by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
The salary of a major league baseball player who batted .500 would make New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner blush.
A business executive who gets it right half the time will be lucky to find a comfy appliance box to live in.
Cork Motsett sympathizes. He also understands that a little fine-tuning may be all that’s needed to turn sighs of frustration into applause.
“Some of these guys sit in that chair, and they realize how tough some of these decisions are,” he said. “If they’re wrong, the ramifications are immense. We’re talking hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars; we’re talking people’s lives.
“Of course, if they make the right decision, then it’s all the good stuff.”
Motsett, the president and CEO of Business Development Specialists, started his company in 1996. As an executive coach, he helps make sure the right executive is in the right job. He helps those executives fine-tune the abilities that are already there. And he helps companies deal with the uncertainty that change inevitably brings.
“Tranquil never happens; there’s always an issue,” said C.B. “Cork” Motsett in his office on Baymeadows Way. “There’s always some form of pain that’s driving it.
“It can be, ‘We’re making some sort of transition and we don’t believe this person is ready for it today. What can we do to make him ready?’
“Or, ‘We just made a transition, and this person has some areas he needs some help with.’ Or it could be, ‘We’re making a transition, and we want to make sure it’s successful.’”
BDS basically works with medium-sized companies and professional organizations. The business weaves coaching into its specialties of leadership development, succession planning and organizational growth.
TAB (The Alternative Board) is a company franchise that is used to support emerging businesses.
“It is exclusively for business owners, partners, directors — whoever pulls the trigger in an organization,” Motsett said. “The idea of the organization is to form a board of directors among the members.
“You become members of each other’s boards. We provide the administrative support and chair the meetings.”
One-on-one coaching is also provided for the members.
“In many cases,” Motsett said, “you know what you need to do but you need that little extra emphasis to get it done. Sometimes, you understand an issue,but you don’t know how to handle it. It may have something to do with the business; it may be something personal.There are a lot of different pressures and stress on executives; it can be difficult for them to balance their priorities.
“I have a friend who said, ‘It’s not whether you’re going to die. It’s whether you get a life before you die.’ We work to get that life balance in there.”
Motsett also wrote a book (“If It Wasn’t for the People ... This Job Would Be Fun: Coaching for Buy-In and Results”) that outlines a five-step coaching process to be used by supervisors and managers.
“I learned and used the process when I was an A-Team commander in the Special Forces in Vietnam,” Motsett said. “It’s a great process for using with people who are extremely competent, but you just need to hold them accountable.
“It’ works well, whether it’s a small business or one of the Fortune 500 companies.”
Motsett was asked to take part in an exclusive Executive Coach Summit Nov. 9-11 in Denver, Colo., attended by only 75 participants from around the world.
“The only place that I didn’t see send a representative was the Middle East,” he said.
The discussion he led was about the “take-in process ... how you get started with an executive who’s been assigned to you but isn’t excited about being part of the program.”
“In the corporate world,” Motsett explained, “instead of an individual coming to us, they are presented with an opportunity to have a coach. It can be a bit awkward.
“You have to quickly get the confidence of the individual. Make sure the individual and the boss know what we’re going to do and how we do it.”
There were several good presentations at the summit, he said: one on working with executives, their moods and mood swings; another on calculating the return on investment.
“Using a coach becomes an extremely difficult thing for business to measure,” Motsett said. “If you have a small law firm, you’re looking at spending a significant amount of money to bring in an executive coach. How do you determine if that was a good investment or not.
“You have to make it objective, using hard metrics. Then there’s the really difficult part. What portion of that success do you attribute to the coach?
“The organization does not depend on the coach. What it depends on is the effectiveness of the leader and how that leader impacts the organization on all the downlines. That’s the ripple effect.”
Companies that use coaches are in the minority; most rely on training sessions, which are not nearly as effective as intended.
“Essentially, 85 percent of what you learn in a training program is gone within 72 hours,” said Motsett. “The other 15 percent doesn’t last much longer, unless there’s actually some way to use it.”
Behavioral change and practice drive the lessons home.
“The concept of our training programs is, when they’re finished, they have both the skills and the comfort level so they will use them immediately when they get back to the workplace.
“Virtually all of us learn by application. You can read a book about how to ride a bike, but until you get on and feel what it’s like to get that wobble in there and correct it and probably fall down a couple of times, you never learn.
“I don’t care how good the book was, until you do it, you don’t learn it.”
The overall number of companies that use coaches may be small today. Rapid change and higher stakes may force a new attitude tomorrow.
“The companies that employ coaches are the ones going through this process of creating a new culture, creating a new way of doing business,” Motsett said. “I think they’re the ones that are going to survive.”