Chris McCluskey, founder and president of PCCI, joins Greg Leith and Paul Aubin, a Convene Chair, to discuss the necessity of an integrated approach to growth as a leader. Together, they examine the many aspects of leadership growth: peer groups, the Holy Spirit, consulting, coaching, assessments and individual learning. Paul Aubin comes alongside them with real-life examples from his years as a Convene Chair. Join them as they dive deep into what it takes to truly grow and transform as a Christian business leader.
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Chris McCluskey: How Leaders Grow
We’re here in the Convene Studios, where in a moment we’re going to get to have some time with Chris McCluskey. He’s a psychologist. He’s the founder of Professional Christian Coaching Institute. They’ve trained more Christian coaches than anybody in the world. Joining Chris will be Paul Aubin, who’s a convened chair, a convened coach, a convened consultant, and somebody who has a strong business background. Paul will take the concepts that Chris and I will talk about and walk them out in shoe-leather for us. We’re going to be talking about how Christian leaders grow.
It’s something I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about because sometimes we think that our individual study helps us grow. It does, but it needs to be attached to things like coaching, assessments, mentoring, the Bible, the Holy Spirit, and a peer group. Welcome. We’re here to talk about how Christian leaders grow.
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I’m excited to be with you guys. Paul Aubin runs a couple of Convene groups and is the vice president for marketing for Convene, and has had a long career in business and selling. Chris McCluskey, a psychotherapist who worked with clients in his prior life in a practice in Tampa, is now the founder and president of the PCCI, Professional Christian Coaching Institute, which is all over the world, training now over 4,000 Christian coaches.
I’m excited to be with you guys and talking about how Christian leaders grow. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. It has its roots in conversations I’ve had with people where somebody might say, “They’re so excited they’re in a peer group.” I can get excited about that because that’s a good thing for Convene. Somebody might say, “Boy, I’ve been studying my Bible all by myself. I’ve locked myself in a room, parked myself on a desert island for a year, and I’m studying my Bible.”
Somebody else might say, “I took the DISC test and I’ve learned who I am.” Somebody else might say, “I’ve finally decided to be in a peer group,” but it occurred to me that God wants us to be involved in all those modalities, not just one. Real adult learning has five elements. It has individual components, coach mentoring, assessments, the Bible, and the Holy Spirit, and a peer group environment. I’m excited to talk to you guys about that because Paul, you live this out in shoe leather day by day with your group. Chris, you can help us with the professional aspects of this and the coaching aspects. Thanks for coming.
Good to be here.
The Coaching Paradox: Training Vs. Untrained Coaches
Chris, why don’t you start us off with some of your thoughts on the subject of how adults learn?
What I love is tackling the topic that you’re talking about here, not really just theoretically. The reason I’m so excited about Convene is that, having integrated the coaching element into the model of the rest of what Convene does, you’ve really created a very holistic or integrative approach to leadership development. That’s what Convene is really all about developing Christian leaders in all of the senses in which they are called to lead.
I think you’ve identified correctly that breaking things down into any of those individual pieces, they’re all important, but any of them in isolation, or even 2 or 3 of them just hodgepodge together, don’t give near the potential for transforming the person. Not just teaching skills, not just giving new insights, a-has, all of that’s growth, but the individual who can take all that material and have it integrated, and it flows out of their whole being, that’s the convene model. That’s what coaching is all about, which, as you know, is why I’m so excited about what Convene is doing with coaching.
Can we talk about that a little bit? You and I have talked about this a lot. Someone can still be in the United States of America, Canada, or the world can still say, “I’m a coach, but have no formal training. Why is that? I cannot just hang your shingle out there and say, “I am a coach.”
You can do that. You’re doing nothing illegal, nor even unethical or immoral, but it is a problem because the word coaching is such a faddish term now. Everybody says, “I’m a coach.” It’s the new word for consultant. “Our discipleship program is now called our coaching program,” or “Our mentoring program is now called our coaching.”
Any number of things that are people helping that have been done in other names are now being renamed coaching. You get a term that is basically meaningless until you clarify your terms. Let’s get that out there. When we’re talking about the way that Convene integrates coaching into your model of leadership growth, we’re talking about a way of working in partnership with either an individual or with a group of people.
When you’re in coach mode, it is looking to draw out from the person things that are inside of them that they may not be aware of or may not have full access to until they hear it come out of their mouth. We call that facilitating a monologue. It’s not a dialogue like we’re doing here, talking back and forth. When we are in coach mode, we are seeking not to pour into them, but to draw out from them through questions and clarifying reflection back to them the things that are in there that they don’t have full access to.
