Executive & leadership coaching
For CEOs and senior managers of organizations, executive coaching provides a robust sounding board for issues in real-time. Having someone with a depth of commercial and business management experience on hand, if only for a few hours each month, can prove hugely beneficial to both the individual and the organization. Such support can help to reduce stress, increase motivation, while improving decision-making.
Awareness is essential to leadership. And because leadership is essentially relational, behavioural obstacles can frustrate execution. So while the coaching conversation focuses primarily on the organizational role, the coaching relationship is with the whole individual. By helping to align personal development and role responsibilities, experiential learning becomes a natural catalyst for high performance.
The agenda is set by you and your organization. As a leader, you may wish to change your leadership style, or address work/life imbalance. As an organization, you may wish to develop key managers ahead of, or following promotion, or to support new entrants with corporate cultural transition. My approach to executive coaching can help with these and other such developmental and change management issues.
By building an authentic, trusting relationship over time, your coaching agenda may, if you require, go beyond the rational challenges of executive action to address deeper emotional and relational aspects of your role that may be affecting you and others. Coaching affords you a confidential and non-judgemental space to explore such bahaviours so to make your leadership more effective.
Business Mentoring for Entrepreneurs & Owner-Managers
Being the boss means having the last word. And that word can weigh heavily on you, bringing with it stress and energy-sapping anxiety. And yet decisions, big or small, despite the pressure, demand a cool head, a full awareness.
Whether you’re a sole operator or the managing director of an expanding enterprise, fully informed, timely decisions are crucial. As the speed of business increases apace with technological change, so too do decision response times. You need keep one eye on detail and another on the big picture, and all the while keep everybody motivated and moving forward. This can be a solitary and demanding task. But you need not go it alone.
A professional coach can help you. Particularly, one with a breadth of business development experience and acumen, one who is invested in knowing you, your business and your aspirations. Someone whose guidance and support is there when you need it most: when issues are current, when you are facing decisions rather than afterwards.
Our relationship builds on an understanding of you and your business. Having partnered with and mentored entrepreneurs for over a decade, I bring a wealth of business development and business modelling experience to the coaching conversation. The agenda is set wholly by you to meet your most pressing business needs.
…airing challenging issues when they are current…
Mission Renewal, Re-engagement & Strategy Review
Have you lost your passion for your business? Do things seem stale? Is team morale low?
This can occur with both mature and growth stage businesses.
Maturing businesses can become stale. Top-line growth slows. Management, in a bid to keep the bottom-line improving, may resort to repeated rounds of cost cutting. Rationalization without improved efficiency is not a sustainable strategy. Early savings may lead to a whittling away of the business’s core. Junior talent, blocked from promotion, may leave. And as the team weakens, creativity loses, passion wanes and morale suffers.
Equally, as owner and founder, you may lose your passion for your business because your personal priorities are changing. Growing businesses make seemingly endless demands on their owner’s time. You may consider that the opportunity cost of long work days has become too high. You may even wish to consider an exit or partial exit from the business, but don’t know how to go about it.
If any of the above sounds familiar, a fresh look at things may be what you need. A re-evaluation, a re-missioning, re-strategizing and repositioning of your business and of how it fits into your life.
Mission Renewal coaching will normally begin with a business-360 analysis then with one-to-one sessions with the company leader, followed by re-strategizing sessions with the core management team.
Team Coaching & Development
A systemic approach to team & group experiential learning…
A team is both a functional unit and an emotional unit. It has a primary functional task to perform, but, when functioning well, a secondary task is also served: the collective self-fulfilment of the team members. The demands of internal and external clients are perpetually changing, so teams must be perpetually learning. Learning, too, has two key dimensions: cognitive change and motivation. So how, under the demands of such constant change, can teams stay motivated, and so remain cohesive and effective?
Our process is designed to help develop participants’ awareness about how they uniquely experience themselves as individuals and about how their individual behaviours impact upon others in the team. Much of the learning is experiential. Team members learn how to develop their social awareness and perspective-taking skills. By taking an authentic, value-centred approach, a greater sense of ownership is nurtured so that team members become more corroborative, self-led and self-motivated.
By experiencing the unfolding dynamics that evolve between group members as they interact with each other in the moment (in ‘the here and now’), within safe boundaries, uncensored emotional content surfaces in a co-created learning environment. Issues related to power, authority, role, competition, gender, difference etc., are usually evoked by members and by the group coach (consultant), thus fostering a type of self-awareness that goes beneath the surface to core values, beliefs, and hidden influences, to reveal the unconscious drivers of our behaviours and our actions.
The ideal group consists of eight people who are not members of the same group at work.
EQWorks
How is a Process Group Conducted?
The process group takes place in the presence of an experienced consultant. I partner with outside specialists for such groups. Issues that arise for you in the process group are usually interpreted in the final 15 minutes of each session (EQWorks) by the consultant and then become part of our work during coaching sessions. For that reason, it is preferred that you continue with one-to-one coaching while participating in the process group.
Groups are usually planned for 1.5-hour sessions. The members decide themselves what they wish to talk about. It is not a therapy or a self-help group. The role of the consultant is one of paying attention to the emerging dynamics, to maintain safe boundaries and, where appropriate, to interpret what is going on.