Coaching
Coaching
Coaching is not advice delivered slowly. It is the questions that have been postponed, asked properly, and accountability for whatever is decided in response. There are three ways of working, and which one fits depends on whether the difficulty sits with one person or between several.
Team coaching
The client is the team rather than the individuals within it. Alliance, roles, conflict, and the future the team is prepared to commit to.
Leadership coaching
For a leader growing into a larger role, alongside a program or after it, with everything applied to their own team.
Executive coaching
One to one at senior level. One behavior, worked on until it holds under pressure.
Which one fits your situation
Where the difficulty sits between people who have to deliver something together, coaching them individually will not reach it, and team coaching is the instrument. Where someone has recently been given a larger role and has to grow into it while performing in it, that is leadership coaching. And where a senior leader is carrying a single decision, relationship or pattern that has remained open for months, that is executive coaching.
From the outside the distinction is frequently unclear, which is what a first conversation resolves. Naming the format that actually fits matters more than selling the one that happened to be asked about.
Which kind fits
The practical part
Anna has carefully guided me on a path to identifying my actual talents and my inner purpose.
Rolf Reinhardt, Senior Account Director, LinkedIn
The crucial revelation was the power of communication. The more I engage, the more openness I receive from others.
Angela, Chief Accountant, ABM
Questions people ask
How does coaching differ from mentoring or consulting?
A mentor describes what they would do. A consultant examines the situation and recommends a course of action. Coaching proceeds from the premise that the client already knows more than has been put into words, and works to bring that into the open and into practice.
Can coaching run alongside a program?
Yes, and that combination produces the fastest movement. The program supplies the language and the practice; coaching sustains it in the weeks between sessions, when no one is observing.
Who usually sponsors the work?
Either the organization or the individual. Where the organization sponsors it, goals are agreed together at the outset and reviewed at the end, while what is said within a session remains there.
Start with half an hour
Nothing to prepare. Bring the matter you have been carrying for some time and we will establish together which of the three would help, if any of them would.