Strong Leadership- How Coaching Can Help You Get it?

By Coach Yuri Amadin

Leadership is one key ingredient that I discovered in helping clients and myself achieving quantum progress in many small and medium business. If we looked at presidents of many countries, strong leadership is one key ingredient that have transormed a nation to excel. Leaders such as Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela have successfully turn around the beliefs of their people from pessimists into optimisits who are congruent enough to actually did something for the better. I remembered when I started my coaching career, I took this profiling test that told me that I had the characters of “compliance” and “ supportive” in nature. That means, I am more of task oriented and reserved person who do not like to confront people. After 5 years in the coaching business and took another test, I realized that my character has changed. I am more “dominant” and aggressive and more willing to confront issues and people than before, although I am still “detailed” oriented like in the past.

What I saw in my clients, I saw the difference in successfully leading and growing a company came to one attribute of “Strong Leadership”. What is the meaning of strong leadership. I think what it means is the ability to influence others. Because companies that I coached often times were made of many people working in the team. With the owner and sometimes he or she also as a managing director had to convince their staff to do what he or she wanted them to do, and it is not always easy. The question is, how can one develop strong leadership to lead a company for the better?

The answer lies within the owner/managing director/leader himself or herself. In coaching, my main role is to help the owner to solve business problems achieving his or her goals. To do this, I had to have several private coaching session with the owner. When I am with the client, I have to play four roles at the same time: role of a trainer, a consultant, a mentor and a therapist. Coaching happened where I touched those 4 areas with goals of bringing new awareness for the client, helping clients taking ownership of their actions and lastly holding them accountable for the results. In doing this, the coaching will help the client to discover himself or herself on what is her or his being is. Once that happen, that being needs to be expressed like radio frequency to their team, suppliers and clients. An example of this is Steve Jobs, not that I have ever coached him... it’s just an example, Apple Computers products such as Iphone, Ipad, Ipod, etc, have created evangelists in their customers, team and suppliers.

Although, now there are many products from different brands such as the androids and mp3 players, Apple products have created a new rules for cult of people to enjoy their products and become their die hard fans (evangelists). Steve Jobs vision and personality was like a radio frequency that is transformed and pull others with the same beliefs, vision and vibration to follow him, on other words, Steve Jobs have influenced them (strong leadership).

So how do I usually helped my clients in developing their power of influence so that they can be a strong leader:

• First, I teach them that they are two types of circles that they need to be aware of to build their leaderships: smaller circle is called circle of influence and bigger circle is called circle of control.
• The circle that you can handlle and under your leadership is your circle of influence. Therefore; if you want to lead a target who is beyond your circle of influence, its not going to happen unless you can make your circle of influence is bigger enough and touches your circle of control, which is your target market. Target that you want to influence and lead.
• To increase your circle of influence, you need to be aware of two situations: situation of your own being and situations of your target market’s being. Does your being is matched with your target market. If not, you need to match it by increasing yours by reading more, learning more, doing more, being more congruent and getting coached so that you have someone accountable and have someone on the outside evaluating your efforts and result objectively. This is how you develop yourself. You want to be honest to yourself and others. Find your own vision that is a worthy cause for pursuing beyond your life time. Plan on how to achieve that vision and setting up your own commitments and company’s commitments to make sure that when chaos happens, your commitments will hold your company and yourself togerther to achieve that vision.
• To develop your ability to influence others after you develop yourself is you need to know who else do your target market trusts, because most likely, the ones they trust are the ones that influence them, that have the ability to lead them. Trust is transferable, because of that, you need to spend time with be their friends on the persona level, become their helpers as their problem solvers partners. Have genuine interest about them. It’s law of reciprocity, they will give you attention and do something for you if you do something for them first.
• As this happens, keep looking on how can you be close and trusted with others who already earn trusts from your target market. If you are a new director in a company, identify who are the existing someones who have circle of influence in the team of business. Get to
• know them personally, play dumb and dig deep, ask questions and listen well. Basically, you want to pace yourself so that you are in the same frequency with them, similar being as slowly you want to lead them to your goal (influence them).
• When you do all of that, as you meet your staff/target market in a meeting and try to influence them, you have already built enough rapport so influence your target to follow your lead. Because these have many things to do with vibes. If you are a leader of a business, usually people who are not in the same vibe will leave and you will start to attract people with simiar being as yours. And thats what you want.

