Jim Wagner

Coaching in the Clear

Jim Wagner:

I think as a leader and being fortunate and privileged to be in a position to lead an organization, it's incumbent upon that leader to create the space for everyone to thrive and to recognize when and if there are either systems in place, structures in place, that need to be broken down to create opportunity for everyone.

Jeff Hunter:

Hi, and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter, and you are listening to coaching in the clear, the podcast committed to help you learn about coaching. Coaching is more popular than ever, and we believe that sharing in-depth personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their potential while creating market-leading big change businesses. Coaching in the Clear is a production of Talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity. We send out a weekly newsletter called the sense maker where we offer our latest thinking about issues affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content to enable you to unleash your potential, learn more and sign up at Talentism.com. So, Jim, thank you so much for being on coaching in the clear today. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time

Jim Wagner:

Thank you for having me, looking forward to the conversation.

Jeff Hunter:

Good. So listen, I'm starting all my conversations the same way, which is, I would just like to know how you decided to enter the world of coaching, how to get a coach when was the first time he got a coach? Just take me through some of that narrative and background about how you approached coaching.

Jim Wagner:

Absolutely. So I think there's the long version, which is my own history going back as an athlete who was fortunate to have some incredible coaches and really learned about how important a coach is to anyone's individual success as well as team success. I think often times when we get into a business context and certainly as a first time CEO, which I was at, at Roland foods, when I started working with you as a coach you really realize you're in a position by yourself. It's actually a very lonely position where there's lots of decisions you need to make. There's lots of responsibility. And while I have mentors, I have friends, I have confidence. What I knew I needed was somebody who was going to work with me to provide the unvarnished feedback and help me to remove or see some of the blocks that existed in my own leadership style as well as in the business. So I was fortunate that I had great experiences with coaches in a different context and knew that I thrived when having that. So that's how I arrived at that.

Jeff Hunter:

Wonderful. So tell me, because you were an athlete, a very highly regarded athlete, and in incredible collegiate program as a waterfall polo player, I was a water polo player. Although I would imagine comparing your skill to my skill is a not a fair comparison, but let's just say we were both in the water splashing around. So tell me. Something that's fascinating, I was just talking to somebody this past weekend who was an athlete, and they were talking about the role of coaching and in helping get better. What do you think is a similarity between the sports context and the business context with that role of coach? Because obviously coaches take on different jobs and different contexts, but from what I've heard, people had coaches in their prior lives, in their, you know, sports and those kinds of things really seem to gravitate towards it more in business than people might not have had that experience. Could you help me sort of navigate that?

Jim Wagner:

Yeah, definitely. So I think that again, the good fortune that I had of having excellent coaches, even in high school and in college and with the under 20 U.S. national team was that great coaching is a constant feedback loop and it's about learning to learn and that every practice and every game is very much an experiment in the sense of improvement as opposed to the idea that winning is in kind of, the aspect of winning a game is about winning the game, which it’s not, it's about all of the preparation and all of the feedback and that, you know, you get that feedback in a game, then you realign, you get the feedback from your coach, and then you go and you try it again. And I think that's very much how I think about business, which is while we have a goal that you cannot just achieve the goal, the goal is about running a series of experiments and getting that feedback and quote-unquote being coachable. So I think a lot of people who haven't had that are challenged with the idea of coaching because they don't understand that feedback mechanism, that it's about a constant practice and it's about constant improvement as well as going into the unknown. There isn't an athlete that's ever played a game or run a race that didn't do something they hadn't done before, which is very much what business is all about. You're trying to achieve something that the company hasn't achieved before. You're trying to develop a product that hasn't been developed before. And so I think having that history and knowing to try to, the ability to figure out what you don't know, you can't do it yourself. You need those feedback mechanism. And I always found a coach to be the best way to do that.

Jeff Hunter:

Yeah. One of the things I know you and I have talked a little bit about in the past and I speak with my clients frequently about is the difference between goals and measures. And I think a key point of confusion since, as we have talked about many times, confusion is sort of our shtick, it's the thing we're taking a look at, we're reviewing performance and cognition through that lens. One of the things I think is very common is that people confuse goals and measures. And so in a sports sort of context, as an athlete, of course, as I said, honestly, not as accomplished as you, but as an athlete, what I figured out was if excellence is the goal, the win is the measure, but if the win is the goal then it gets pretty confusing because it creates a certain fragility and identification with the win, as opposed to the practice and the process of constantly pushing ourselves to find that outer limit of potential in the moment and outer potential in the game and find our own potential in that game. And I think that's something that I've always found very similar in a lot of different things, whether it's world working with world class performers on the stage or in film, or it's in business or sports or whatever it is, there's this thing of not confusing the goal of excellence with the measure of the win, the win is a nice sort of point in time. They can tell you things are probably on the right path, but you never know you could have gotten lucky etcetera. And I've always experienced in working with you that you kept those two things very clear in your mind. And I think that's what you're talking about.

Jim Wagner:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the phrase that I use consistently is “if you run the system, the goals will come” sort of in, in the athletic context. And I think it's in the business context as well, which is if you're not running a sys...