When we are in coach mode, we are seeking not to pour into them, but to draw out from them. Share on XWhen they hear it come out of their mouth, they say, “I needed to hear myself say that.” That makes sense to me. I know where I’m going with that. Where did it come from? In here. How did it come out? Through the coach drawing it out, not pouring it in like a mentor, or a discipler, or a teacher. Anybody who is taking an outside-in approach, that’s decidedly not what we’re talking about.
This is not the focus of what we want to talk about, but it is a pretty important moment that you bring up here, which is this notion of there are organizations out there that would say, “Yes, we have coaches, but the coaches have no training.” I remember in the early days, Paul, I’ve convened some of our chairs, as we call our leaders, would be going to a one-to-one coaching time, and they’d be nervous because they thought, “What if I don’t have the answer to the question that somebody might ask about manufacturing, about real estate, about agriculture, about IT? No, I don’t know the answer.” They’re thinking the coach means outside in.
I’ve got to give them the answer.
Why is it important that we partner with you to train our leaders?
It’s because it’s a complete period time shift, isn’t it? When you really get that this is not about outside in, advisory, guidance, direction, insight, those are all valuable. They’re part of the model that Convene uses. When you’re in coach mode, you’re not doing any of those. Every one of us is going to get to the end of our bag when we go, “I got nothing else in there to give you right now. I got nothing from the outside to pour into you.” If I were to shift into a coach mode and seek to draw out from you, why, all kinds of new vistas might open up for us.
The Psychologist’s View: Why Integrated Learning Is Essential
You’ve trained over 4,000 people to be coaches in many programs that you have. Here we are sitting in the Convene offices, and you’re saying peer groups are important, assessments are important, and individual learning is important. An integrative talk about why that is from a psychologist’s perspective.
A lot of times, when people look at just personal growth on any plane, in this capacity, we’re talking specifically about leaders, but any human growth, we have our go-tos, our favorite things. I love to read, so you’ve got a library full of books that you read. I love workshops.
Don’t look at my books.
Everybody has their thing. I love to just cuddle up with my Bible and do my journaling. That’s my thing. Private retreat. All of those are good and important, and all of them in isolation are not going to be adequate because again, we’re looking to develop not just the mind or not just the skill set. We’re looking to develop the person.
There’s a fancy word for that called ontology. Ontology is the study of being. Our personhood that we bring into every situation, when you’re working ontologically, you’re trying to work that whole person so that they can draw from any piece of self that a particular situation might require. Coaching, since it’s not pouring in but is drawing out, is working ontologically all the time. Drawing from those assessment insights that you got.
You took such and such an assessment. What did that tell you about? What could you use in this situation? That book we were just discussing last week, The Bible Study Lesson, the conversation you had with your wife last week. All of those things can be brought to bear when you’re in question mode as a coach because you’re connecting, you’re integrating all of what the person really has. You may not realize they have until the coach asks them.
I can tell you that I was one of those outside coaches, and I did get nervous. I had anxiety and fear and worry and all those things because I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to carry the day with their discussions.
You probably knew you couldn’t carry.
I couldn’t.
Every one of us knows at a certain point, I’ve got nothing.
Thank you for introducing us to this different way of doing it, because now you just go into a coaching session and you don’t really have to be prepared. The only thing you need to be prepared with is profound questions. If you ask the right questions, you’ll take them down the path of self-discovery, and they’ll discover on their own. You know all the benefits of that.
If you ask the right questions, you'll take them down the path of self-discovery, and they'll discover on their own. Share on XYour expertise is in a tremendous amount of self-awareness. How are you, Paul Aubin, showing up with this client in your being so that you aid them in hearing their being? We emphasize that when you’re in a pure coach mode, the coach is largely invisible. They’re like a little disembodied voice in the ear of the person. I go back to what we were saying about us dialoguing here, but you’re helping the participant to facilitate a monologue to just do some self-discovery, self-exploration, until they hit pay dirt. When they do, you can hear it. Their countenance changes, their energy level goes up. They suddenly see all kinds of connections that we as the coach may not even know what’s going on for them. They’re making connections, and that’s what’s important.