There you have it, the bigger picture on how to develop your strong leadership by sharpening your skills in influencing others. When you call me and have a private chat, I can start coaching and helping you on how to do this into details and specific action plans. For short, you need to be congruent with what you believe and start lead people from there.

How To Create Winning Business Culture?

By Yuri Amadin

Most of my problems in coaching small business usually is on the attitude of the business team as well as the owner. In my early years, I was so naive about this. I thought, just by showing them the business technical tricks, all their problems would vanish, but I was dead wrong.

Because I didnt realize how important the attitude is, many of my early coaching years came to me projecting my values of what I think should happen in that business. When I did that, the owner and the team was defensive. For those of you considering in getting a business coach to solve your business problems, becareful, do your research on whether the coach has enough flight time to help you solve problems. As years passed, my wisdom grew and I started producing consistent results to my clients. I found that “culture” or “attitude” is the trigger that will help business transformation in small and medium businesses.

With the right attitude, the coaching process and engagement between coach and coachees ran smoothly. Clients started to get more clarity and awareness on whats went on in this business. They were more willing to take ownership of what needs to be done in the business and that their accountability of their work is much higher. Now the question is, how can we create a winning business culture that are followed by the whole team and the owner:

• In the beginning of the coaching process, I usually started with what I called “positioning powerpoint”. In this powerpoint I describe the role of both coach and coachee, the principles that need to be applied for the coaching sessions to produce best results in the business. Although many of then understand and agree, when the coaching happens, these things are not embodied yet in their attitude. The attitude transformation, usually happens when we start to talk about setting up the business’ rules of the game or culture to transform the business.
• See when the business have been failing, it usually are reflected by the “Results” they are getting. Results came from “Actions” that they took in the past. Simply said, if the actions were wrong, the results will be wrong as well. Actions that they took were triggered by “ Feelings” that they had right before they took actions ; therefore, if the feelings were not right, it will make them took the wrong actions. Feelings came from “Thoughts”. They Thought of something and if they have the wrong thoughts or beliefs, their thoughts will be manifested to the wrong feelings, wrong actions and wrong results. Therefore, its obvious that to fix results, I need to fix their thoughts first, but carefully I need to draw their answers from them, not me projecting my values to them.
• Fixing their beliefs or thoughts has a trick to it. In the past, when I asked team on what attitude or rules of the game that needs to be in placed to make the business successful, many of them did not come out with the passionate right answer. It was because they were not ready at that time to be positive. So what I did, I played the opposite, much like Devil’s Acvocate. I asked them what attitud/beliefs or rules of the game that needs to happen to drive the business into bankruptcy. Many hands came up and I got many answers. Once I jot them all down, I asked them whether that it is what they want to happen. Once they say No, I asked the opposite of what I wrote.
• What attitudes/beliefs and rules of the game that needs to happen to transform the business from their present situation to their ideal situations. I used the negative list that I have written down and basically I asked them to come out with the opposite answer that they believe. Instantly, I got new winning culture that came from them. I gave them guidelines that these rules of the game need to represent core values that the owners, team, customers and what the business believe. Usually I asked them to write 3 values that represent each above, but again I asked, if they have to choose only one that they will be congruent to will be which ones.
• At last, we set some kind of rewards and punishments system to encourage the team to practice their rules of the game with the help of many aids such as framing them, putting these values on their computer screen , etc. I also teach them to calling people out and acknowledge their members if they do their values.

There you have it, my ways of helping small and medium businesses in creating winning business culture. If you would like to personally talk to me about your business issues such as this one or other business matters, please email me at bisnisgerilya@gmail.com with the subject of “10 Minute Consultation”.