My business is seven this week. I have been a business owner for seven years! Me! Yes, me! An entrepreneur. A female entrepreneur. I have a thing about proving myself as a female business owner – I don’t know where that came from, but I knew right from the start that I wanted to be
Tag: coaching
My writing journey
Given my recent award for a series of articles in Coaching at Work (links at the bottom of this post), I thought you might be interested in how I got here. How I got to being an award-winning writer. Gosh, that sounds grand. I need and want to own that – I am an award-winning
The Yin and Yang of (Virtual) Leadership: Deep business acumen and deep personal acumen
Can you be good at business and good at personal relationships at the same time? If you want to be a great (or even a good) leader, this is another Yin and Yang that you need to factor into your way of working. What is business acumen? How would you describe it? Let’s look at
The Yin and Yang of (Virtual Leadership): Self-confidence and confidence in others
As a leader, we need self-confidence. I work with a lot of leaders who lack inner self-confidence, although they put a brave face on it. Some might call it imposter syndrome – thinking you will be found out sooner or later. But much of the time, we are simply facing situations that we have never
The Yin and Yang of (Virtual) Leadership: Unified Team and Diverse Individuals
This yin and yang of leadership calls on you to get better at choosing diverse people for your team when you recruit. There are so many variables to diversity that bring so many unique experiences to decision-making. The more diverse your customer base (or should I say your desired customer base), the more diverse your
The Yin and Yang of (Virtual) Leadership: Hold Accountable and Trust
Your role as a leader is to get work done through others. You can’t do it all yourself, as we discovered in the yin and yang of task and relationship. That means though that you do need to hold them accountable for results. I’ve been coaching one senior legal leader who wanted to figure this
Psychological safety in team coaching
Team coaching isn’t like any other development that an individual will have experienced. The agenda is co-created by the team and the coach and there isn’t any taught content. Team members may have worked with (some of) the team for some time, but they won’t necessarily be ready, willing or able to say what is
Commuting, reading, transitioning, new routines
It’s amazing how change upsets our routines and our rhythms. I no longer commute and so, I have lost my dedicated reading time. And I have lost that transition into and out of work time…
In coaching, it’s the little things that make a big difference
As I have been mentor coaching coaches recently (observing their coaching and giving them competency-based feedback), we’ve realised that small changes in language make a big difference to the way a question or an observation is received by the thinker. It might only reach their sub-conscious, but even then, it will get in the way
What they say they want is not always what they need!
I’ve been tussling with something for a while now. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I come from an employee experience background. As such, I believe that we should ask employees what they need in order to have a phenomenal career experience, rather than assuming we know what they need and providing that
Getting unstuck
It’s not uncommon for people in coaching to get stuck. They might get lost in their thinking, or they might just come to a point where they say outright, “I’m stuck”. So how do we get them unstuck? First, we need to notice it, and not get stuck with them! If we jump into the
How is team coaching similar to 1-1 coaching?
I’ve written a lot about 1-1 coaching, whether that is by an external coach, an internal one or a leader as coach. 1-1 coaching has a big impact on the individual, building their thinking muscles and encouraging them to experiment with new behaviours which create a ripple effect on the people around them. But sometimes
Team Coaching
My next series of coaching blogs is going to focus specifically on team coaching. Over the coming weeks I’m going to discuss: What is team coaching? How coaching a team is similar to 1-1 coaching? How coaching a team is different to 1-1 coaching? The team experience. And then I’ll finish this series with some
Mentor Coaching is for life – not just for a credential
How coaches show up in the room The International Coach Federation is the only professional coaching body that assesses coaches’ actual coaching skills in depth – how you show up in the room. How we show up in the room is way more important than how much we know about the theory of coaching. The
Where to start with building a coaching culture
In the fifth blog of my “When to Build a Coaching Culture Series”, I discuss where to start when building a coaching culture. If you are an individual leader, you can only start with yourself. So, start there when building a coaching culture. Start asking rather than telling now. If you are responsible for developing
What does a coaching culture look and feel like?
You’ll know it’s time to build a coaching culture when: Your organisation is going through change (see my previous post) (oh, wait, isn’t that every organisation?!) Decisions are being made at levels that are paid too much for the complexity of those decisions Strategic imperatives that affect the long-term future of the organisation are not