Community And Growth: The Inescapable Need For Others
We don’t want to rag on coaching, and we don’t want to rag on peer groups, but it is true that someone can lie to their coach, and it is true that someone can be silent and quiet in a peer group. It is true that someone can lie on an assessment and say, “I’m this,” but the 360 assessment would say, “Your people don’t say you’re that.” When we put the assessments, the 360, the individual learning, the peer group environment, and the coaching environment together, you almost cannot escape. Townsend and Cloud say in their book, How People Grow, they say it’s doubtful that anybody can actually grow apart from community. Real learning happens over time in a community. Would you agree?
Yes. There’s an old saying that, “We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.” If we are always about taking into ourselves from learning and assessments and readings and experiences and all, but there’s not a community around us that can help us with that other perspective and say, “I don’t think that’s all that’s going on here.” They can help draw us out to see a bigger picture. Everything ultimately, we were designed to be in relationship, and everything else ultimately going to lead us to a lot more insight and truth when we’re in community. Do it in isolation. You’re going to wind up doing some navel-gazing at a certain point.
That doesn’t happen immediately. There are several stages of a group and the evolution of a team. What you’re trying to get to, as you both know, is to get to that place of vulnerability and transparency through trust and through connection in that group. I know in my group, initially, we didn’t get there. We had some community going on, but it wasn’t really a fake community. It was a fake community.
Going through the motions. Very well intentioned, knowing that it’s valuable, showing up and doing the song and dance, but not really going very deep.
We went from a group of great ideas, phase one, where it’s all about me, to the next phase, which is all about establishing best practices, it’s about we, to the next stage, which was accountability, which is about us and performance. The last is high performance. What I found is that as you go through that evolution of a team, vulnerability and trust start, and then you start getting real in the group as opposed to, if you look at the tip of an iceberg, we’re going below the water line. That takes time. It takes trust.
It’s over that time you’re developing trust, and until there’s trust, as Lencioni and so many others write about, you really don’t have what you need in order to get the transformational change. You can get an incremental change. Transformation, again, of the person or of the culture, the work team, the company, that’s only going to happen when there’s deep trust because you’ve had that growth process over time as a community.
Paul, you have some real-life stories from the trenches that are walked out in shoe leather of these concepts of adult learning with people that you work with. Do you want to share some of those?
The first one I was thinking of, I actually called a couple of my CEOs yesterday to see if they could reflect on their experience in the group. I actually inherited the CEO group that’s been around for over fifteen years. One of the members I called has been with us for fourteen years at Convene. He reflected on a time, actually, before me, which I thought was a really good example. He was going through a mediation courtroom exercise. He was being sued by a contractor. What the chair decided to do, which I thought was brilliant, was to set up a mock trial at the forum meeting. Each member of the team played a different role. One person was the judge. There were two attorneys. Were people on the jury?
The black robe.
What this gentleman told me was what came out of was that they all agreed that this person was getting too emotional. Their personality was coming through, and that would have really impacted the outcome of the trial negatively. They all coached him on just stick with the facts, and don’t get emotional. From there, the coach, the chair at that time, had really good material to go ahead and coach this gentleman on how he is going to present himself at the trial with what he has to say. What the CEO told me last night was that they saved over $200,000 in a settlement as a result of really winning the settlement. He couldn’t have done it without that peer group setting doing the mock trial.
That’s a beautiful example, and it really illustrates one of the points that I used to address, even back when I was doing psychotherapy 25 years ago, before I moved into the coaching world, and that is that there are things you can facilitate in a group that you cannot facilitate. I don’t care how skilled you are as a therapist or a coach. You cannot facilitate those same things one-on-one. There’s a place for one-on-one.
The way that Convene integrates the coaching element into a community that starts to get used to the value that they got in the last meeting. Now they’re realizing, “Maybe I could play that questioning role and clarify something. They’re helping each other out. If they all trust each other and love each other and are invested in each other’s best, then there are things that will happen in that community setting that just couldn’t happen any other way, one-on-one or with a book or an assessment or some modality.”
Beyond Books And Coaches: The Indispensable Role Of Group Dynamics
As a psychotherapist, what’s the reason that’s true? Convene had some of its roots in tech, Vistage ideology, which I think 2 or 3 industrial psychologists designed, including the fact that there was a curriculum and coaching. Curriculum coaching and group. Why is group important? There might be somebody out there who you could talk to who would say, “Listen, I have a coach. I read a lot of books. What do I need this group for that sounds like a waste of a day?”
