Dorothy E. Siminovitch, Ph.D., MCC

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Dorothy E. Siminovitch, Ph.D., MCC Diane
Menendez, Ph.D., MCC

• Executive Personality Dynamics for Coaches
• Coaching Heroes, SHeroes Perfectionistics

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Challenges
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Why Leadership Coaching?

• Coaching is an adaptive response, to rapid
  socio-technological change.
• --Pam McLean,
  2008
• Diminishing the influence of clinical practice
  has allowed coaching to be accepted by executive
  users
• Coaching is seen as a performance enhancer, an
  ROI factor, a safe place to learn.

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Raising Awareness

• Our key aim today Raise your awareness of the
  power and relevance of the clinical perspective
  in relationship to executive coaching.
• Awareness in itself is transformational.

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Leader Effectiveness

• The Big Five Characteristics tend to
• predict effectiveness
• Emotional Stability
• Surgency
• Agreeableness
• Conscientiousness
• Intellectance

Reference Robert Hogan
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Executive Derailment

• Insensitivity (abrasive, intimidating, bullying)
• Being cold, aloof, or arrogant
• Betrayal of trust
• Over-managing / failure to delegate
• Overly ambitious
• Failure to staff effectively
• Unable to adapt to a boss with a different style
• Over-dependent upon an advocate or a mentor
• Having an overriding personality defect

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Bad Habits?

• People create their own glass ceilings,
  limiting their success and their contributions to
  the company. At worst, these otherwise highly
  competent and valuable people destroy their own
  careers.
• (Waldroop Butler, 2001)

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Root Cause
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• Lore Is This Client Coachable?

• CO Not coachable
• C1 Extremely low coachability
• C2 Very low coachability
• C3 Fair coachability
• C4 Good coachability
• C5 Very good coachability
• C6 Excellent coachability

• CO Psychological/medical problems
• C1 Narcissistic personality-strongly
  independent-will not admit to areas for
  improvement, feels invulnerable, antagonistic
• C2 Resists or deflects feedback, explains away
  issues. Negative to coaching process
• C3 Complacent unmotivated towards change
• C4 Acknowledges 360 process but may not be
  certain about how to proceed. Some resistance but
  awareness of need for change-urgency depends on
  implications of not changing
• C5 Accepts feedback, desires to improve, sees
  value, becomes committed as benefits become clear
• C6 Has intrinsic need to grow, lifelong learner,
  self-directed realistic sense of self

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Failed Leadership

• Eliot Spitzer
• Former Governor of NY
• Resigned in disgrace after violating laws he
  himself had crusaded to institute. May 2008

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Failed Leadership
Conrad Black CEO of Hollinger International,
Sentenced to prison for fraud in 2007.
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Failed Leadership

Jeffrey Skilling CEO of Enron, Sentenced to
prison for fraud in 2008
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Failed Leadership
Dennis Kozlowski, Founder CEO of Tyco,
sentenced to prison for looting his company.
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Personality?

• represents a pattern of deeply
• embedded and broadly exhibited
• cognitive, affective, and overt
• behavioral traits that persist over
• extended periods of time.
• T. Millon, Personality and Its Disorders, 1988

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Difficult Leaders

1. The Perfectionist (Obsessive-Compulsive)
2. The Hero (Narcissistic)

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The Perfectionist

• How do we recognize them?
• Their major preoccupations
• Control
• Order
• Perfection

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Quick Exercise

• Identify a person most like this in your work or
  home life.
• What do they do?
• What is the impact on you?
• Turn to the person next to you and share the
  impact of the person on you (and perhaps others).

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Useful Perfectionism

• Fredrick Taylor Taylorism
• Professions where error free is valued
• Pilots Air Traffic Controllers
• Surgeons/Dentists
• Copy Editors
• Quality Evaluators
• Financial experts

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What Goes Wrong?

• Perspective Often Gets Lost
• Focus on control, order perfection make it hard
  to
• Empower others
• Matter attached vs. People attached
• See the big picture
• Tolerate deviations from expectations
• Rigid, intolerant . . .

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A Matter of Degree

• What works when Coaching Perfectionists?

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Difficult Leaders

1. The Perfectionist (Obsessive-Compulsive)
2. The Hero (Narcissistic)

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The Narcissistic Leader

• Today's business leaders maintain a markedly
  higher profile than did their predecessors of
  previous generations.  A growing need for
  visionary and charismatic leadership has brought
  to the fore executives of a personality type
  psychologists call "narcissistic."
• Michael Maccoby,
  author of
• The Productive Narcissist

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Worst Investment
Warren Buffett, CEO Berkshire Hathaway

• I was neither pushed into the investment (in
  the US Air Line Industry) nor misled by anyone
  when making it. Rather this was a case of sloppy
  analysis, a lapse that may have been caused
  by...hubris.

