Tag Archive for: Work
How can we make the learning from professional development stick?
Learning from professional development stick?
I was recently asked by the CFO of a tech company, How can we make the learning from the professional development events we do, stick? So I went ahead and wrote this article…
Check out this article on LinkedIn: How can we make the learning from Professional Development Stick
Enjoy!
Emily
Part 3: Setting and Attaining Goals
Diana Golden Brosnihan, a brilliant skier. Diana won 19 Gold medals in world competition.
How do you go about setting and attaining goals?
What challenges do you face when setting goals?
How do you hold yourself accountable for accomplishing a goal?
How do you know when you are successful?
How do you celebrate success?
Setting and attaining goals
Setting goals and how one attains them can differ between the athlete and the executive. With the end result being success for both, it differs in how one’s goals are identified and what role the coach plays. The skier may tell their coach their overall goal of wanting to ski all the intermediate terrain comfortably. The ski coach then identifies what the skier’s needs are to accomplish this and creates the smaller goals or stepping stones for their student, telling them and showing them what to do and how to do it. They encourage and provide feedback throughout, even skiing down the hill in order to literally mirror proper movements for them; perhaps even manipulating them physically so they may feel the correct positioning.
The executive coach questions, providing space for the client to explore possibilities and express how they see, feel, or think about things. Instead of focusing on what the coach thinks, an executive coach focuses on the client’s thoughts and ideas. It is a conversation to provoke thought and bring out of the executive his or her own goals and direction they want to go; guiding the executive to identify for themselves what the path is (obstacles and resources) to get them to their goal. Executive coaching includes mirroring also, but it’s mirroring the client’s words back to them and asking for more depth of vision.
The executive coach focuses on repeating the positive statements and rephrases in an affirmative way so as to support clear, positive, proactive thought patterns; similar to how the sports coach performs the maneuvers in the correct way, leading the student to see positive movement patterns with the goal of creating the correct image for the student. Through open-ended questioning, the executive coach listens to what the client says so they can identify what the client wants. The coach then takes the very words of the client, without analyzing or judging, and reflects them back to their client.
The scope of goals for an executive is broad and can range from any issue in the person’s life to one particular project in a particular area. This broad scope arena for goal options means the look of success for an executive is just as broad. The coach for the executive then uses their fine-tuned skills to help guide the executive to clarify and pinpoint particular goals and then prioritize them. Through further questioning to bring out existing resources and strengths, the executive coach helps the client to identify action steps and timelines as well as measures for success.
While the sports coach takes into consideration confidence levels, analyzes movement and then teaches and advises. The executive coach brings about awareness through discussion, plus exploration of their client’s wants, thoughts, and behaviors. Awareness is enlightening to the executive, just as it is to the athlete. Sports and executive coaches both seek to empower their student/client and provide action steps and timelines for making change based on new awarenesses of body mind and spirit.
In part 4, I address risk taking and behavior change.
Part 1: Coaching the Athlete vs. Coaching the Executive
With the rise in popularity of executive coaching, you may ask yourself, “Why would I want a coach? What can a coach do for me? Athletes have coaches and that seems customary but how is it customary for an executive to have a coach? How is it different from or similar to the athletic coach?”
How often do you find yourself in a situation at work where you wish you had someone to run things by? How could you have benefitted by having someone to help you navigate challenging terrain, something as simple as building an agenda for a board meeting or as difficult as having a challenging conversation with an employee?
Coaching has its roots in tutoring and has been a part of sports since the 1800’s. In its simplest form, the traditional coach is defined as “a person who gives advice.” The beginning of most definitions of a coach is “a person who teaches or trains…” A new definition of coaching is emerging with the rising popularity of professional life, health, and executive coaches. What executive coaches do is similar in many respects to what sports coaches do, and it also differs in precise and important ways.
Coaching the Athlete vs. Coaching the Executive is part one of an eight-part series, comparing and contrasting my experience as a skiing coach to my experience as an executive coach.
When athletes perform, they are having fun, competing, and hoping to perform efficiently and at the top of their game. They are inspired, focused, and motivated. Sports coaches are teachers with students. Sports coaches tell their students how to do what they do, listen and support their students in creating goals and action steps that will help them win. They provide advice and direction, telling their students what to do and how to do it. Sports coaches often have mastered a sport to some degree, usually to a higher level than that of their students, in order to effectively coach the student.
When executives are in their working mode, leading people, keeping up on issues, finding resources for their business and finding better, more efficient ways to do more of what they do, they also are inspired, focused, and motivated. Executive coaches listen, encourage their clients to create their goals and action steps and support change, based on what the clients wish to achieve. Executive coaches don’t tell or advise. Instead of collaborative involvement to set the goals with or for the clients, executive coaches give clients the space to be the sole decision-makers, free from direction. Executive coaches don’t provide the answers. Instead, they ask open-ended questions, prompting their clients to discover the answers for themselves. Executive coaches listen to understand and to determine which questions to ask next. The goal is to provoke more thoughts on subjects identified by the executives. Executive coaches partner with clients so the clients can explore, move past obstacles, strategize, plan their own actions, and create change they have defined and chosen themselves. Executive coaches do not have to be the content experts. Executives hold the answers for themselves, and the coaches’ job is to bring the answers that already exist in the minds of their clients to the surface.