First of all, I will say I practice what I preach. Although I am the founder and president of this institute and we train all these people in coaching, I have a coach. I’m on my eighth coach. I’ve always had an individual coach who is working with me around aspects of whatever I’m going on in my life, personally and professionally. I’m part of a group.
That’s because I facilitate mastermind groups, but I also am a paying member of a mastermind group that’s very similar to the convened model because of the power of my being able to be there in a room full of others who have all of their differing backgrounds, but they know me because I’ve chosen to be known. I know them, and I may be speaking into their life or posing questions to them or whatever as part of my investment in their growth in that group.
Twenty minutes later, they’re turning around, asking me questions, or pouring into my life from that group, and they’re seeing things that Chris McCluskey would not have seen. The group sees, and everybody else is nodding their head. Again, I don’t see things the way they are. I see things the way I am. My group helps me to see more broadly the way things really are. They can be my eyes and ears.
I don't see things the way they are. I see things the way I am. Share on XYou may not want to recognize. There’s this classic story in my life when we worked with the Center for Creative Leadership in Colorado Springs. Business Week said it was the number one leadership training program in the country. You were surrounded by psychotherapists in a group for a week, and there were all these great exercises. All these psychologists and all these people in the group said to this one particular person, “You are whatever it was. You are to this or to that.”
He was with arms folded, head down, crying at the table. This is like, “Why didn’t anybody ever tell me this?” It was really quite a moment, so he was distressed and stressed. That night, he called his wife at home and said, “Honey, they told me da da da.” The program was $12,000, and she said, “I could have told you that for free, but you weren’t listening.” The group was able to say to this person what he actually wasn’t listening to. She was saying, “You are whatever,” but he wasn’t listening.
Greg and I were talking about this. We’re talking about the fact that one-on-one coaching is very complementary with peer groups. This is what we’re talking about now. I get to thinking, “My role as a coach is to take them down the path, asking profound questions to identify opportunities and issues, and then to be their cheerleader. Encourage them, then also be their accountability partner to get them the results.”
With my 40 years of experience in business, that’s still not enough because I was thinking about my group and with the 12 to 15 people I usually have around the table, that represents over 400 years, not 40, but 400. To your point, it’s a very diverse group with a lot of experience, and usually 2 or 3 people are on the table that actually have specific experience and knowledge in that area. They almost become like an affinity group. They split off later on.
You’re saying you would have to be 400 years old to equal the group’s experience? You’d be using a cane.
I come from the pharmaceutical industry, where I was head of Botox marketing. I’m actually close to 100 years old. My point is, what I can do is help set the table with this person, with this CEO or key leader, bring them to the larger group, this 400 years of experience around the table, they come out with an outcome, then it comes back to me, and I help them stay accountable.
The step in between is, “They go to work. Can they actually execute on what they were told and what the next steps were that they were identified in the group?” Usually not without a coach’s help. What happens the next day after the forum meeting? The tyranny of the urgent. Somebody leaves, somebody hasn’t paid their bill, whatever. All the pain points that CEOs go through, they get distracted from that direction from the group.
They have their coaching appointment 2 or 3 weeks later, the coach comes back and says, “What I try to do is a week or two after the forum meeting is text them a column?” Say, “How is that going?” It really is great. You and I talked about it, the coaching and the peer group is really complementary of each other. They both need each other to really get the outcomes that these people are looking for.
I want to riff off of a point that you’re making because the word that you used a moment ago was listening when the husband wasn’t listening to the wife.
“I could have told you that for free.”
“You weren’t listening to me.” None of us don’t listen very well. It’s hard to listen well, and one of the key skills that we train coaches, in addition to powerful questioning, is active listening. When you’re in coach mode, you are doing a lot of listening with the client, even for the client, stopping the client sometimes when they’re in mid-sentence and you’re saying, “Did you hear what you just said?”
The answer is no, they didn’t hear what they just said. They didn’t hear the import of it until you, as the coach, caught it and said, “Say more about that. What would that look like? How would that be different? Has anybody else done that? How did they do it? What change do you think that affected?” You just stay in those questions with them, actively helping them to listen to the insights their spouses have given them, or the group is giving them, or the workplace is giving them, or the book that they read, or the assessment.
They’ve got the material. They aren’t listening inwardly as well as they will when they’re in conversation with their coach, who’s listening, again, for and with them to help them access and then implement what is in fact in there. It’s not that, “I need one more what degree, one more workshop?” No, there’s nothing more outside in. I need more ability to pull what’s inside out and use it more fully.
