David B Peterson has been at the cutting edge of executive coaching since the 1980s, helping leaders go from good to great. His knack for reinvention is a valuable asset in today’s rapidly change environment. Liz Hall reports
Questioning assumptions and active experimentation are at the core of coaching but David B Peterson, former head of executive coaching and development at Google, and Coaching at Work award winner, takes these to a whole new level.
Throughout Peterson’s working life, he’s set about provoking new thinking, and enabling shifts from mediocrity to mastery – in his leader clients and in coaches.
“My whole career I’ve been focused on uncovering the real dynamics of what’s going on,” he says. He’s currently on a major mission to support coaches to be great: “it’s clear that most are mediocre”.
Last year, Peterson received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Coaching at Work 2020 Editor’s Awards for his contributions to executive coaching. The award recognises him as one of the coaching profession’s pioneers, with a knack of not taking things for granted, asking at times uncomfortable questions, and shaking things up. In her recent history of the field of coaching, Vikki Brock listed Peterson as one of its primary influencers, both for his early influence on the emergence of executive coaching in the 1980s, and for continuing to shape the field as someone “on the cutting edge of the profession, doing and saying surprising and thought-provoking things”.
From good to great
In a bid to work out what would help coaches embrace mastery, Peterson “began seriously experimenting”.
“When I talk about leaders as coaches, they want to try something that will work. [But] when I talk about experimenting in coaching, I’m talking about things that might not work. If we talk about powerful questions, for example, I want to experiment with extended silence, interrupting people, asking ‘stupid’ questions.”
In his own journey as a coach, there have been “several critical moments”; he says. He watched as coaching became what he saw as “more bloated and expensive”.
“I wanted to be faster, lighter, to add more value by the minute.”
His thinking was prompted by working with clients in technology companies including Hewlett-Packard – what would “following the computer model” mean in coaching and leadership?
“It got me thinking about the future. How fast do I need to be to change? It became clear that as the [tech] industry when through different stages of disruption, all of these changes in technology changed the leadership and organisation. And are coaches learning faster than the pace of change? No, they’re still coaching on topics they started with. So I started talking about the future of coaching, and how coaches need to evolve.
“I started saying six years ago that in five years’ time, the value of coaching will be different, the needs of learners will be different.”
He looked at lots of masters programmes but “couldn’t find any I thought were addressing how do you help really good coaches be great ones”.
So he launched 7 Paths Forward with David Goldsmith as executive director to help good coaches develop mastery faster. “We just saw a huge need for good coaches who want to be great to find a community for their development, and how coaching needs to be part of the pace of change to be more efficient.”
One problem is that good coaches will get “great feedback”, he says, but “their client doesn’t know what great coaching looks like”.
“Starting faster, going deeper and ending stronger is the essence of the approach, amplifying the value”, he says.
“Time is so valuable in people’s lives and we don’t have time to build trust slowly. You need to get [quickly] to a level where you’re having the real conversation, learning what’s really going on here so you can spend time on what really matters the most…. It’s all about efficiency and impact.”
Pioneer
Peterson is widely acknowledged as an influencer and a pioneer. He developed the first leader-as-coach training, for example, and his book, Leader As Coach: Strategies for Coaching and Developing Others, co-authored with Mary Dee Hicks, is a classic.
He’s proud of his trailblazing multi-year research carried out between October 1987 and August 1992 (Peterson, 1993). The longitudinal study was carried out among 370 coaching participants in an intensive one-to-one coaching programme, called Individual Coaching for Effectiveness (ICE), covering at least a one-year time period for each participant. The study “established there was pretty significant impact in [participants’] resilience and effectiveness at work.”
The ICE programme consisted of diagnostic assessment, coaching and follow-up ranging from six to 12 months. Individuals’ objectives included being able to accept feedback and criticism openly and non-defensively. The research design used each participant’s individual objectives as the primary evaluation measures.
“I think it was an incredibly well-designed piece of work. It was hard to get controlled groups so we used control items (things that don’t change).”
Thus participants, bosses and coaches were able to distinguish what changed as a result of the coaching (coaching items) and the control items.
Peterson has also been a pioneer in supporting coaches to help individuals manage their environments, teaching them to interview all the stakeholders and work with the feedback.
“Nobody was talking about this at the time, and my company was seen as quite revolutionary… . Equipping people to be more effective and better learners, that was implicit in my approach all along. David Clutterbuck talks about coach maturity; it’s a similar thing.”
Peterson joined the technology company, Google, as director, leadership and coaching. His role saw him provide coaching to senior leaders, oversee internal and external coaching programmes, hire coaches and support a range of executive development and organizational learning.