This first blog highlights an important difference in the relationship between an executive coach and the sports coach. In Part Two of this series you’ll learn more about the coaching relationships experienced in sports coaching and executive coaching.
Check out our Adventure Leadership Summit combining evidence-based assessments, leadership coaching, and an adventure to sharpen your leadership skills.
How are you connected to your organization’s mission?
Connecting to the mission of one’s work adds value and purpose to the work.
Consider the following questions:
How clear are you about your organization’s mission?
How do you explain to others what you do?
How do you explain why you do what you do?
How does your role at work directly connect you with the organization’s purpose?
How does your role at work connect to your personal goals and values?
In my work with one nonprofit, the board was made up of “old timers” and “new comers”. There was lots of new energy and ideas in the air. The new comers were taking things in a new and fresh direction to bring in new and exciting things to draw in new and enthusiastic members. The old timers were wondering how this fit with their purpose. The new comers saw the potential to bring in more money with this newness. This sounded good to the old timers so they moved forward.
What happened was mission drift. It became hard for the board to agree where to focus and spend and grow because they lost the sense of who they were and why they existed in the first place. It became challenging for leadership to focus on precision and for the staff to operate when the mission was no longer clear. The messaging to the public became fuzzy and the purpose of, and connection to, the organization was drifting for all.
The next board meeting required a full agenda on the questions “Why do we exist?” and “Who do we intend to serve?”
It is invigorating to revisit the mission of one’s organization and clarify the connection for governing members, leadership and staff as well as for one’s self. Clarifying and articulating the mission is also a powerful tool for on-boarding new team members and champions.
How is the work of your board, leadership and staff different when your connected to your organization’s mission organization’s mission is clear and each can articulate their own connection to it?
I offer a program on mission connection and enjoy my work with boards, staff and individuals to strengthen connections in their lives.
Request a complimentary Connection Strengthening Session today.
Note: A wonderful read discussing mission connection is the book, Focus on Sustainability by Dennis McMillian of the Foraker Group.
What Creates A Trusting Environment?
What Creates A Trusting Environment?
A recent coaching session began with the client asking me, “How does one creating trusting surroundings?”
This leader was struggling to enter into a new position and had the goal of building trust among his team. I loved that he cared so much about this because when people experience trust in their situation they are motivated to learn and be more productive.
Here are the highlights of what my client came to through our coaching session:
- It begins with the leader.
- Team members trust they can let their light shine and not be held back or overridden.
- Team members trust it is safe to stretch and grow even if they may fail.
- Team members trust they will be spoken to honestly whether they are overreaching or underperforming.
- And most importantly, the entire team trusts that leadership values and practices confidentiality.
The importance of confidentiality, especially from leadership is critical to Creating A Trusting Environment. Trusting one’s leader promotes each team member to trust one another and this promotes genuine behaviors and team members showing up as their authentic selves.
How will your workplace surroundings change, and What Creating A Trusting scenarioas team members whole-heartedly trust leadership?
Coaching provides a solid checkpoint for leaders to enhance their workplace surroundings.
Request a complimentary Leadership Enhancement session today!
Free Sample Marketing
During a recent coaching session, a client was focusing on how to market herself as a coach. She expressed the recommended marketing steps felt uncomfortable and contrived. She described an interaction at a party where she was talking with someone telling of their challenges at work. My client felt confident she could help this person yet she didn’t feel it was appropriate to respond by marketing herself as a coach in this situation.
The question I asked my client was “What will happen when you simply act like a coach the next time that happens? Her response was “I will be giving them a taste of coaching.” Just as she finished saying it she realized it as an opportunity to provide a first-hand experience into coaching. She could offer it as a gift and that felt appropriate to her.
What a great way of marketing one’s self — to give, in the moment, a free sampling of what one has to offer…
Coaching is a gift and when the fit is right and the coach is well trained, it only takes a small taste to make a positive difference, leading one to want more. Offering one’s self as a coach in a random setting for the sake of exposing another to coaching is not only genuine for a true coach, it is a gift we coaches enjoy giving naturally.
So, if you are a coach, offer free sample marketing when the situation presents itself.
If you are not a coach, and you find yourself thinking more intentionally about things because of a conversation you had with a stranger, be aware that you may just have been given a gift; perhaps that person was a coach.
Finding a good fit is important and coaches often offer a free introductory session for just that reason.
Free Sample Marketing
Treat yourself; go get a free coaching sample today!