Tag Archives: leadership develoment

Coaching others

How do you know how to choose the right executive coach for you?

Posted on by

How do you know how to choose the right executive coach for you?

Helpfully, we are now in a world where executive coaching is seen as an investment in organisational success. Gone are the days when you were told you needed a coach and that was not necessarily a good thing.  Unhelpfully, there are hundreds of coaching niches and thousands upon thousands of coaches out there, and there is no unified code or standard for executive coaching.  How do you know how to choose the right one for you?

Curiously, seeking guidance on this from that most ubiquitous source of information, the World Wide Web, yields a myriad of advice that seems to me to be somewhat skewed towards that particular giver of advice-who-just-so-happens-to-be-an-executive-coach themselves!

Before you read on I have something to declare: I am too an executive coach.

However my advice to you is simple: Use you head, heart and gut to make your choice.

Use your head

Your coach needs be able to work with the outcomes you are seeking. For example, it’s no use selecting a business development coach if you have writers’ block. Look for someone with proven experience in the areas you want to work on, evidenced by testimonials, who can evidence relevant successes in the real world and evidence over what timeframe that happened. Then understand how they will get to know you, your context and your challenges. This may be someone from the same industry background if that is important to you, or maybe not; sometimes a fresh perspective can be, well, refreshing.

More importantly understand their process for understanding you: for example, are you going to be inundated with psychometric questionnaires (high focus on the coach’s process), or simply listened to (low focus on the coach’s process, high focus on you)? You might also want to know your coach is in coaching themselves and that they have qualifications and/or accreditation from one of the coaching bodies such as the International Coach Federation, the Association for Coaching, the European Mentoring and Coaching Council or the Academy of Executive Coaching (other coaching bodies are available!) Such bodies have codes of ethics such as requiring coaches to be under professional supervision.

Listen to your heart

Coaches are there to help you make better choices in whatever you are seeking to change. Different coaches will do this in very different ways; they might work anywhere on a spectrum from non-directive through to directive; from purely accepting you as you are by listening deeply to you, through to confronting your challenges and helping you learn how to learn new ways of doing and being; from gently evoking change within you to robustly provoking you to do things differently.

That your needs will be matched by their process is very important. If you choose an accepting/listening coach, you are likely to have some great conversations, but they might not have much purpose. Choosing a provocative coach may be too challenging. This is a careful balance that just using your head will not resolve. You will only work though this by talking with them or having a sample coaching session from them. Look out for their ability to listen deeply and accept you as you are, go beyond listening by helping you face the challenges you have, and enable you to make better choices.

That coaches must keep your conversations confidential is a must-have. As is building trust between you. The best way to assess the relationship you seek with your coach, is to meet with them perhaps several times before committing to the contract. If you only use your head, you might miss whether the chemistry is right or not.

Go with your gut

Not all coaching relationships gel. Coaches often hear, “My last coach didn’t work out, I should have gone with my instinct.” So yes, use your head and listen to your heart.

How do you know how to choose the right executive coach for you?  Ultimately something down inside your gut will let you know you’ve picked the right coach.

Choose wisely.

The A to Z of OD (Part III continued): C is for Climate

Posted on by

Earlier in the week, I covered C is for Culture.  Continuing the letter C, this beautiful blog post about organisational climate is contributed by freelance OD practitioner Lucy Thompson.  Lucy is a creative OD Specialist, Changemaker and Coach.  She typically leads the people aspects on major transformational change programmes, focusing on delivering organisational effectiveness and team performance.

Creating the right Climate for Culture to Flourish

I was reminded today of the simplicity of a flower in nature – when you see a flower growing beautifully and thriving, the last thing you do is pick it.  You leave it to be nurtured by nature-  safe in the knowledge that this flower had found its place in the world and the climate it was growing in was enabling it to be the best version of itself it can be.

A climate in an organisation is often referred to as its culture.  You only need Google ‘culture’ and ‘organisation’ to find a raft of insight, models and diagnostics that can help put labels on what is happening at any one time in the organisation and its system.

Many an OD practitioner will tell you that culture is a direct descendant of the team at the top.  Leadership shapes culture.  It’s the way leaders walk, the way they talk, the messages they send and the way they bounce back when things might not have gone as planned. 

Creating high performing leadership teams

Taking this a step further, the leaders in an organisation are a team in their own right – they might be members of several teams but their ‘first’ team is their peer group and the purpose of their roles is to work together to steer their ship to success (whatever that might look like for them).  Therefore, if this team shapes culture, then creating high performing teams must start with the top team.  This creates the right climate for OD – simple enough? Yet why do many organisations struggle with this concept?

Patrick Lencioni is a true hero of mine.  He really puts out in to the ether a simple construct of a high performing team and its characteristics.  No long-complicated words or theory, no model that requires you to follow a tube map of arrows to understand the end goal.  Quite simply the five behaviours of a cohesive team are Trust, Conflict, Commitment, Accountability and Results – simple when you know how, right?