When he joined, there were many coaching programmes with different managers and processes so he launched a coaching strategy that was more integrated. People saw it as “the most impressive coaching options they’d seen anywhere”, building a well-run process he’s “really proud of” and which “virtually never got any complaints”.
At Google, he launched a portfolio-based approach, which sought to find and supply the “most competent, most effective coach” rather than the most expensive. The portfolio included external coaches and internal coaches, some of whom were professional coaches who came into their own when internal knowledge was required and the coaching was around more internally confidential matters.
The organisation invested strongly in developing its internal coaches, and “matched and invested in matching participants based on their needs”.
“Google was growing really fast and a lot of Googlers wanted to be coaches. We channelled them to where they’d be most effective. When I started, there were very few accredited coaches, and at least 100 certified coaches when I left. We also had three internal professional coaches full time.”
The coaching strategy was a success: “The ratings of all our coaches was incredibly high for many years, typically 4.9 out of 5 for internal coaches, 4.95 for external coaches.”
He points out that much of the coaching work at Google was carried out effectively via videoconference, whereas for some this has been a newer element as a result of the pandemic.
“So many people resisted and struggled with that, but it’s just different. You learn how to be effective.”
Coaching
Peterson became a coach by accident, having joined Personnel Decisions International, later known as PDI NH (Ninth House), one of the first companies to start an executive coaching programme. At that time – 1985 – coaching didn’t even exist as a profession.
By 1990, Peterson, who earned a PhD in Counseling and Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Minnesota, US, was head of PDI’s coaching practice, responsible for training coaches. He eventually served as senior vice president and practice leader for its worldwide coaching and leadership development services.
His consulting work with PDI NH focused on coaching for senior executives in Global 100 companies, as well as helping organisations design their own coaching and leadership development programmes. His clients included Target, Genentech, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Levi Strauss, Stanford University, Chevron, Shell and Wal-Mart.
But in those early years, there wasn’t a blueprint. “Twenty years ago, there weren’t any coaching conferences and we figured it out and made it up as we went along.”
Edgar Schein’s model of process consultation informed work with executives. However, although powerful, Peterson realised that it could be problematic as it “starts from the assumption that something’s not right; it takes a fix-it approach.”
So he experimented with what he called ‘positive coaching’ – “before Positive Psychology became a thing”.
“The key component [in his positive coaching model] was: go where the energy is. Instead of a detailed assessment, ask [clients] what they want to get out of it. It was a much more participant-focused approach.”
Great coaching
When Peterson turned his attention to developing master coaches, “the first thing that became really evident was that coaches have lots of opportunities to fail. Coaches don’t by and large experiment with ‘could I have asked a better question?’ Maybe it takes them five rounds to get there. A great coach would ask one question, which prompts the client to respond with ‘I never thought about that!’ [Something] that gets to the heart of things and makes the client work faster. Coaches can miss the point.
“It’s really easy to blame the client when they don’t change – ‘they weren’t ready’, ‘the environment doesn’t support them’, ‘they’re narcissistic’ – all those notions of coachability. People who are highly coachable, self-aware and committed to self-development don’t need coaches. It’s the others who need coaching. My goal was how to coach the people who don’t want coaching – that’s where we add value.
“We need to shift to [the notion of] coach-ability. The coach isn’t equipped, so what do they need. It’s back to the Positive Coaching approach.
“[We often] start with the assumption that a bad person doesn’t want to change or grow but what that really means is they don’t want to change the way I think they should. It’s ridiculous – you [the client] won’t do what I want so you’re uncoachable. Go where the energy is – what do you [the client] want to get better at? Don’t beat them over the head.”
Peterson did a lot of work with his co-author Mary Dee Hicks, walking into team meetings and saying, ‘I hate it when people say people resist change.’
“After getting tired of me ranting, she said, OK, let’s write about this,” which they did, writing about the half-truths and real truths of coaching (Hicks & Peterson, 1997). One half-truth is that people resist change, he says. “No, people love change. What if I said, you will do the same thing every day, and never meet any new friends? People resist being forced to do things they don’t want to do.
“People are motivated by multiple goals. We care about so many things. That’s why lots of development fails. How do we make choices in a world full of competing goals? For example, I want to spend more time with the team. [Then we think], they seemed so motivated. But we weren’t addressing what happened outside [of the coaching]. So I shifted my focus from the coaching session to what they do when they leave – that’s when the hard work happens. [It’s about] bullet proofing the process.
“As the field of coaching started to evolve, coach training proliferated, and many of them focused on listening skills and were very procedural, and didn’t match the real world. They’re still very skills based. We need to know how to ask powerful questions, and also when and where, and when to repeat, and when to be silent. What’s the right balance of challenge and support for this [particular] client? How can we get the client to generate their own feedback? I started experimenting with interrupting – what is the opposite is true? Or we say nothing?