The world, for the most part, thinks adult learning is sage on a stage at another conference. Let’s hear Mr. or Mrs. Famous give a talk and sell their latest book. The talk is 40 minutes long. I paid whatever, $2,000 for the event. There were a thousand people there, and I just learned something. I find that people take those notes, put them in the file folder called 2019 conferences, and move on with their lives. It’s not real adult learning. Real learning happens over time in a community.
My father raised us kids with a phrase that many have heard, and that is “The real learning of anything starts when you begin doing.”
Thanks, Dad.
Do you have to do something?
Yeah. I got to implement. I got to iterate. I got to try that and then get some feedback, check with that, listen and see, “Did that get me the result? If not, what do I need to tweak?”
Self-Discovery Through Assessments: Holding The Mirror Up To God
Let’s talk about assessments for a little bit. I’m happy to talk about assessments when there’s someone who’s a psychologist in the midst. Some people would say, “That’s just the way I am.” They don’t really understand who they are. Bonhoeffer wrote a poem, Who Am I, from prison and realized he might not be the person that he thought he was, and who was he really in Christ. Talk about the value of assessments like the DiSC, the five strengths, or the PXT, or I don’t care what you do, Enneagram. It doesn’t matter, but it’s sometimes good to look in the mirror and then hold the mirror up to God. Talk about that a little.
If a person doesn’t lie, try to skew their test, but actually is really trying to take a well-designed and tested, like empirically proven assessment, like a DiSC or a Myers-Briggs or the StrengthsFinder inventories or Enneagram or any of those others that can be helpful for understanding self. What they’re doing is on the scriptural principle that the gifts and the call of the Lord are irrevocable.
To be irrevocable means he placed them within us. He’s not going to take them back. That’s us. That’s in there. It does not say the gifts in the call of the Lord are going to be known to you automatically. You don’t get a manual or a blueprint when you’re born. This is the way this kid’s hardwired from the factory. The assessments help you in the self-discovery process if you use them and have someone help you to make sense of them, and then help you connect not just cognitively.
The assessments help you in the self-discovery process if you use them and have someone help you to make sense of them. Share on XNow, what does that mean you’re this person, but where do you see that play out? When you brought that strength, what happened? What do you notice changing in a room? The question-based fleshing out of assessment results in the end increases a person’s self-awareness. That’s EQ. That’s emotional intelligence. Do I know myself? Some things are in there that are irrevocable.
Am I aware of them? If I’m aware of them, do I use them intentionally, consciously? Probably not nearly to the degree that I could if I had some hard assessments to say, “These are them.” I had somebody, i.e., a coach and a group, help me to figure out what they look like when you invest in them? How could you do more of that? We become more of the fullness of what we were created for.
Beyond “That’s Just Who I Am”: Growth And Sanctification
I think the coach mentor piece is part of stopping somebody from saying, “That’s just who I am. You better get used to it. I’m just bombastic,” or “I’m just quiet. I just take a long time to make decisions,” or whatever. Being the same is antithetical to scripture, which says that we’re supposed to be coming more and more like Christ and sanctification takes time.
There’s no justice to it at all.
I often think that it’s interesting that God didn’t set the deal up that when we accept Christ and become a new creature, we become a totally new creature instantly, and we run around perfect. Since that’s not how it happened, which would be very weird, all people who are Christ followers would be perfect. I think the world would be so mad. We’re all in the process of becoming more like Christ, so we therefore, by definition, cannot say, “That’s just the way I am, I’m going to be that way for the next 40 years.”
Again, I’ll circle this all the way back to the beauty of what I believe about the convene model. I’m not just blowing smoke on this. I really love what Convene is about because it is a holistic and integrative approach to self-development across the lifespan. Just reiterating each of those key pieces. The Holy Spirit is at work in all of those, but would we take any of the elements, assessments, for example, and say, “You really don’t need those assessments. Goodness, no.”
“Would we take Bible study?” “No, we need that. We need the individual. We need the group process. We need to be out just doing and testing things and finding out what works and doesn’t.” A holistic approach calls the individual to be always about a process of growth. We’re never done. It’s not a destination. It’s just a journey. That we are always becoming more of who we were created to be.
We're never done. It's not a destination. It's just a journey. We are always becoming more of who we were created to be. Share on XOne of the members of my group, with his entire company, went through DiSC, and he said, “One of the big a-ha’s was that as he separated out the four different personality types.” It suddenly struck him that he was only getting to 25% of the people effectively because he was pretty much saying, “Deal with me. This is who I am.”
