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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..."
