Success on Your Own Terms by James B. Rosseau

Author:James B. Rosseau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Career Press
Published: 2014-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Formal coaching: Is your antenna raised?

Choosing whom you ask to become a coach can be a skill all its own. I often looked for people who emulated skills and competencies that I believed would be areas of opportunity for me. Ed McGann did just that! Ed had been around JPMorgan Chase for quite some time, had worked with a number of CEOs and HR executives, and was the senior executive of compensation and benefits. I often wondered how he had attained such influence.

Given Ed’s role and my continuous expansion of roles, I had good exposure to Ed. I eventually asked him to be a mentor and he agreed. During my trips to New York, I would try to catch up with Ed once a month or so. Eventually, I was promoted to HR service delivery executive for North America, taking on responsibilities for the HR Contact Center in Houston, Texas in addition to my previous responsibilities.

Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction.

—John Crosby

As I set out in my new role, I thought about opportunities to function differently and improve our performance. I would go out to the various HR executives for the lines of business; each line of business had a different HR executive. For example, the retail bank had an HR executive, the private bank had an HR executive, the investment bank had an HR executive, and credit card services had an HR executive. So I would attempt to get out to them to explain what we were doing, how we were doing it, and when things would come to fruition.

Things were going well over the course of a year; improvements were being made, we were performing better in many instances, and we were exceeding benchmarks within our various functions. However, when I would meet with Ed, he would seem less than congratulatory. During one of our meetings over the phone, Ed asked me a question that stopped me right in my tracks: “James, do you think your antennas are raised enough?” I wasn’t sure what he meant at the time, so I asked for clarification. He then explained it was important for me to listen while I was meeting with all of these different departments. Talking and informing wasn’t enough: I needed to hear what the HR executives had to say and, more importantly, what they weren’t saying.

Although we had made a number of improvements, we hadn’t done a great job of understanding the different needs of the businesses given the varied priorities of the HR executives and their constituents. Taking Ed’s advice to heart, I met with everyone again. I dug deeper, spending more time with each HR executive and his or her team, listening, and examining the unique challenges that each of their businesses faced.

Throughout the process, I bounced different ideas of how to approach this with Ed, and he would provide some great insight. He often gave me things to think about relative to the

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