“This is me.”
What we shared with him was that you need to reframe for each personality type, so you can expect to get different outcomes from that conversation. It’s not one size fits all. That was a real a-ha for him as well as the rest of his company, his leadership team.
He’s using himself differently now. He is more self-aware and therefore chooses more consciously how to interact with Susie versus how to interact with Bill because he knows how they’re wired and how they hear best. How do they get motivated best? When things shut them down and all, he shifts his way of being in interaction with them.
He talks to Billy in bullet points if he talks in paragraphs or novels. He doesn’t see Bill very long. Bill leaves the room. When he talks to Susie, he’s very careful not to use bullet points. He talks in paragraphs because she’s more of an S, I believe, on the chart. You actually have a story of a self-taught member, who didn’t have an opportunity, or didn’t want to attend University.
They see Convene as a place of intense learning. He’s near and to my heart, this gentleman. He’s actually my son-in-law. He was in the Convene before I was, and he introduced Convene to me. I’m forever thankful for my son-in-law, as long as he takes care of my daughter. He didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. He was homeschooled. He actually started a business. He was very entrepreneurial at an early age, at the age of thirteen, and now he’s 31.
He joined Convene at the age of 23, very young, and he’s told me on and on, as well as the people in our group, that his bachelor’s degree and his master’s degree have been earned through the learning process of Convene and being in two Convene groups now, and having a couple of different coaches. He’s just genuinely grateful, and you know him.
I do know, and what he is doing on the business front is amazing, and what he’s doing on the personal front is amazing, and why? It’s because he has had that many years of being in this integrative approach to self. He has far more self-awareness than the average 31-year-old would ever have because he chose to immerse himself in a setting that would call out those different parts of himself and help him to become more aware of what he actually brings.
I’m very proud of him. He’s done well, but it’s a great example of group learning as well as one-on-one learning that he’s experienced, despite his father-in-law.
I want to, at the same time, we’re saying there are some really good things about Convene. I want to say that there are some great things about the work that you’ve done, teaching our chairs about how to be better coaches, because our retention of members has actually gone up since our chairs have become better coaches. I think the days are gone when it’s the coach modality that is patting you on the back, sending you into the game, hurrah. That’s not really great coaching. Thanks for the work that you’ve done to teach our chairs how to be better coaches.
It’s been a great privilege. It’s one of my biggest joys in doing the work that we are because it’s multiplying the impact. When we can train not only a coach, but coaches who then work with others who are overseeing companies and in many ways changing our culture, changing the world, it’s pretty exciting stuff to get to be part of. You commented earlier that people will sometimes use a coach who isn’t trained.
The truth is, a lot of times, even if they are using a coach who is trained, you have to go back to the definition. There are over 10,000 different training certifications. You can put your quarter in the bubblegum machine, turn the handle, and you’re certified as a coach in this, that, or the other. I do think it’s important that the coach training that we’re doing with the Convened chairs is based on the gold standard of the emerging field of professional-grade coaching.
That’s the International Coach Federation. We are the largest Christian school that has all of our training approved by the ICF, the International Coach Federation. We’ve got nearly 350 hours worth of training that we’re providing to these chairs that meets the same standard that, for example, any Fortune 500 company. You look at recent studies now, about 40% of all Fortune 500 companies are saying, we use coaches with our executives in our work teams. Really? Are those ICF-trained coaches? The answer is yes.
If on that Fortune 500 level, they’re saying, “We use coaches, but we know what we mean by a trained coach. It’s an ICF train.” We’re saying here within Convene. That’s what our coaches are, except they’re also Christians. They’re integrating into your Christian worldview, your faith, your moral construct, and honoring that. Within that, then we are using a true professional-grade coach approach, not just whatever the latest shiny piece of paper says, “We’re coaches too.”
Biola University, where I was for quite a while before Convene, there was the Rosemead School of Psychology, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, and they used to train and teach that the third person in the counseling room is the Holy Spirit. There’s the psychotherapist, there’s the person who’s the client, and then there’s the Holy Spirit.
That’s exactly right, and if the Holy Spirit is our counselor as Christ said he was, he’s also our coach. He’s there in our midst. Even if the client isn’t a Christian. If we’re a Christian who is trained in coaching, we’re bringing the Holy Spirit there and inviting him to be at work and calling forth from that individual what needs to be spoken.
