The Power of Mentorship

How a Coach Can Shape Your Leadership Journey

— Written in partnership with Tina Martin at Ideaspired.com —

Leadership isn’t something you wake up with one morning, fully formed and polished. It’s built over time—through experience, observation, and, most importantly, guidance. That’s where mentors and coaches come in. If you’re serious about becoming a strong, capable leader, finding someone who has already walked that path can make all the difference. Sure, you can read all the books, watch all the TED Talks, and listen to every leadership podcast out there, but nothing replaces the value of real-time, personalized feedback from someone who has been in the trenches.

Get A Mirror That Reflects the Truth

One of the hardest things about growth is seeing yourself. A good mentor acts like a mirror, reflecting your strengths and the blind spots you don’t even realize you have. Maybe you think you’re an excellent communicator, but your emails confuse your team. Perhaps you believe you’re decisive, but your hesitation in high-stakes moments says otherwise. A mentor will call you out on these things—not to tear you down, but to help you build yourself up. Leadership requires self-awareness, and sometimes, you need an outside perspective to get there.

Learn from Real-World Experience, Not Just Theory

There’s a reason why the best leaders aren’t just textbook experts—they’ve lived through challenges, failures, and high-pressure moments that shaped them. When you work with a mentor or coach, you gain access to their hard-earned wisdom. They’ll share stories of mistakes they made so you can avoid them. They’ll tell you what worked for them and what didn’t, offering insights you won’t find in a leadership manual. Theoretical knowledge is excellent, but practical wisdom? That’s priceless.

Benefit from Accountability That Keeps You Honest

Let’s be real: self-improvement can be tough. It’s easy to set ambitious leadership goals and then quietly let them slide when life gets busy. A mentor keeps you accountable. They check in, push you when needed, and remind you why you started in the first place. Without accountability, leadership development can become a vague aspiration rather than a structured journey. Having someone invested in your progress ensures that you don’t just talk about growing—you do it.

Navigate Challenges with Confidence

Every leader faces moments of uncertainty. Maybe you’re dealing with a problematic employee, making a tough business decision, or struggling with impostor syndrome. During these moments, having a mentor or coach can be a game-changer. Instead of second-guessing yourself or making a rash decision, you have someone to turn to—someone who has likely faced a similar challenge. That reassurance can make all the difference between leading with confidence and doubt.

Expand Your Network and Opportunities

The right mentor doesn’t just help you grow—they also open doors. Leadership isn’t just about what you know; it’s also about who you know. A seasoned coach or mentor has an established network and can introduce you to people, opportunities, and resources you wouldn’t have access to. If you want to advance in your career, having someone advocate for you and connect you to the right circles can be a decisive advantage.

Develop Your Unique Leadership Style

A common mistake aspiring leaders make is mimicking someone else’s leadership style. While learning from others is excellent, authentic leadership comes from authenticity. A mentor helps you refine your own approach rather than forcing you into a mold that doesn’t fit. They’ll challenge you to lead in a way that aligns with your values, strengths, and personality. The best leaders aren’t carbon copies of their predecessors—they’re originals who bring their unique perspective.

Consider Higher Learning

If you’re serious about building your leadership skills, learning to succeed in business by earning an online degree can be a game-changer. You will sharpen your understanding of strategy, communication, and decision-making and develop the critical thinking and problem-solving abilities that define great leaders. Online degree programs make it easy to balance your education with your career, allowing you to gain real-world leadership experience while advancing your knowledge at the same time. Whether you’re looking to step into a management role or refine the skills you already have, investing in your education is one of the smartest moves you can make.

Leadership is a journey, not a destination. No one becomes a great leader overnight, and it does not happen alone. A mentor or coach can provide the insight, accountability, and guidance needed to accelerate your growth and help you become the leader you’re meant to be.

Contact us to transform your key contributors into collaborative change agents today! Learn to mentor and become an executive coach with Hervé.

How to boost your impact and avoid derailments

I recently asked a group of top-level managers, "What is the difference between professionals who control their success path and those who are equally gifted but struggle?"

We agreed that people with a consistent track record are self-aware. In other words, they look for ways not to derail. When they make errors, they have established processes, procedures, or rituals to learn about them. They are open to admitting their mistakes and eager to correct them. Of course, it takes humility, courage, and an ability not to turn this intro into a melodrama. Find ways to receive positive and negative feedback, and you still stand ahead of the crowd of other talented managers.

