Like most successful companies, we’ve considered ourselves self-sufficient. We have a lot of talented people, we know our industry well, and we’ve been fairly disciplined as an organization. The magazine business is complicated. There are a lot of moving parts, and much of it is based on an arcane knowledge (much of it, admittedly, folklore) that takes years to absorb. On top of that, we’re still a small company. We don’t like to spend money. We can’t afford to spend money.
Our aversion to consultants, therefore, is deep-seated. It’s made worse by watching our largest competitor rely so much on consultants that it makes us wonder sometimes why its own executives still receive a paycheck.
So it’s time for me to make a confession.
For the last few months, we’ve been using an executive coach. The payoff has been enormous. Let me tell you how it happened—overcoming prejudice isn’t easy—and what the payoff has been.
I’ve written before about my friendship with Mike McCurley, a top family lawyer in Dallas. Family law requires a lot of hand-holding and a lot of psychology. It also requires getting people to cut through the emotional clutter to understand what they truly want to achieve. These skills, developed over the years in very trying situations, are applicable to a lot more than child-custody cases. Mike’s friends have long encouraged him to develop another professional channel to apply this knowledge. I was one of the encouragers. Mike has been a personal mentor of mine, and I know how valuable this kind of counsel can be.
Lo and behold, he did it. Last month, Mike announced the formation of Personal Enhancement Coaching (www.personalenhancementcoaching.com), a consortium of the best business coaches around. In typical McCurley fashion, he picked the members of his new group by gathering references and then having them coach him.
We became a client before the plaque went on the door. I was intrigued by his description of what an executive coach does, and I saw the possibility of how a coach could help some of our younger managers—they are mostly young managers—learn how to be more effective in guiding their teams. The first person Mike assigned to us was Nancy Wonders. It was an experiment for us. To say the experiment paid off is an understatement. Nancy has now worked with several of us, and we’re learning every day.
A coach doesn’t purport to know more about our business than we do. What a coach brings to the table is a clear-sighted understanding of how organizations work, how people interact, and how to help each person achieve their best. It is about process, not content. A lot gets tangled up in any group that works together for a while, and a coach helps straighten things out. The result is amazing to watch.
We are converts. We’re in danger of becoming coach-crazy. We’re already interviewing and lining up coaches for other situations. For example, if we make an acquisition, how do we absorb a group with its own culture into our own? Or, if we launch publications outside of Dallas, how do we instill and keep alive our culture in those new locations? These are problems we could fumble through on our own, but why not get it right from the beginning?
Growing is not first about revenues. Growing is about people. As our people grow, our revenues grow. It’s an equation so simple that even I can understand it.
