|
Bob Bookman, INSIGHTMirror 360
President, realized that for almost
twenty years he was wrong about how to
develop leaders.
He wanted to fix his past mistakes, and
with the INSIGHTMirror 360 staff
developed this Mission Statement that
has kept our team in the right direction
for the past nine years:
Our
Mission Statement:
To help people focus on their
strengths for exceptional performance,
contributing to making the world a
better place.
Short version of how this mission
statement emerged. (Longer and more
revealing version follows this
abbreviated piece.)
Bob Bookman, creator of the
INSIGHTMirror 360, began his career as a
management performance improvement
consultant nearly thirty years ago when
he became Board Certified as a Master
Executive Coach. He subsequently
launched a coaching firm that reached
its pinnacle with twelve full-time
coaches and clients that included over a
score of Fortune 500 companies.
In the summer of 2000, Bob experienced a
breakthrough event that he described as
“like an anvil hitting me on the head.”
He had just read the Gallup Study 2000
on the characteristics of outstanding
leaders. One of the project’s most
important findings, corroborated by such
highly respected management experts as
Peter Drucker, Donald Clifton, and
Marcus Buckingham, was that leaders
often waste time trying to “fix”
employees’ weaknesses. The study found
that concentrating on weaknesses often
doesn’t work, and at best only helps
people prevent failure.
Bob realized that he had built a
consulting practice following the common
wisdom among most executive coaches at
that time, based on the opposite of what
the new research had uncovered. He had
been a “fixer of weaknesses” rather than
a “reinforcer of strengths.” Armed with
this new insight, Bob made a decision to
sell his executive coaching business and
set out on a totally new course of
action: To help people focus on their
strengths for exceptional performance,
contributing to making the world a
better place.
Longer And More Revealing Explanation Of
How The INSIGHTMirror 360 Emerged.
by Bob Bookman
Before attending college, I was labeled
by those who didn’t know me well, as
not the brightest kid. With the
exception of English, most of my school
grades were low, especially in the two
subject areas I worked hardest in:
Spanish and algebra. I had to repeat
both courses to graduate.
After college, I entered the Peace Corps
and was sent to the Dominican Republic
to, of all things, teach algebra in
Spanish! I took the teaching assignment
to prove to myself that I could do it.
And after just one month I proved to
myself that I could do it. But I was
miserable, as were my students
I suggested to the Peace Corps Director
a new assignment for myself: helping
assist small farmers form cooperatives
to get a better price for their
sugarcane. At first she said, “No.” But
I persisted by enumerating up my
strengths. These strengths included:
resiliency, gaining people's trust
quickly (in spite of my shoddy Spanish),
mobilizing people to take action, and
making sure every stakeholder played an
integral part in the decision-making
process to form the cooperatives. The
director finally gave in.
I understood that the small sugarcane
landowners in our rural area were
trapped in a cycle of working long hours
to eke out a living, greatly hindered by
the middlemen's greed. These
middlemen bought the small landowners’
sugar at very low prices. And it seemed
the small cane farmers had no other
choice but to sell at such minimum
prices because the sugarcane refineries
only bought cane in large
quantities--not the small lots that
these farmers could produce.
In ten weeks, I had over a dozen small
sugar cane landowners working to help
create their own cooperatives. At first,
there was no interest in my idea, but
that changed rapidly to guarded
enthusiasm when I took fifteen farmers
to a nearby town, El Seibo. Here there
were several very successful dairy
cooperatives formed two years ago by
small sugar cane farmers seeking to
dispense with their middlemen. The
reason the sugarcane farmers kept their
hopes restrained was because they knew
their lives were in danger from thugs
hired to keep the status quo. Bravely,
they stayed the course, and within five
months formed three successful
cooperatives selling cane directly to
the sugar refineries, making four times
the money for their effort.
I visited the Dominican Republic with my
family in 2001, and met many of my
farmer amigos now in the ranks of the
Dominican upper-middleclass. Upon
returning to the States, I opened my
mail that included an article from the
American Society for Training and
Development (ASTD). The article
concluded 360º assessments were
unwittingly encouraging coaches to focus
almost solely on people's weaknesses,
while seldom or not at all building on
the power of their natural strengths. I
immediately went to Google, and found
leading researchers like Marcus
Buckingham, Donald Clifton, and the late
Peter Drucker agreeing with the ASTD
findings. This revelation caused me to
take a new look at the twenty years I
had spent building a practice as an
executive management coach based on a
set of beliefs that after serious
self-inquiry I could no longer
support. Before reading the article,
I thought my job was to help clients
overcome personal areas of weakness --
often with the assistance of
well-recognized 360s. I almost never had
my client’s strengths play much of a
part in my coaching approach.
I asked myself, how could I have
accepted the common wisdom that “fixing”
people’s weaknesses would be of great
benefit; and that a person’s strengths
and talents would simply take
care of themselves? Thirty years after
high school, I was still dealing with
wounds from well-intentioned people
whose entire focus was on fixing my
weaknesses to make me better.
Better at what? Algebra, which most
people never use in a lifetime? And
where were the supporters of my
strengths in English, especially
writing? Why had no one ever thought to
encourage me to write for the school
newspaper, or express my writing talents
in other ways? That would have done
wonders for my self-esteem.
Even more surprising, I forgot as a
coach the lessons I learned in the Peace
Corps about trusting and utilizing my
strengths and the strengths of others?
All those lessons were left behind, as I
simply followed the way most coaches
worked. Was I (and others, too) so
hardwired that we kept believing,
regardless of our experiences, that the
best way to achieve and succeed was to
work on our weaknesses, leaving our
strengths to take care of themselves?
Why wasn’t it obvious, especially to me
that it is within our strengths that the
true opportunities for world-class
performance reside?
Within two months, I closed my coaching
practice and began developing the
INSIGHTMirror 360. I was on a mission,
based on what I had learned from my own
pain and triumphs, and backed by the
latest research building on the fact
that the best leaders capitalize
predominantly on their strengths to
succeed.
I believe most people want to contribute
to making their world a better place. If
INSIGHTMirror 360 can be a driver in
helping people consciously identify and
use their strengths to their fullest
potential, what a positive influence
that would have on their self-esteem and
level of productivity! Just imagine how
such a combination of factors
--individual strengths, high
self-esteem, and greater productivity --
could come together to become an
uplifting and ongoing force for change.
|