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Lies--Then Admits to Affair
John Edwards Former Senator, N.C.

• Over the course of several campaigns, I
  started to believe that I was special and became
  increasingly egocentric and narcissistic.

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Heres Looking at Me, Kid

• A Narcissist is someone whos better looking
  than you are.
• Gore Vidal

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Quick Exercise

• Heroes and Sheroes in your life

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A Gestalt Distinction

• Strategic Interaction
• Connected to an agenda
• Future oriented

• Intimate Interaction
• Relationship oriented, without an agenda
• In the present moment

Good leadership uses both strategic and intimate
interaction. With narcissistic leaders, intimate
interaction is always in service of the strategic
agenda.
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Strengths of the Hero

• Energy and vision
• Positive contagion
• Mobilizing energy that aligns toward the vision

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Weaknesses of the Hero

• Not Listening (e.g. Edward Land/Polaroid)
• Oversensitivity to criticism
• Tendency toward paranoia
• Anger and put downs
• Overly competitive and controlling
• Isolation
• Exaggeration and lying
• Lack of self-knowledge
• Grandiosity
• Gates preparation for government trial
• .

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The Productive Narcissist

• Find a trusted sidekick.
• Create a clear point of view.
• Then, get the organization to identify with
  them, to think the way they do, and to become the
  living embodiment of their companies
• Develop self-awareness and reflection.
• Whatever you are doing, keep doing it.
  You dont get so angry any more.

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Clinical Referral Indicators

1. Depression Low affect (i.e. Does not
   demonstrate emotional highs or lows) narrow
   expressive range, chronically or profoundly
   unhappy..sense of hopelessness
2. Dependent Personality The client is excessively
   dependent on others, is incapacitated without
   the constant approval of others, fears being
   rejected by others, fears being abandoned and has
   low self-regard.
3. Narcissism Psychopathic Personality Very
   egocentric and seems to care about no one but
   himself or herself. Usually very clever,
   articulate and manipulative.
4. Borderline Personality Has a pattern of unstable
   relationships with others behaves impulsively
   and alternates unpredictability between feelings
   of boredom, anxiety, anger and depression.
5. Paranoia Does not trust others, is reluctant to
   confide because the information can be used
   against him/her, or is unreasonably suspicious of
   others motives or actions.

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Referral Indicators

1. Bi-Polar The clients life is very chaotic and
   cannot seem to get it under control.. Has extreme
   emotional highs and lows is moody and
   unpredictable.
2. Antisocial Personality Persistently angry or
   aggressive and shows no concern for the welfare
   of others.
3. Transference Client says something like, You
   are the ONLY person who care about me. There are
   similar or other inappropriate expressions of
   love toward or interest in you.
4. Schizophrenia The clients beliefs are not
   consistent with reality.
5. Suicidal tendencies Considers suicide or has
   other self-destructive impulses or behaviors
   (addictions)

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Gestalt Coaching Therapy

• Present/outcome Oriented
• Strategic Work to achieve defined outcomes
• Utilizes strategic intentions goals and
  outcomes
• Concerned with alignment of intent, effectiveness
  and definition of success
• Focuses on domain of work life, personal life
  part of work boundary
• Expand new skill sets and ways of being and
  behaving
• Leads to mobilization of Action

• Historical reconcilement for present
• Work for Insight, Emotional repair ,
  Integrity/Healing
• Validates feelings reconstruction of mood
  states
• Focuses on domain of personal life-work boundary
  attached to personal life
• Creates intimacy Achieves open-ended outcomes
  but brief psychotherapy is solution focused
• Produces new ways of experiencing life

IGCP 2008 An OSD Center Program
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The Clinical-Coaching Divide

• Personality type gives shape to their executive
  behavior.
• Probabilistically
• -issues, preoccupations, blind spots will turn
  out to inform a particular coaching situation.
• -Some are preoccupied with anxiety and control,
  others with strategy, power and perfectionism,
  still others with the softer, more human
  dimension of their organizations.
• Understanding how these patterns tend to coalesce
  inside particular people is a helpful starting
  point for coaching as it informs what questions,
  what inquiries need to get priority, even what
  brings people into coaching.

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Presenter Contact InformationDorothy
Siminovitch, Ph.D., MCC1-416-935-1554
awareworks_at_aol.comDiane Menendez, Ph.D.,
MCC1-513-545-5473Diane.Menendez_at_Convergys.com

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