“In our workshops, one of my favourite games is coaching without asking any questions. For example, ‘tell me what would be helpful.’ It accomplishes the same thing without asking a question. Is there a difference? One of the things I hear from participants is, ‘I feel so much freer now.’
“[People] come with a narrow window of what is coaching, and what’s acceptable. They seem obsessed with coaching; I’m obsessed with clients learning and growing. [They might say], ‘you can’t do that, that’s consulting.’ Or, ‘I don’t do advice.’ I’m less enamoured of questions than I am of creating better leaders for the world. If I can help someone grow, who cares? What’s been revealed is a mindset of right and wrong. It’s more about coach and client preferences.
“All the models I developed are meta-models, [addressing questions such as] what are the necessary conditions for development? What does the client need? Rather than what does the coach do. For example, [a coach might say], ‘I always do 360.’ Again, what does the client need?”
Peterson says that often when it comes to goals, thinking is “simplistic”.
A client may say they want to make money or manage their time, for example, but we all have lots of goals. As coaches we need to make sure we’re aware of our own goals, so we don’t “blindly impose them on the client”.
Client voices
Another area in which Peterson’s been a pioneer is in privileging the client’s story. “For many years, only coaches were telling the story, so I launched a campaign to get clients’ voices out there. I invited some of my clients to speak at conferences, including one on the East Coast. A COO from Capital One spoke about how the first thing they realised was that your coach isn’t your friend. Your coach has to be able to piss you off.”
In 2005, he published an article co-authored with a client, Jennifer Millier (Peterson & Millier, 2005). Millier began the coaching in 2000, and over the subsequent five-year period she was promoted three times, including to a significantly more challenging role. Prior to the coaching she hadn’t been promoted for years. “She was working very hard to be good at her [current] job, not the next job.”
To help her get promoted, Peterson encouraged her to seek out and solve problems, and find projects to realise.
“Rather than being known as someone who is good at following orders, she became someone good at solving gnarly problems which got her promoted to a senior leader [role].”
Who is Peterson?
Peterson is known for his love of wine, even calling his Tibetan terriers after varieties of wine grape – Cabernet (who died recently) and Pinot.
“There are two main parts to my love of wine. The intellectual challenge: there is so much to learn and understand about it, and the social component: drinking with friends as an aspect of community [pre-pandemic, Wine Wednesday was a regular feature in his and wife, Alexis Shoemate’s social calendar]. The hedonistic component comes only third.”
Art and music, too, have been sources of inspiration in his life. In an interview for Forbes magazine, Peterson is quoted as saying he wanted to be a rock star when he was younger, and “had a love of the creative process, a love of words, and a sense of fun”. (Cohn, 2018)
“I love music. It’s always been a passion. In all of our [Peterson with David Goldsmith] programmes are layered some artistic things. The ACE (Accelerating Coach Excellence) Coach Accelerator programme draws on metaphors from poetry, while the ACE Virtuoso programme draws on music.
For example, Neil Young’s music is woven into the coach development programmes: “He [Young] reinvented himself any number of times over the years and exemplified that challenging of the status quo, experimenting.”
Peterson also makes an effort to regularly listen to a range of new artists from different genres. He believes people benefit from exposing themselves to new challenges.
Peterson also loves quotes. One, which he includes on his website, highlights the kind of person Peterson clearly is not. He cites French Romantic artist, Eugène Delacroix: “Mediocre people have an answer for everything and are astonished at nothing.”
In these times of rapid change and unpredictability, it’s the Petersons of our world, with their curiosity, willingness to confront and challenge, and their knack for reinvention that may just see us through.
References and further info
- A Cohn, ‘Embracing the future of leadership and coaching’, in Forbes, 2018 http://bit.ly/3aI6ZcF
- D B Peterson, ‘Measuring change: A psychometric approach to evaluating individual coaching outcomes’ In annual conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, April 1993
- D B Peterson and M D Hicks, Leader As Coach: Strategies for Coaching and Developing Others, Personnel Decisions Inc, 1996
- D B Peterson and M D Hicks, ‘Just enough to be dangerous: The rest of what
you need to know about development’, in Consulting Psychology Journal, 49(3), 171-193, 1997 - D B Peterson and J Millier, ‘The alchemy of coaching: You’re good, Jennifer, but you could be really good’, in Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 57, 14-40, 2005
- D B Peterson and M D Hicks, Development First: Strategies for Self Development, Personnel Decisions International, 1995
- 7 Paths Forward, www:7pathsforward.com