“You don’t have to swing hard to hit a home run. If you got the timing, it’ll go.”
– Yogi Berra
It pays to time your coaching engagement well. Leadership coaching can do great things for you, both personally and professionally. Speaking from experience, my coach has made all the difference for my business– but it does require an investment.
Some key moments to consider a leadership coach are when you are:
- Being promoted into a more prominent role at your organization
- Starting a new job
- Taking on new responsibilities in your function
- Feeling burned out because you are doing too much and not delegating enough
- Leading a new cross-functional initiative
- Feeling less than confident in your leadership
- Experiencing a reorganization (before, during, or after)
- Getting a new boss or new CEO
- Feeling anxious about your success at work
- Taking on a new team, or several new team members
- Motivated to overcome some challenge in your leadership role
- Encouraged by your supervisor to make changes in your leadership that you find difficult
- Having trouble getting the most out of your direct reports or cross-functional team
If you see yourself in any of these situations AND are ready to own your role in becoming better, then now may be the time to hire a leadership coach. And caution: there are lots of people out there that call themselves coaches. I recommend finding one who is ICF-credentialed, has their own coach, and does a free consultation to ensure you and they are a good match for the issues you want to work on before locking in an engagement.
What the free coaching consultation entails
If you feel like the time is right for coaching, the free consultation is a no-obligation way to dip your toe in the water. During our one-hour call, we will home in on the leadership challenges you want to address and dig in a bit more on where you want to get to and what might be getting in the way now. My job is to ask lots of questions and listen well. If you are curious, I will explain what coaching is and is not and the structure of a coaching engagement. We can feel each other out to see if we are a good personality fit.
No matter what we decide about working together, my goal on the call is to listen to you with full attention and give you something of value:
- A helpful podcast or book recommendation
- A tip-sheet
- A referral to a better coach for you
How your first 2-3 coaching appointments look
Are you curious about what actually happens in our coaching sessions? While no two engagements are exactly the same, here’s what you can expect in general:
We start by setting your goals and establish a coaching agreement. If we are doing a sponsored engagement, your sponsor and we do this together. This typically takes between 30 minutes to an hour.
We’ll then either review assessments that you’ve already had (like a 360), or I will conduct an assessment that is appropriate to the coaching goals.
Based on your coaching goals and assessment, we’ll co-create a one-page leadership development plan to guide our coaching sessions.
The coaching sessions are generally an hour long. You decide what issue you want to tackle in the session (based on your development plan) and what you want to walk away with.
Here are examples my clients have brought to coaching sessions:
- My team and peers often let deadlines slip and don’t always follow through on commitments, leaving me to clean up their mess. At the end of the session, I want to develop a better approach to holding them accountable that I can immediately implement.
- I want to delegate more, but every time I delegate, the job isn’t done right. At the end of the session, I want to know what concrete steps I can take to delegate more effectively
- I’m so busy and being pulled in a million directions by my boss, team, and peers. I have no time to work on strategic things. At the end of the session, I want practical tactics to manage my priorities better.
- I’ve been given this new leadership role and feel like an imposter. At the end of this session, I want to know what practical things I can do to feel more confident in my new role.
Discovering solutions
We then dig into what’s getting in their way of finding a solution. Often the presenting challenge signals deeper issues or root causes to be addressed. We will brainstorm ways forward and commit to small actions you will take to make progress before the next session. At the next session, I’ll check in on your homework and we’ll go from there.
If you’re ready to build the confidence needed to hold others accountable, delegate more effectively and manage your priorities better, let’s discover your path together.
Recent Comments