What Is Your Leaderboard?
I am a coach who has a coach. Her name is Maureen Ahern, and she is wonderful at holding me accountable and helping me get unstuck by asking powerful questions that cause me to think differently.
(BTW, if you’re wondering why someone who describes himself as a coach would need a coach, let me suggest you might be asking the wrong question. If coaching is as powerful an experience as I believe, then why wouldn’t I want a coach who could help me unlock my potential and accomplish my goals?)
Our last coaching session occurred last Thursday, the first day of the Masters Tournament. The issue we chose to discuss—well, technically I chose, but my coach tricked me into it!—was my recent transition from being a long-time practicing lawyer and law firm leader to becoming a Leadership and Strengths Coach.
Being an employment lawyer for the past 30 years and helping clients solve difficult employee disputes has been tremendously rewarding in many ways, and it comes with clear markers for success:
Did my client win or lose that hearing or lawsuit?
Did they achieve their objectives in their labor negotiations?
Did I hit my individual productivity and business development objectives?
Am I making a meaningful economic contribution to my firm?
While these markers are not easy to achieve, they are all very measurable ways to see whether I am living up to my goal of contributing more to my clients and firm than I’m taking out. (Those of you who are fans of Adam Grant’s wonderful book Give and Take know exactly what I mean.)
The measures for successful coaching, on the other hand, are a little harder to define. When done well, coaching results not just in numerical improvement, but in lives being transformed and worlds being rocked. I have had coaching clients tell me they gained a fresh understanding of their purpose in life as a result of our coaching work together; they had become more of the colleague, spouse and parent they wanted to be; and they experienced a particular flash of insight during a coaching session that first caused chills, then caused transformation. All were fantastic testimonials to the power of coaching and affirmations of my decision to spend the second half of my career doing it. The thing is, though, it’s a lot harder to measure chill bumps than client wins and direct economic contribution, you know?
During my last coaching session as a client, I explained to my coach that I had always been at or near the top in my previous roles, whether as a working lawyer, practice group leader, student or even football player. (Those of you snickering at the last part should know that before being domesticated by life and career, the 17-year-old version of me was a feisty, though undersized, cornerback for the Fighting Colonels of Henderson County High School: H-C-H-S, Fight, Fight, Fight!) Given my still-burning desire to achieve, I wondered, how could I show I was still at the top of my game when success could no longer be measured by win/loss records and productivity metrics?
In response to my wondering, my coach said something I’ve been thinking about continuously since: “Mike, what I’m hearing is that you’ve been on the leaderboard your whole life. What I’m wondering is what do you want your new leaderboard to be for this next stage of your life and career?” (Being originally from the Bronx, it’s possible she might have slipped in some profanity as punctuation, but this is a family blog.)
A leaderboard is a board or list showing the names and scores of people doing the best in a particular game or competition, like the leaderboard from the Masters tournament shown here. The key to a leaderboard is knowing not just who has the best scores, but precisely what the scores are measuring.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, all of us are operating pursuant to a leaderboard that measures our performance in our professional and personal lives against a set of measures or criteria. The reality, though, is that people who make it to the top tend to be those who intentionally set the markers against which they are measured.
In my next post, I’ll discuss seven specific measures I plan on using for my own personal leaderboard. If you are no longer interested in chasing a leaderboard set by someone else, I encourage you to join me in considering what measures you would put on your own leaderboard. Putting it more directly, how will you measure YOUR life?
Mike Tooley is a Co-Founder with Upstream Principles LLC, a coaching and consulting firm dedicated to helping individuals, leaders, and teams go upstream to discover solutions for their leadership and employee development challenges. As a certified Leadership and Strengths Coach, Mike is committed to serve as a guide to help others discover, and live out, who they are designed to be.