January 2010

This Month's Features

+	Leadership Book Series
+	FMI's 360 Feedback
Leadership Videos Online
+	Introduction to the Leadership Institute
+	An In Depth Look at the Leadership Institute
+	Leadership Institute Testimonials

FMI's Executive Coaching

Just as the best athletes have coaches, strong leaders often have coaches as well. In tough times, the need for coaching is even greater. Our FMI coaches bring more than 100 years of combined coaching experience, coupled with specialized industry knowledge, that can help you through these turbulent times.

Click here to learn more about FMI's Executive Coaching.

What FMI Executive Coaching clients are saying:

• "When you have the ability to make change and improvement to someone who affects your business, affects the growth of team members and affects your image – can you afford not to complete something like this? My answer is no!"

• "I already have made a greater contribution to this company as a result of coaching – both from a performance and a supervisory standpoint. In working with my group of a dozen people, they have their subordinates as well; I think it’s important how the impact transcends my group."

The "Practical Tools for Exceptional Leaders" booklet series is designed to help you learn and apply best-of-class leadership principles in your life and within your organization.
Click here to purchase

A Letter From Ron Magnus, Managing Director

From 1967 to 1973, the UCLA men’s basketball team won an unprecedented seven national titles in a row. During this streak UCLA won 88 straight games with four perfect 30-0 seasons. These teams were full of future NBA stars, such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton, but the one constant was a legendary coach, John Wooden. Even the greatest talents in the world benefit from a coach who is deeply committed to their success and knows how to help them achieve exceptional results.

Unfortunately, business leaders are not like athletes. While both are expected to deliver exceptional performance every day, athletes spend up to 90% of their time practicing to perform. In contrast, leaders spend the vast majority of their time performing with little practice. And very few leaders work with a coach as talented and dedicated as John Wooden at UCLA. Fortunately, this trend is changing as organizations realize the value of their best performers in driving organizational success. Many companies are adopting the concept of executive coaching, which pairs a leader with a professionally trained coach to accelerate leadership growth. Coaching has proven to be a highly flexible and personally tailored way to develop current and future leaders.

This issue of the Leadership e-News looks at the rapidly expanding field of executive coaching and how you can utilize coaching to make organizational change.

Ron Magnus

More Is More: Leaders Coached Simultaneously Means Exponential Impact

Jennifer Jones, Jake Appelman and Tom Alafat

Just as individual coaching can be transformational at an individual leadership level, cadre coaching can be transformational at an overall organizational level.

The emergence of executive coaching as a billion-dollar industry supports coaching as a proven means of improving results as a leader. Every day, thousands of executives work with coaches as part of their personal development. Great coaching can expand capacity, smooth the transition into a new position and sharpen a leader’s focus. Yet, no matter how transformational coaching is at an individual level, it is the systems and culture of the organization that determine the depth and duration of change. One of the coaching approaches evolving as a best practice in organizational change is cadre coaching, which leverages an entire network of coaches and leaders to make systemic and cultural shifts in organizations.

Read on to learn how cadre coaching works.

Blowing the Whistle: The Buzz on Executive Coaching

Jennifer Jones and Jake Appelman

Executives who have been coached have found direction, purpose and confidence in achieving their goals more quickly than they would have without their coach.

Executives at companies throughout the nation are buzzing about the personal benefits they’ve gained from their coaching experiences. In addition to these personal accounts, the statistics are impressive and support the notion that coaching helps executives find direction and purpose while helping them to achieve their goals faster. According to a 2008 Sherpa Executive Coaching Survey, 90% of HR professionals and coaching clients see the value of executive coaching as “very high” or “somewhat high.” Fast Company’s survey on the same subject, published April 10, 2006, found 92% of leaders being coached plan to use a coach again; 63% of organizations say they plan to increase their use of coaching over the next five years; and 71% of senior executives and 43% of CEOs have worked with a coach.

Read on to learn how coaching can be an effective solution for many of the current issues facing construction companies.