For some managers and executives, being a leader is like a bumper-to-bumper crawl through an inferno with an occasional jolt into the next level of anguish.
    To those executives, the meaning of good leadership seems to shift with the times, leaving them confused and uninspired.
    What is good leadership, anyway? According to leadership experts, Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, decades of analysis have given us more than 850 definitions of leadership. Definitions reflect fads, fashions, political tides and academic trends. They don't always reflect reality and sometimes they just represent nonsense and like love, leadership continued to be something every­one knew existed but nobody could define.
    So, while we may not definitively state what good leadership is, we at least know that it is important because, according to Bennis, it accounts for about 15 percent of the success of any organization.
    Despite the significance of good leader­ship, however, the reality is that most of us who lead have neither been formally trained in leadership, nor had good role models. So we lead as we were led. We wing it, and tend to do what comes naturally to us. But good leadership practice is often the opposite of the latter. For instance, it may come natu­rally to treat employees like they were your children, but it works better to treat them with adult respect, as yourmost precious resources for success.
    Another element that is lacking in most managers but contributes significantly to leadership success is emotional intelligence. Popularized by Daniel Goleman in his 1995 book "Emotional Intelligence," it is now con­sidered the strongest indicator of success in the work world. The higher up you are in an organization, the more emotional intelli­gence (or understanding yourself and others, and managing yourself and others) deter­mines your leadership success, contributing as much as 80 to 90 percent to the equation.
    So what is executive coaching? Coaching is the second-fastest growing profession in the world, rivaled only by information technol­ogy. Recently, the Harvard Business Review reported that business and executive coach­ing is worth $1 billion a year.
    Two factors contribute to the popularity of the profession: the massive global eco­nomic restructuring since the 1980s and the personal development movement. In addi­tion, the demand for coaching is fueled by flattened management structures, shrinking talent pools and ineffective leadership.
    In terms of return on investment, Fortune 500 companies like IBM, Dell, Boeing, Bristol Myers and Johnson & Johnson have all report ­ed experiencing positive ROI. Evidence from studies done by the Manchester Group and others shows that executive coaching brings an ROI of up to five times its investment.
    The coaching process, as defined by the International Coach Federation, is partner­ing with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional poten­tial. So, it's not about giving advice, because we learn from having been teenagers our­selves that human beings first reaction to advice is to resist it.
    Why hire executive and business coaches, you might ask. Today, they are hired because stress and failure of executives has increased, executives face more frequent perfor­mance assess­ments, the old command and control style of leadership is out of sync with the younger, inner­-directed, collabor­ative and culturally diverse workforce; and the economic realities of short­-term financial suc­cess have placed enormous pres­sure on organizations.
    And as for the impact of executive coach­ing on executives themselves, "Ungagged, Executives on Executive Coaching" in the Ivey Business Journal, reported that benefits executives experience include continuous one-on-one attention, expanded thinking through dialogue with a curious outsider, self awareness, personal accountability for development and just-in-time learning.
    An additional benefit my clients often report is having a sounding board -- an impartial confidante to talk with without having to worry about political implications or maneuvers.
    So, the answer to the question about what coaching has to do with good leadership is undoubtedly: everything. This means man­agers who have their own coaches are usu­ally better leaders than those who don't, mainly because these managers are consis­tently experiencing the benefits of coaching.
    The other significant connection between good leadership and coaching is what is called "The Coach Manager" -- a manager who takes a coaching approach to leadership. This is a manager who creates an environment of influence versus authority, self-responsibility versus being answerable or liable and inspired actions versus obliga­tions. His role is as a developer of people, where he believes in the potential and pos­sibility of each employee and assists his staff to achieve their professional and personal goals. A Coach Manager is one who capital­izes on his staffs' strengths, while working around their weaknesses. He also seeks to lead his employees to come to their own "A­ha" moments, rather than constantly giving them advice or telling them what to do.
    The impact of the coach approach to lead­ership is a more engaged and productive work force, who is, believe it or not, happy to go to work.
    Now that is a paradigm worth shifting toward, wouldn't you say?

It's not every day that I wake up at 4 a.m.because I feel compelledto write a letter to The Birmingham News, but here are the two things that fueled my compulsion:
    ** First, the $200 laptop that students in Birmingham are receiving is actually designed by Swiss-born, San Francisco-based industrial designer Yves Behar. So, just because the laptop is sent to Third World countries as a non­profit initiative does not mean it isof inferior quality.
    Behar is renowned for creatingutilitarian objects that often become design icons, such as the Herman Miller leaf lamp, the Birkenstock garden clog and so on. His client list includes BMW, Nike, Apple Inc., Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, just to name a few.
    ** Second, the photo of first-grader Tyris Pickett as featured inThe News was precious. The au­thentic joy he was experiencing when he received his XO laptop isthe reason some of us do what we do to make a difference in people's lives.
    In the end, it's not about the politicians' egos, which camp wonwhich argument or the list of things that are wrong with Bir­mingham or the world around us. It's about the unadulterated joy someone experiences as a result of a positive change.
    Imagine how different life would be if we all just focused on that.