Let's raise the bar by creating a feedback culture around you. This will optimize your ability to validate where you add high value and to identify the areas where you need support, help, or even supervision. 
 
You may ask, "How do I boost my impact and create a feedback culture simultaneously?"

Well, the answer is below, and I mean it. The three mini-courses below tell you all you need about feedback and how to promote it at work. You can also email me, and I will send you my article on feedback, which specifically shows you how to structure your feedback message and provides a few noteworthy examples.

Please share this blog post with your staff, peers, and management. Could you take a look at this together and discuss it?  It will only happen if your approach is committed. You will need to practice like a martial artist.

For even more support, you can contact me, and we will set up a strategy session to help you structure your leadership ecosystem.

Enjoy!

How to plan for total success

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Over the past 20 years, I've visited over 30 countries, worked with hundreds of teams—over 300—from large companies like Google to modest startups. In that time, it became evident that 90% of failures stem from poor planning, from insufficient planning. In my experience, whether it’s at the inception of projects, the beginning of a year, at the start of anything you're planning, if you take the time to plan well at the beginning, you avoid most mistakes, many of the problems and errors that would otherwise show up later.

So, the question is:

How do we make you into an excellent planner?

There are essentially three steps to a better planning process, three steps you can apply to any project, to an entire year ahead of time, or any event, personal or professional, that you want to create—you could apply it to your next family picnic, for instance.

A few years ago, I was coaching a top-level sales team at Kenzo, of the Louis Vuitton Group, and their goal was to organize a conference to focus on their luxury items. I challenged the sales team: “So, how good is this conference going to be?” I asked.

“Well, you know,” they admitted, “we are a little bit behind in planning.” “Some things we need to do a little bit later,” someone added. “Yeah, it's on our to-do list.”

Waiting until the last minute to do something. It’s a signal of less-than-optimal success ahead because it's basically reactive. It’s adapting to whatever happens at the time and pray that it’s going to go well. In most cases, people say, with relief, “Well, we made it!” And celebrate a marginal, reduced level of success.

That’s is not what we want! We want to achieve the maximum potential from the event. How do we do that? By reverse-engineering it.

So now, let me introduce these three highly effective steps to planning for success.

1 – Visualize Success

The first step is really exciting. Actually, it's a mind shift. You have to allow yourself to imagine total success. Some people will resist this. They will argue, “I am a realistic person. I can't just fantasize about things.” Well, I don’t want you to just fantasize. I want you to visualize total success. And you can do it alone, on your own: Take a piece of paper and write things down to capture how this would look. Or do it as a team, which can be a lot of fun—people love doing this. But you must explain that everyone needs to be inclusive, and welcome any idea or suggestion—no filtering.

The first thing I ask my clients is, “What would be top, the ultimate outcome?” For instance, with the sales team I mentioned above, I asked, “What would be topmost for your big sales event?” And they went wild! “We want this guy… We want that… We should do this…, and this, and this, and that…” I encouraged them further. “What if you had all the tools, all the means, to make it great? What would you do?”

They noted every idea they had on separate pages, loads of them. And we collected them all and put them in buckets, pulling them out one at a time and reading them. “Okay, what about this idea?” “And what about this?” When we were done, we had a real view on what an amazing success of their conference would look like.

That's step number one. I call this “creating the green dot” in my best-selling book What Color Is Your Sky? Creating the green dot. Doing this means that at the end of the year, you can ask yourself, “What is the story I want to tell?” That’s what you write. You write your story, the story of success you envision for yourself.

2 – Set clear ownership goals

In step one, you wrote a lot of things, free flow, with lots of permission. You gave yourself full permission to write ambitious things, yet some of these things are not so crazy. They're simply ambitious.

Now, the idea is to make all of these buckets of ideas your realistic goals. Here is an effective way to do this: “WWWH.” You start by writing on a piece of paper what needs to be done, and by whom. That's really important because you need someone to own this task. So often, in companies, the whom is not very clear. It's a bunch of people, it's a committee, it's whatever. But nobody's accountable.

The what needs to be very specific: What will we observe? What will we get? What will be done? The whom is a person, and the person can have a team around them, but one single person needs to be named—not two, not three. And then, when is it supposed to be done? This needs to be a realistic date.

