The chapter delves into the transformation of the speaker's perspective on leadership, leading to their transition from a charitable foundation worker to an executive coach. It discusses pivotal mentors and moments that influenced this journey, along with the restructuring of learning programs to prioritize interpersonal skills and experiential learning. The session explores the distinctions between coaching and therapy, emphasizing the importance of recognizing limitations and providing insights based on the coach's experiences.
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Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com
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Notes:
- Commonalities of excellent coaches:
- Not defensive
- Respond well to feedback
- Ability to learn
- "Leadership can't be taught but it can be learned."
- Coaching is not therapy, but it can be therapy-adjacent.
- It's not telling people what to do and it's not just asking questions. It's a combination of all of them.
- There is ample research on the benefits of writing. It clarifies your thinking.
- The questions to ask someone who might need an executive coach:
- Why do you want a coach?
- Why now?
- What do you hope to get out of it?
- What do great leaders do?
- First, do no harm.
- Walk the talk.
- Be an embodiment of the culture.
- Have high standards
- Take risks
- Coach people up
- Train people
- "Coaching is accomplishment through others."
- "Feedback is not a gift."
- Feedback is data. Signal and noise.
- Signal - Important and good.
- Noise - Byproduct of someone's distorted lens.
- "Praise, Criticism, Praise (PCP) is terrible." Don't give the compliment sandwich. It's disingenuous.
- How leaders best overcome adversity – The most critical skill is "adaptive capacity..." It’s composed of two primary qualities: the ability to grasp context, and hardiness.
- Coaching - Asking evocative questions, ensuring the other person feels heard, and actively conveying empathy remain the foundations of coaching.
- Connect: Establish and renew the interpersonal connection, followed by an open-ended question.
- Reflect: Having elicited a response, reflect back the essence of the other person's comments.
- Direct: Focus their attention on a particular aspect of their response that invites further exploration.
- Support and Challenge - A client once said, “It feels like you’re always in my corner, but you never hesitate to challenge me.”
- Master the Playbook, Throw it Away - Coaching involves a continuous and cyclical process of learning, unlearning, and relearning.
- Power Dynamics - The longer I coach, the more I appreciate and value the work of Jeff Pfeffer, a leading scholar on power. philosopher Ernest Becker: "If you are wrong about power, you don't get a chance to be right about anything else."
- "Meaningful coaching is always an emotionally intimate experience, no matter what’s being discussed. In part this is a function of the context: two people talking directly to each other with no distractions... Intimacy in a coaching relationship also results from a willingness to 'make the private public'--to share with another person the thoughts and feelings that we usually keep to ourselves... And yet an essential factor that makes such intimacy possible is a clear set of boundaries defining the relationship, which creates an inevitable and necessary sense of distance..."
