Читать книгу Taming the Abrasive Manager - Laura Crawshaw - Страница 17

I have a confession to make: I don’t call myself a boss whisperer in real life. I refer to myself as an executive coach, the standard term applied to coaches who work with businesspeople. I have mixed feelings about the executive coach label because it suggests that I restrict my coaching to the upper echelons of bossdom, otherwise known as the C-level: CEO, COO, CIO, CFO, and assorted other chiefs. I am distinctly uncomfortable with such an elitist conceptualization of coaching and have to restrain my potentially abrasive comments when other coaches boast that they work exclusively with top executives, as if this were some sort of badge of honor. I’m not terribly impressed with physicians who take pride in treating only the wealthy or powerful—it doesn’t make them better doctors. Bosses at every level struggle with management challenges, and to limit their access to coaching because of the outrageous fees charged by many of these C-level coaches is, I believe, unethical. Tirade over.

Back to my confession about the boss whisperer title: when I was a doctoral student I couldn’t resist buying a book whose title promised that a dissertation could be written in only fifteen minutes a day. What a promise! What a title! What a gimmick! Not far into the first chapter the author confessed that the probability of completing one’s dissertation in one’s lifetime by writing for only fifteen minutes a day was pretty low. She was right—I upped my minutes, finished my dissertation, and to this day admire her ability to come up with a catchy title and deliver some very helpful wisdom. I trust you’ll excuse this so-called boss whisperer from using similar tactics so long as I pitch forth with some helpful horse (or should I say boss) sense.