I try to help work with companies that are at a strategic inflection point.” He explained how he bought stock in a company. 

I think it was called Core, which had just made a $1,000,000,000 deal with a crypto company that was going out of business to buy their supercomputers to run their data centers. The core runs a data center company. When I came home, I told my son about this, “Did you get his business card?” I said, “No. I didn’t even think of it. I wish I had his name, so we could play golf.” He said, “Dad, you’re supposed to network.” I think I’m a person who forgets to network a lot of times. I think probably a lot of people are like that. 

Very few people make the most, and the ones who do are probably a little bit too opportunistic about it.

The ones who have good personalities. They’re easygoing. Excuse the language. They’re not easily pissed off. They go with the flow. They’re not full of self-righteousness. Those are things. Another thing that maybe I could speak to your readers is, it is good to have ambition. If you don’t have ambition, how are you going to get ahead in the game of life? Whether the ambition is in business or beyond it. Think about this question. It’s amazing when I ask people, “What’s your goal?” People can’t say anything. Let’s turn the tables now. Tell me something about what you’re trying to accomplish with this show and your mission.

I’ve been pretty clear on that from the get-go, and I benefited throughout my career a lot from being part of leadership development programs. I got to go through that at McKinsey. I got to go through that at Fidelity. I got to go through that at State Street. I learned a lot from that, but I also appreciate that a lot of people never get that exposure to those programs. 

Yet, most people come into work wanting to do a good job. Maybe they don’t have the CEO level of ambition and I think that’s okay. Not everybody can be a CEO but they want something more than what they’re currently experiencing in their career and their life. My objective was to bring some of that wisdom to them at an affordable price point. 

There is a lot of information on our site that’s free, and that’s by design. It’s to help people learn and get better. If you want to pay for coaching, you have to pay for coaching. That’s not free but a lot of the content that has been developed on the site is there to help people be better individual contributors, better managers, better leaders, and better strategic thinkers. That was the objective from the get-go. 

That’s a wonderful mission. Provide people with a leadership development opportunity that they wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise or wouldn’t necessarily be chosen for otherwise. Why did they pick you for all these leadership development programs? You must have something going for it. McKinsey, State Street Bank, and Fidelity are some of the best companies in the world. How did you show up for them that they selected you?

I think consulting is obviously a very different experience doing that than working in a company. You have different time frames that you’re operating under and a different approach to the relationships that you build. I have always been interested in how this company works. What’s working and what’s not working about it?

What can we do as consultants? What can I do in the role that I’m in and even maybe beyond the role that I’m in to help put the company in a better position? That’s been the common thread for me in terms of everything I’ve done trying to find ways to help this company be better. I tend to operate as a glue guy in the scheme of things to connect the dots across groups and people. 

I came into Fidelity. It was a joke at the time. I think I had 50 different interviews with people before I took a job at Fidelity. I knew many people in the company and most people at Fidelity said, “You should meet this person.” I said, “I already know that person.” I met them 6 or 4 months ago. I was never one of these people. 

The leaders always comment. They get all the people down in the organization together, and they’ll say, “I can’t believe these people have never talked to each other before.” I was never one of those people. I always had a very broad network within a company and understood what people were doing across different groups, I made it my point to understand how things work in other parts of the company in addition to getting my job done well. That’s been a common thread for me. 

That sounds great. I said, “Leaders get ahead, they have this combination of EQ, IQ, and performance. Politics could be another way of saying some of these. I like when you just said that people get ahead who are in middle management who ask those kinds of questions that you just post. What’s working for this company? What’s not working? What’s missing that could make a difference?

What can I do to be part of the solution versus the problem? What can I do to connect the dots between various people? In 2000, I wrote a book called Mastering The Art of Creative Collaboration, and I discovered that I have a belief that leadership is overrated. The key to success is being able to get people to collaborate in a cross-functional way or getting people with different views and perspectives to collaborate. 

Robert Hargrove: Mastering the Art of Creative Collaboration.

