Influence without an agenda

A couple of years ago, while I was looking for work, I made a few interesting acquaintances. Three of them turned into coaching-mentoring relationships.

Why the hyphen. Coaching is about helping the other person reach a sharper conclusion himself, through a well-built conversation and questions asked at the right moment. Mentoring is about handing over your own experience. And where the two are deliberately joined, a third thing appears that is more interesting than either.

For me that format turned out to be more interesting than sitting on a board or doing consulting work. You still become part of the strategic decisions, but indirectly and at a different level – through understanding the leader's own motivation and history along with everything else.

Which is to say you break the usual order. Instead of the zone of control, where the CEO sits, and the zone of participation, where the board and the management sit, you build yourself into the zone of influence.

And that influence is disinterested: you have no agenda of your own and nothing riding on the outcome. That may be exactly why it works.

Inside a session you first try to inhabit the other man's position – the coaching half. Then you picture the set of options you would be looking at in his place – the mentoring half. The decision stays his.

So it is the format that metamodernism and I both like: serious play, where everything is real and not real at the same time.

And at last my ten years of reporting and interviewing turned out to be useful. The technique is much the same: listen actively and do not interrupt, but notice when the story is dying down and it is time to throw another log of questions or remarks on the fire.

Every one of these meetings leaves the same feeling a good piece of writing does – without the misery of writing and editing it. And appreciated by a reader and a subject who are the same person.

You let someone open up and understand something new about himself through the right sequence of questions, added some of your own experience – a little or a lot – and what came out is a «text». A new product, deep and usable by the next morning.

Value both of you can see immediately. If the session went well, of course.