We’re planning to give our hourly employees a cost of living pay increase next month. What should we use as the benchmark?

Pay for performance (or merit pay) is the compensation program I recommend – regardless of the employee’s status in the company. Unless you’re planning to hire according to the Woody Allen theory (“80 percent of success is showing up.”) I suggest you avoid across the board COLA (Cost of Living Allowance) pay increases.

A review of research on goal-setting has helped us better understand two key areas of concern for leadership coaches: 1. Why people give up on goals and 2. How effective goal-setting can help ensure long-term goal achievement. An understanding of the dynamics of goal-setting and goal achievement may help coaches understand why their clients sometimes lose motivation and how they, as advisors in goal-setting, can increase the odds that their clients will “stick with the plan” and reach desired targets.

Great leaders encourage leadership development by openly developing themselves.

Any human, in fact, any animal will tend to repeat behavior that is followed by positive reinforcement. The more successful we become, the more positive reinforcement we get – and the more likely we are to experience the success delusion.

I behave this way. I am successful. Therefore, I must be successful because I behave this way.

Wrong!

The corporate credo. Companies have wasted millions of dollars and countless hours of employees’ time agonizing over the wording of statements that are inscribed on plaques and hung on walls. There is a clear assumption that people’s behavior will change because the pronouncements on plaques are “inspirational” or certain words “integrate our strategy and values.” There is an implicit hope that when people — especially managers — hear great words, they will start to exhibit great behavior.

Leadership is not just for leaders anymore. Top companies are beginning to understand that sustaining peak performance requires a firm-wide commitment to developing leaders that is tightly aligned to organizational objectives — a commitment much easier to understand than to achieve. Organizations must find ways to cascade leadership from senior management to men and women at all levels.

A lot of what passes for leadership development in companies can be a waste of time. See if you recognize this process. Your company taps you as a future leader. It sends you to "leadership camp," which can last anywhere from a day to a couple of weeks. You're entertained by a parade of speakers (like me), and afterward you're required to critique the speakers and rate how effective they were. If the company is particularly rigorous about gathering information, you may be asked to critique the hotel and the food. But nobody is critiquing you. Nobody is following up to see what you learned or if you have actually become a more effective leader. As a result, the people who may be learning (and changing) the most are the speakers, the hotel staff members, and the cooks.

Providing feedback has long been considered to be an essential skill for leaders. As they strive to achieve the goals of the organization, employees need to know how they are doing. They need to know if their performance is in line with what their leaders expect. They need to learn what they have done well and what they need to change. Traditionally, this information has been communicated in the form of “downward feedback” from leaders to their employees. Just as employees need feedback from leaders, leaders can benefit from feedback from their employees.

This real life case study shows how an executive can expand a simple coaching assignment to benefit his team and the entire company. I hope the article also reinforces my observation that the most important factor in executive coaching is not the coach. It is the executive being coached and his or her co-workers.

While behavioral coaching is only one branch in the coaching field, it is the most widely used type of coaching. Most requests for coaching involve behavioral change. While this process can be very meaningful and valuable for top executives, it can be even more useful for high-potential future leaders.

Throughout this series, I have shown that understanding the differing perspectives of leadership versus coaching is a key to utilizing coaching as a leadership tool. Here’s a final perspective to set up our discussion: leadership focuses on trying to change an area of performance in an organization; coaching focuses on revealing why the key people in the organization may actually believe this same area of performance will never change. Which of those two conversations do you think is more critical?

Early on in my coaching relationships, I usually have a conversation with my clients about the “domains of knowledge” in life and in business. Most people are aware of only two dimensions of knowledge: “what they know they know” (how to read the legend on a blueprint, for example) and “what they know that they don’t know” (how to surgically repair a human heart valve). But few people are aware of the third dimension of knowledge, the dimension that Albert Einstein called the largest domain of all: that which “we don’t know that we don’t know”.

In part two of this series on utilizing coaching as a leadership tool, I want to focus on the second of four high impact possibilities that a coaching mindset can bring to a leadership conversation. The second impact area is this: coaching can enable us to help our employees or clients see a future that is hidden from them unless they take a different look at their role and their potential. Simply put, when you inject a coaching mindset into a leadership conversation, you can literally help a person discover an unlimited future.

When I teach business leaders how to integrate coaching practices into their everyday leadership, I begin by reminding them of an important distinction: leadership is accomplishment oriented, while coaching is insight oriented. Each practice is distinct from the other, but each also enhances the other. Good coaching reveals unseen mental and organizational barriers to higher performance. Good leadership then organizes the operation into new efforts to work from the new insights. I also remind my clients “You’re not leading all the time, and you’re not coaching all the time; but you need to learn to be ready to do both at any time.”