The PCCI approach has really had a trickle-down to our members and their companies. We had Sheryl Scanlon, my coach, come in and do a workshop at our retreat on leadership through coaching. Now all of the CEOs in my group have made the gradual transition from being highly controlling to more empowering and asking more profound questions. Now, when I coach them, they’re almost evaluating me on the questions that I’m asking them. They’re saying, “Paul, can I use this?” Paul, you might want to rephrase that because what I learned in PCCI was that it’s really having a profound effect down the line, not just to the chairs, so those are the members.
I love hearing that because there you’re creating a coaching culture, a different way of being for all of the employees, not just hierarchical top-down, what does the boss say, “Do we like that or not? Are we going to comply with it or are we going to go through the motions?” Instead, you’ve got much more of a team coming together in an exploratory, discovery-based process of trust that says there are probably all kinds of great ideas that could be pulled out here. Who’s got them? Can we draw from the brain trust of everybody? It’s a huge competitive edge.
It’s a change maker, it really is. It’s really making a big change, at least to my group.
Spiritual Poverty: Finding God In Frustration
I want to shift gears a little bit and have us talk to the person who’s out there who might be listening who says, “Listen, I’m frustrated that things don’t sometimes go well.” I think Townsend and Cloud like to call this spiritual poverty. The whole notion that due to the fall, we live in a post-Genesis three world, things aren’t perfect. Thanks, Adam and Eve, you didn’t get it exactly right. Things aren’t good. Adam’s curse is not that work is cursed, but that the ground is cursed and thorns and thistles, meaning things that aren’t good and aren’t perfect are going to happen.
People out there who are executives are thinking, “Why did the guy quit? Why did they not accept my offer? Why did the bank pull my loan? Why is the light not working? Why did the million-dollar piece of equipment not work the way I thought it would? Why did the China deal not happen?” That sometimes means that a CEO might think that, in their own prowess, they can self-repair. They’re upset that things aren’t working, and they cannot get it right. That’s helping them get closer to God if they play the cards right. Would you speak to that person?
It does provide an opportunity for us to grow. It can sound trite, but the right response is, “What does this make possible?” Not, “Why did this happen?” We need to understand why, so we don’t keep doing it, but why is not usually your best question to camp out on. It’s to move you in a direction of discovery so that you can say, “What else might work? What could work better? What could we do differently here? Who could help us in this?” Opening up that opportunity for discovery. What does this make possible?
The truth is, as you said, yes, work is going to be hard, but it’s also one of those things that Christ said in this life you’re going to have trials, but be a good chair. I have overcome the world. Take my yoke upon you. My burden is light. Jesus was a carpenter. He made yokes. I think he knew that yokes are fitted to each of us. We have a yoke to pull, but it’s light and easy, not because life’s a cakewalk but because it’s built for us. Those same irrevocable gifts and talents and all. They’re fitted for the work that we have. Embrace the challenge. Embrace the frustrations, the disappointments, and don’t stay too long in the why, just the what, what now? What else? What could be different?
I lost a deal one time when I was selling for Service Master. I was selling this particular university, and the deal was done and everything was a go, and they had a change at the top, a new president, and I went into the vice president, who I’d been working with. It was a big deal, and he said, “The deal’s off.” I said, “Why is this happening?” He didn’t mean to say this in a hit-me way, but this was in a theological way. He said, “Simple, it’s none of your business.”
I was like, “Wait a minute, you don’t mean it’s none of my business, you mean it’s not my place to question God as to why this happened.” He never said he would tell me why something didn’t go well. It is due to the fall. There’s a weakness. Some things don’t work. There are thorns. There are thistles. God might never tell me why. Ever. That felt really good to me. I don’t have to figure this out. Paul, do you have another real-life shoe-leather example of a member who just revolves around any of these stories at all?
Holistic Coaching: Beyond Business Decisions
We haven’t talked a whole lot about the holistic approach that we take. There are opportunities as a coach to go there to ask those questions because sometimes, as coaches, we tend to focus on the business questions at hand because they’re all business leaders. Questions that I like to ask, and a lot of my fellow convened chairs and coaches like to ask her, “How would your wife feel about this decision? How is that going to impact your parenting with your children? What about Susan, who’s six years old, do you really want to make that move across the country?
Do you want to merge with that company? How is that going to impact your family? What about your health? I know you wanted to lose twenty pounds over the next quarter or so. How is this going to impact that? What’s the next step you want to take in your faith?” All of those other components of our lives, we have an opportunity as a coach, as well as a group of community that we’re in, these peer groups, to ask those questions in the group as well.