The H should not be how we will do it, or how we will control it, and not how we will micromanage these things. The H is: How will we know it's done? This is the best way to avoid a bunch of micromanaged tasks centered on it and to free your time.

“WWWH” is an extremely effective system. I taught this to most managers at Nespresso, and dozens of managers at Louis Vuitton, and they loved it. It simplifies everything.

Now, if you are the manager above, all you need to do is to really make sure people manage those WWWHs. This is a good high-performance habit.

3 – Anticipate failures and broken agreements

Step three is about anticipating. Now that you know what you're going to be doing, you want to plan for disaster. You are going to do the opposite of planning for success. Instead, you're going to say, “Imagine the worst thing that can happen”—some of them probably will happen. You want to brainstorm with your team about what could go wrong: Do we have the right resources? Is this the right person? Are people are going to be involved with it? What is the worst thing that can happen? You can also perform this as a team-building exercise.

The idea is to share your plan, your goals, with people and to listen to them after you ask, “What will derail my plan?” They'll come back to you very creative suggestions, such as: “You will not get a sufficient budget,” “The budget will come too late,” “Your suppliers are not going to make it,” “You're going to get sick”—all of these make you more aware of possible failure points.

Once you finish this third step, you will, very likely, need to go back to step two to refine your goals. You may even add a few more tasks because now you're seeing a few potential loopholes: “We don't have insurance on this,” “We didn't double-check [you know]”, or “We need to double down on making sure they make it there.” All of these are issues to double down on—doing it, for sure; being intentional—these make a whole big difference.

In summary: first, visualize success—open permission; second, set goals, identifying specific owners of the delivery of each goal; third, anticipate the worst and adjust accordingly.

For this powerful process to deliver its promise, you must become intentional about following up on the delivery of WWWHs, hold regular meetings to check progress and adapt to unpredicted events. In most cases, the people involved become self-managed and more creative in resolving their problems. The results are systematically well beyond all expectations.

To fully develop your leadership impact, learn more about our accelerated leadership program XCELERATOR. If you have any questions, please comment below. I read every single comment and am happy to offer you my help.

Quelle est la différence entre un manager amateur et un professionnel ?

Quelle est la différence entre un manager amateur, instinctif et un manager en constante réussite ? Le premier peut être efficace…parfois. Ce manager à l’instinct reste un acteur motivé mais amateur dans l’âme ; il ou elle apprend de ses échecs et du burnout. 

Le second, celui qui réussit de façon prévisible, produit immanquablement des résultats de niveau supérieur, quelles que soient les situations ou les missions.

Comment appartenir à cette seconde catégorie, celle du vrai professionnel ?

Le manager en réussite constante est un professionnel construit qui a développé et rodé un système à travers les années : un cadre pour une réussite à long terme. Lorsque son rôle s’élargit, ce manager agile et situationnel relève les défis et gère le changement avec efficacité. Peu importe que l’entreprise traverse une réorganisation majeure, une phase d’acquisition, de fusion, de transformation numérique ou une importante initiative pour augmenter les ventes, ce manager se distingue. Quel est son secret ?

 Tout d’abord, clarifions le problème. Le manager instinctif conçoit ses succès passés comme la promesse de ses réussites futures. Il a gagné la confiance de son entreprise en établissant de bons résultats sur différents projets où l’expertise et l’implication faisaient la différence. Ça, c’est le bon côté. Le mauvais, c’est que plus s’accroît la complexité du contexte, plus il continue à proposer des solutions rapides, superficielles et orientées vers l’opérationnel, pour résoudre des problèmes systémiques désormais plus complexes.

Nous y voilà, ce manager n’a pas conscience des aptitudes spécifiques à développer pour réussir sur le long terme. Voici le feedback qu’il commence à recevoir : « Tu n’es pas assez stratégique » ou « Ton département tarde à évoluer » ou « Tu ne priorises pas assez » ou encore « Tu dois améliorer les réalisations de ton service ». Ce manager n’a quasiment aucune idée de la façon de devenir soudainement un « stratège » ou un « agent du changement ». Le héros d’hier est maintenant un acteur déconsidéré.

