What is It?
Personal Global Positioning Systems (PGPS) is a six-step development program designed and tested over a seven-year period with hundreds of clients in one-on-one coaching situations that assists leaders and their teams build and sustain successful performances in rapidly changing business environments.
Who Benefits?
When the coaching candidate is a senior executive or someone who is in the succession plan for senior management, our method helps. People learn to anticipate change and re-orient to it, while staying on point with business objectives.
Smart business folks recognize that it is much easier to anticipate change and build it into their operational strategy than it is to try to manage change once it hits. The PGPS program serves as your blueprint for creating a personal operating system that is responsive to your needs, aligns to your organization, and supports your evolution as a leader.
How Long Does It Take?
The PGPS coaching program takes 6 to 12 months to reach maximum impact. Yet, you learn its elements and begin to apply them in the first weeks of coaching, continuously updating and refreshing your goals and the strategies you use to attain them.
The logistical details of your coaching program – the number of sessions per month, length of sessions, and the nature of other activities including observations, interviews with peers, subordinates and superiors, etc. – are determined by you in consultation with your coach according to your specific circumstances, pressures, time constraints, and objectives. For a sense of the commitment required to make PGPS coaching work for you, see the Sample PGPS Roadmap.
What Are the Steps?
1) Articulate Your Vision
The first step in charting a course toward your desired outcome is to clearly articulate your business vision. Three critical questions must be answered at the outset of the coaching engagement:
What is the future you desire for yourself?
What is the future you desire for the organization?
Where will you lead your organization?
As part of the vision-articulation exercise, we will choose what language and dissemination strategies you can use to enlist the full support of those who will help you realize your vision.
2) Take Inventory
3) Adopt a Wide-Angle Perspective
You took the role you now hold in part because of your ability to see the big picture. When situations change, you must “refresh” your perspective in terms of the new reality and cultivate the quality of leadership agility. Your coach will walk you through a series of assignments to investigate different views of the same situation. You may undertake one or more of the following:
- Test your default (automatic) view of things by speaking with trusted advisors to see how they view the same situation.
- Experiment with viewing the situations from these new vantage points.
- Invite others to give you feedback on your refreshed view of the situation.
4) Initiate and Manage “Buzz”
Look at those with whom you interface: your peers, subordinates, superiors, cross-functional team members, the Board, your customers/clients, vendors, competitors, and strategic partners. Ask yourself:
- How are your relationships with each of these stakeholder groups?
- With which people/departments/groups are you aligned?
- Which alliances are functioning at maximum efficiency?
- Do any require repair? Routine maintenance?
- Where must you build alignment from scratch?
5) Identify and Implement Alignment Strategies
You know these relationships need to be in good working order, but do you know how to get them there? We do. Your coach will aid you in creating alignment strategies for every relationship and will hold you accountable for when and how you implement them so that you can sustain, repair, or build alliances necessary to your business success.