Those are good examples of coaching-type questions because, for one thing, they’re not leading questions. You are raising a context that you, as their coach, are aware of, that they have a child or that they have a spouse, or that they’re considering this situation. You’re simply inviting them in the current conversation with you to step out of this and plug into another part of their life and walk around in it for a while. Feel it. What is that like? What would they say? How might that impact? What’s going on here?
You’re drawing their attention to something that will feel a little uncomfortable, but you’re not goading or in a pushing or an accusatory or finger-wagging way, or shame. There’s no leading implication here. You are simply listening with them to help them in, again, a facilitated model book to explore. How would this affect the kids? What would she say? What in the world am I going to do if I don’t get this weight under control or whatever? You are helping them to remain more holistic, not to get myopic only on the business decision at hand, to see the bigger picture by inviting them to step out of it and remember that life is lived in lots of different ways.
I’ve got a shoe leather story, a real quick one on this real quick. Two years ago, there was a gentleman in my group who was very transparent with us about his marriage. It wasn’t going really well. The following month, he came back, and he was celebrating with everybody and high-fiving people in the room. I’ll never forget that he won this consulting contract in New York. He had to go to New York for about 6 weeks to 8 weeks for this consulting agreement, you know where this is going.
I’m afraid of where this is going.
I caught wind of that because my wife is a marriage coach, and she spills over on me a bit on some of this stuff and makes me aware of it. A couple of other folks in the room, my anchor, noticed it. When check-in came around the table, we’ll just call him Bob, he said, “Bob, that’s great that you got that consulting agreement. We’re a little confused as a group. I was talking to a few folks here.
Last month, you said your marriage wasn’t going really well. Is this going to improve your marriage, or is this going to make things maybe worse? How do you feel about that?” We really put that on the table. Now our group has evolved to that accountability phase. We’ve got trust. He was floored. He got emotional. The solution we came up with as a group was that he doesn’t need to go there for the full 6 to 8 weeks all at once.
He can perhaps go for a week at a time, come home on weekends, or really condense that. In the end, that’s what we ended up doing with him, and he ended up agreeing to it. It was more of a hybrid approach where he was home more. That was just an example of this group, who are a bunch of business leaders, but leaning into the care and love that they had for this gentleman, and just questioning him about his decisions and how it was going to impact his marriage.
You used the word right there, that’s love, isn’t it?
It is.
That’s not a word that we use a lot of times in the marketplace, but that’s in fact what’s really happening there among Christian brothers and sisters, that there is a caring that goes beyond just helping you make a good decision or make a little bit better on your bottom line. It’s loving the person enough in the context that you’ve established as their convened chair to give them an opportunity to really help call that person out. “Remember, it’s all going to wrap up at some point.” The only things that are really going to matter are the things that we mustn’t lose sight of in the midst of chasing after our home.
The only things that are really going to matter are the things that we mustn't lose sight of in the midst of chasing after our home. Share on XIt was a feel-good moment. Didn’t feel so good to him.
The Priceless Value Of Community: Beyond ROI
How do you put a dollar value on that? Forgive me for waxing in a sales mindset, but that’s really part of what this comes down to. I think a lot of people could be listening and going, “I can see value in all that, but,” The very pregnant slap, “It’s not free? Are the churches supposed to just do that?” I’ve got to commit some money to this. How would you put a monetary value on that alone?
You cannot. I can tell you that the people who go through this never talk about the ROI.
It doesn’t measure the bills.
It doesn’t at all. I mean, it does, but it’s so much bigger.
There’s a particular group that likes to say at the end of the year, “What was the value financially of all this for you?” There is certainly a value, millions and millions, and some groups, 10, 20, 30 million dollars, 40, 50 million dollars of value, but you cannot value a saved marriage. You cannot value a relationship with a kid. You cannot value a relationship with a partner with whom you parted ways that is still good. It’s been a joy talking to you guys.
It’s been great, been fun.
I cannot think of a better couple of guys who would be able to talk about this. The real-life side of things, Paul, with the work that you’re doing as a coach and the psychological aspect of things with you, Chris, really, that all leads to healthy leaders, both professionally, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally, in all areas of life. That’s how Christian leaders grow. It’s a joy to talk to both of you. Thanks for coming in.
Thanks for having us.
No doubt. Great privilege.
It’s been wonderful.