In Congress recently, we have a lot of people who are called leaders, but the ability to collaborate is not very high. The same thing in companies. Gary Hamel, a leadership guru once said that one of the problems is that people don’t have enough forums to be able to collaborate. You always wind up talking to the same 5 people. That’s why I created this program called, The Collab-Lab, which is on my website if anybody’s interested. Go to MasterfulCoaching.com and look under Offerings. It is a good description of it.

That is something that people don’t do enough of. They zero in on what is most directly relevant to them, and they don’t necessarily connect the dots. A lot of great ideas come out of people coming together and connecting the dots. You go back to a question I asked you earlier, “What’s the definition of leadership?” You could argue that a definition of leadership, and this goes to what you were saying just a minute ago. Getting a group of people to be able to achieve something together that they could all achieve independently. 

I said that leadership is the ability to bring about historic change. That’s a big definition but another simple one is just leaders are people who can make the vision a reality with an addendum that you just said by helping people achieve something together that they couldn’t otherwise achieve on their own. Do you know what? That’s not that easy. When you can think about all these defensive routines that wind up being in every group, you have to have a lot of skill. 

Yes, you do. It comes back to EQ, Emotional Intelligence, or whatever you want to call it. Being able to read a room, understand the politics, and understand who’s exhibiting what behavior and coax them out of those behaviors. Get them working toward a common goal. That is very hard work. 

Coax them without crushing them. It’s one thing for a leader to talk to people in a group about some behavior. Maybe they’re trying to dominate and avoid domination, or they’re not speaking up but you have to be able to communicate that with what I call, The Leadership of maturity. You can get your message across without killing people or without overreacting yourself. There is a lot of stuff in the world. I like your mission of providing people with leadership development opportunities that might not be able to afford or have access to them. Is there any other way people can get in touch with you about these things?

Closing

We have a website, Pathwise.io. It has a tremendous amount of career content on it. We’ve got courses and coaching if you want it. This is what I do in the wee hours. In the spare moments of my life. As I mentioned to you earlier, there are a couple of people who work on it pretty intensively and I give guidance in the background. Any parting thoughts from you before we close? 

My parting thought would be to keep doing what you’re doing. If someone’s looking for master coaching for themselves at their organization, go to check out our website, MasterfulCoaching.com.

Thank you. It was an interesting conversation. I don’t often get to talk to people who’ve worked with many senior-level leaders throughout their careers. 

Thank you very much. 

Thank you as well. 

It’s late over there, I guess. 

Late, but still light. That’s the one nice thing about this time of year we get long days. It’s a wonderful thing while we’ve got it. We pay for it in the winter, though. 

See you later. Thanks. 

Thank you. Bye.

– 

I want to thank Robert for joining me on this episode to discuss the coaching work that he’s done with CEOs and many other senior leaders throughout his career. Working with a coach can make a huge difference, but you’ve got to start by taking control of your career, and Pathwise can help you do that. Become a member. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the Pathwise newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks. Have a great day.

Important Links:

• Robert Hargrove – LinkedIn
• MasterfulCoaching.com
• Masterful Coaching
• 5 Dysfunctions of a Team
• Superbosses
• Mastering The Art of Creative Collaboration
• LinkedIn – PathWise.io
• Facebook, – PathWise.io
• YouTube – PathWise.io 
• Instagram – PathWise.io

About Robert Hargrove

Robert Hargrove has dedicated his career to unlocking the full potential of leaders and entrepreneurs. The Wall Street Journal describes Robert as the Man Who Wrote the Book that Changed The World of Coaching Forever. He is called “The CEO Whisperer” and has coached Presidents, Cabinet Secretaries, Generals, Top CEOs, and teams all over the world. He has been doing this for a long time in different venues: as a founder or co-founder of the Harvard Leadership Project, The Leadership Weekends, America’s Future Leaders Initiative, and his own business, Masterful Coaching. Along the way, he also co-founded a venture capital firm, and he has a book, Masterful Coaching, which is in its 3rd edition. Robert lives in the Boston area.