Vous entendrez sans doute ce manager désormais dépassé dire : « Formons tout le monde, et de meilleurs résultats suivront. » ou « Après toute notre communication, ils ne comprennent toujours pas. » ou encore « Convoquons-les car on doit résoudre ce problème pour la semaine prochaine. »

Sans le réaliser, ce type de manager se concentre sur des problématiques d’experts au lieu de favoriser les relations humaines, d’aller vers les clients clés et les autres acteurs, ou de consacrer beaucoup plus de temps à réfléchir aux causes profondes des problèmes à régler. Ils n’apprennent pas à s’auto-développer, à créer du temps pour prendre du recul, à guider leurs équipes vers la haute performance, à identifier les questions de fond, à coacher leurs pairs, à effectuer des analyses de situation plus solides ou à définir des plans de changement maîtrisés. Vivez-vous cette situation ?

Comment ces managers peuvent-ils enfin commencer sur la bonne voie ?

Tandis que le manager instinctif utilise indéfiniment les mêmes méthodes, quelle que soit la situation :

• Le manager averti commence par passer d’un état d’esprit passif qui attend les opportunités, à un comportement proactif qui prend des initiatives.

• Le cadre de référence du manager à succès inclut un ensemble de principes personnels, de valeurs, de convictions, de méthodes et d’outils adaptés aux situations, une approche systématique et systémique d’analyse et un réseau d’experts, de coachs et de mentors.

• Le manager qui réussit sait que le leadership est un art, pas une position dans l’entreprise. Comme un artiste, il sait qu’il faut investir dans l’apprentissage, avec de la régularité et des années de pratiques pour devenir un maître.

• Il consacre beaucoup de temps à la recherche des causes profondes des problèmes, au lieu de se ruer vers des solutions superficielles. Il a pour priorité de construire une équipe parfaitement cohérente autour de lui et passe un temps considérable avec elle à réfléchir avant d’agir.

Rencontrez-vous de grands défis de transformation dans votre entreprise ? Pouvez-vous continuer à les aborder seul et dépourvu de méthodes ? N’hésitez pas à nous contacter pour étudier ensemble comment mieux réussir.

How to Focus on What’s Important in 2023

Managing your time and your focus are the keys to unlocking your success in 2023

Alice Boyes, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist turned writer and author of The Healthy Mind Toolkit and The Anxiety Toolkit writes: 

It is natural to want to get deadline-driven tasks squared away and off your mental to-do list. A paradox many people face is that our most meaningful tasks are less likely to have deadlines than tasks that are relatively unimportant. Your important priorities might relate to:

• enacting your values (for example, volunteering or spending more time with your children)

• achieving public recognition (getting invited to sit on industry panels or writing a book)

• improving vital skills (upping your knowledge of statistics or learning a new language)

• averting disasters (scheduling an annual checkup at the doctor or creating a crisis management protocol for your business)

If you’re like most people, these priorities slip to the back of your mind while you work on low-importance, time-specific tasks, such as booking a hotel room for a conference, clearing out your email inbox, or writing a monthly newsletter.

Her article in Harvard Business Review is a quick read: How to Focus on What’s Important, Not Just What’s Urgent

For more on managing your day, I strongly encourage you to learn about proactivity and creating Million Dollar days with my short article Deliberate Morning Program (My book and my blog). You can also view my short lectures on how to create time on Youtube.

If you have reached a senior level in your company, you might be interested in our leadership program XCELERATOR.

Developing your mindset is also a crucial part of being intentional and not procrastinating.

Let's make it happen!

How to create organizational alignment

 How to Create an Aligned organization

We want to ensure that everybody in your organization who is under your influence is behaving like members of an orchestra playing the same symphony. Since you are impacted by the ecosystem around you – above, across, and below – we want everyone to understand and support what it is that you are focusing on.

I have traveled the world, more than 30 countries, training thousands of people in companies, and invariably I encounter among them a fundamental problem of alignment: a failure to make sure that all priorities are understood and interdependent. If you can address that, you become incredibly useful and influential to your organization.

So, that is one of my goals: to help you become highly influential with the people below you, the people across, the people in front, behind, and – mostly – with the people above you. It could be your banker, your investors, your partners, your bosses – whomever.

Here is a mini-lecture extracted from my complete leadership program XCELERATOR. Your responsibility is to absorb it, understand it, and begin to implement it – talk to your colleagues about creating a laser-focused organization.