 For OD to flourish in organisations, the culture needs to be right: it needs to enable OD practitioners and their practice to be the very best version they can be, and this means the work starts at the top.  Enabling the cohesive team can be the gamechanger for the success of organisation development and its interventions.

Next time: C is for Change

Are you ready to lead a robotised workforce?

Posted on by

The next generation are ready to embrace robots into their lives.  The future is now.  Are you ready to lead a robotised workforce?  Strengthening your leadership skills can help you navigate the new digital landscape. 

The digital revolution will not be televised

Whether you are digitising post-sales customer support, introducing robotic process automation (RPA) into your back-office, or enabling customers to self-serve through online portals or apps on their phones, it is likely you are feeling some anxiety and stress from the ever-increasing exposure to digital technology on your business.

Today’s leaders are expected to empower their teams and deliver digital transformation at the same time.  The digital revolution will not be televised to be re-run later, so you can pick over it and learn the lessons in hindsight.  The digital revolution will be live.

What is the need for human leaders?

Commentators suggest we are drowning in new ‘always on’ technology that pervades modern life.  At work, this is not simply a technology matter, but rather an issue that goes to the core of what it means to be a leader.

In his most recent book, Conquering Digital Overload, Wisework’s Peter Thomson examines the effects on core activities that were once the preserve of human leaders: providing support, focusing on results, seeking different perspectives and solving problems.

Thomson and his co-authors explain how the digital revolution is stripping away the need for expert human leadership.  When the internet can provide knowledge and empower groups of people to find their voice, they ask, what is the need for human leaders?

Could a robot become a leader?

The leaders who survive and thrive the digital revolution will work across organisational boundaries by putting their customers at the heart of their business processes.  This means that businesses can best embrace digital transformation by using technology and artificial Intelligence to help prioritise customers’ needs and directing them towards appropriate services 24/7.  Research by Oxford University suggests 47% of UK jobs will be lost to digitisation by 2050.  Thankfully, you’ll still need ‘the human touch’ to coordinate – or ‘lead’ – the delivery of those services.

This means we need more and better-quality collaboration, and the ability to lead the whole system.  Robots cannot do that, not yet anyway.

Whole system leadership

Whole system leadership tams collectively attend to strategy, operations and relationships.  To do this effectively you need to develop a collaborative mindset and skillset in your leadership team.

I’ve helped several leadership teams in different sectors strengthen these skills through coaching and set-piece development.  Agile leaders are already deploying live strategy frameworks and investing in efficient shared services and digitisation to ensure their strategy remains flexible and responsive to emerging customer needs.

The most effective leaders I speak to are also explicitly working on their relationships.  This investment includes developing value-adding relationships with key customers, suppliers and other partners by becoming truly collaborative .  It also includes engaging colleagues in a vision of how digital technology can improve their working lives and the quality of the services they provide and investing in skills to deliver those services excellently in a digitised world.

Now is the time to develop your leadership skills

To be ready to lead the digital transformation of your business, it is more important than ever to develop a collaborative mindset and keep your leadership skills current and relevant.

We can’t afford to wait for others to show us the way.  And so – if not you, then who will navigate the complexity of leading a digitally augmented workforce?

 

Jeremy Lewis, March 2018

Jeremy is a Wisework Partner http://www.wisework.co.uk/partners

This post was first published on Wisework’s blog http://www.wisework.co.uk/content/robots-versus-humans-battle-leading-future-work .

 

Robots versus humans: the battle for leading the future of work

Posted on by

Book review: Conquering Digital Overload, edited by Peter Thomson, author of Future Work and Director of Wisework, the leading authority on the Future of Work

Conquering Digital Overload is a fascinating inquiry into the stress caused by digital technology on businesses and society at large and provides some practical tips for leaders to navigate the new digital landscape.  It suggests we are drowning in the new ‘always on’ technology that pervades modern life and that for governments and businesses, this is not simply an ICT issue, but rather an issue that goes to the core of what it means to be a leader.

With useful research findings on the effects of digital technology, the book examines the impact it has on every facet of our lives, surfaces the anxiety and stress caused by digital overload and highlights the effects on core activities that were once the preserve of human leaders – providing support, focusing on results, seeking different perspectives and solving problems.  Thomson and his 15 co-authors explain how the digital revolution is stripping away the need for expert human leadership.  When the internet can provide knowledge and empower groups of people to find their voice, they ask, what is the need for human leaders?  They go on to suggest expert human leadership is needed to prevent the tyranny of crowds making populist and yet poor decisions.  And to preserve the health and wellbeing of organisations.

We can’t expect governments to regulate effectively.  And so – if not you, then who will navigate the complexity of leading an artificially intelligent workforce?

Jeremy J Lewis

Committed to making a difference in developing leaders

January 16, 2018