What Can Coaching Do For You?
Be Your Thinking Partner
I need someone that I can trust to be my sounding board.
As a Senior Executive, you may feel that you cannot openly discuss your ideas, thoughts and concerns with your boss, your peers or your team for all kinds of reasons. As an Executive Coach who has walked in your shoes, I can offer you an independent viewpoint and a safe space to allow you to step away from your role and explore your ideas, thoughts and concerns.
I will listen actively and ask challenging questions – in essence, I will be a “thinking partner” and will enable you to explore ideas and consider options without feeling pressure to commit to the outcome.
This privileged relationship between you and your coach builds on your strength and enables you to clarify your vision and move more rapidly into sustainable action.
Executing on the Strategic Mission
I know that I am accountable to translate my company’s vision into action, but I am struggling!
As a leader, a big part of your role is to take your company’s vision and turn that into action and results in your area of accountability. As an expert in your business, it’s usually easy for you to know what has to be done; what’s sometimes challenging is the “how”.
In times of change, it’s important for you as the leader to make sure your behaviours and those of your team are supporting the plan in “how” you lead just as much, if not more, than “what” you do every day.
As your coach, I can help you understand what may be holding you back from bringing your vision to action in both what you do and how you do it. I can partner with you and your team to define how you need to be aligned and to maintain your focus and to hold each other accountable when your focus wavers.
Culture
My company culture is too complacent. We are either fighting the daily fires or waiting for the next fire to start. People are more concerned with who to blame when something goes wrong and staying out of the line of fire. How can I change that?
The foundation of a good corporate culture is trust and acceptance. However, once the blame game has started, it’s difficult to turn it around. Through coaching, leaders and their teams, we can build a climate of trust. Trust is essential as it enables teams to communicate more openly and proactively and to focus on the business problem at hand not the person.
Leaders and teams who are able to become curious about what happened, how others understood the issues and how as a team they can work together more effectively are teams that perform at the highest levels.
As your team coach, I can work with you to identify your current team culture and behaviours and help you to define a new team culture that will serve your needs.
Team Coaching
Our projects keep going sideways and I think it’s because of poor communication. I know we need to change the way we do things but nothing I try seems to work.
A fresh set of eyes on your team in action in a real life situation can have a huge impact on team performance. I am certified in team coaching and human dynamics and can use this expertise to identify communication patterns or other team dynamics that may not be visible to you and your colleagues.
By observing you and your team in a real life meeting setting, I can make observations and ask you questions that can assist you in understanding how each player and each component of your organization behaves and how that behaviour contributes to your business goals.
By reflecting on the observations you will gain new clarity on how your team works together. As a result, you will build trust among team members and find ways to leverage the strengths of the entire team more easily.
Team Coaching has helped many teams find solutions in record time for problems they thought unsolvable.
Building Focused and Effective Communication
My team is always complaining about the time we waste in meetings. I really need help to get the team meetings more productive and focused.
Many teams hate meetings and will do anything to get out of them, largely because they feel meetings are getting in the way of their “real” work. Hiring a certified team coach can help you to dramatically improve the usefulness of your meetings.
You can learn to plan agendas and attendance more effectively and to ensure that the decisions that you make are directly linked to your business goals. Your coach can observe your meetings in action and can help you and your team work together to improve your communication, ensure that everyone on the team stays engaged and active.
The team becomes better at team thinking and starts to leverage the talents of the team as a whole.
Mergers and Acquisitions
My company is going through a merger. I’m not sure how this will affect me or my team… I know that my job is to stabilize my team, but how can I do that when I am not sure what lies ahead?
There’s not a much more unsettling situation for a leader than this one! Times of change can make even the strongest leaders feel vulnerable; and when we’re feeling vulnerable about our own role, it’s a big challenge to project calm professionalism to your team and keep them focused on the work at hand.
As your Executive Coach, I can help you deal with this situation in two ways. First, by working with you one on one to help you “say out loud” what your hopes, fears and dreams are for yourself in your changing circumstances.
Our coaching sessions will provide you with a confidential space to talk through all the “what if” scenarios that may be keeping you up at night. This dialogue will help you to advance and clarify your thinking by challenging you to delve into areas that may seem too risky to talk about with your colleagues.
Second, I can partner with you to think through the challenges that your team may be facing and help you use what you know about your team to build ways to leverage their strengths as you face the changes together.
Organization Change
As a CEO, I am implementing a significant organization change in my company; we’ve communicated our new strategy, now I need to ensure that the change is a real one and is sustainable over time. I cannot afford for this to be the “flavour of the month” around here.
Creating and communicating a change is easy; sustaining it and bringing it to life is what distinguishes the good leaders from the GREAT ones. Times of big change require energy and consistency on the part of the leader, the senior executive team and all of the members of the organization who lead and influence others.
As CEO, you will most likely feel ready for the changes more quickly than those around you, simply because you’ve been thinking about it for a longer period. You may choose to work with a specialized C level coach who can hold up the mirror for you and ask you the challenging questions about the sustainability of the change that your team might be hesitant to pose.
You may also choose to offer coaching to your leadership team; by working with a coach they will have the opportunity to confidentially explore what the change means for them and how they may have to evolve their leadership style.
A carefully crafted coaching agreement, will allow your Executive Coach to provide you with insights into what your team is really thinking that you may not otherwise hear about.