Coaching for Transformational Leaders, Teams and Cultures
The curse of leadership is: Nothing changes until you do.
The gift of leadership is: Everything changes when you do.
1:1 Executive Coaching
Throughout the course of a career (and a life), every leader has learned strategies for being successful—and for staying safe.
Over time, these strategies become automatic responses and habitual patterns, which you may or may not be aware of. These patterns don’t necessarily serve you or your goals, and are insufficient for the new challenges you face today.
Coaching is a partnership process for rewiring old patterns that limit leadership effectiveness and cultivating the skills that power transformational leadership. With small shifts in your thinking, you can elevate your impact and achieve next-level results.
If you’re wondering “Why should I focus on me when the issues are in my team?” consider that, as their leader, every choice you make—every action, reaction and interaction—has outsize influence on your team. You are what we call, in systems thinking terms, our highest point of leverage.
Coaching offers you:
Space for Reflection
Shift from reactive, firefighting mode to leading with purposeful vision
Support for Growth
Understand your leadership strengths and liabilities, investing in the the former to overcome the latter
Structure for Sustained Results
Deliver tangible progress against strategic imperatives and change initiatives
80% of people who receive coaching report increased self-confidence.
Over 70% report improved work performance and relationships.
—International Coaching Federation
Team Alignment and Optimization (TAO)
When is a team not a team? When it’s a collection of talented people working alongside one another—not together.
High-performing teams are greater than the sum of their talents, operating with a high degree of collective intelligence—the combined capacity and capability to perform a wide variety of tasks and solve diverse problems. Any team of any size will experience friction and conflict—that’s a natural result of bringing together two or more minds. In team coaching, we develop the trust, awareness and inclusion necessary for collective intelligence to emerge in those moments.
My TAO process systematically builds trust and aligns a team toward a shared vision. Each TAO engagement is designed with and for the team in question, and can range in format from a weeklong team retreat to a 3-6 month journey.
Important: The prerequisite for team coaching is that the team leader must be engaged in 1:1 coaching.
From: Transactional Team
Lack of clear direction and decisionmaking
Conflict breeds division + distraction
Feedback is withheld or counterproductive
Improvised or reactive ways of working
Individual interests are prioritized
To: Transformational Team
Aligned around purposeful vision
Conflict is processed openly for creative solutions
Feedback is regular, constructive + multidirectional
Explicit norms + effective ways of working
Inclusive (vs. consensus) decisionmaking
A team’s collaboration processes are 2x more important to collective intelligence than individual skills.
—Quantifying Collective Intelligence in Human Groups, Riedl, Kim, Gupta, Malone, Williams Woolley, 2021
Calibrating a Healthy, High-Performing Culture
Once we’ve coached an organization’s leaders individually and collectively, we can turn our attention to the whole system, also known as the culture. But culture is not a machine we can finely tune to our specifications—it’s an ecosystem.
Imagine a coral reef—thousands of organisms living together in cooperation and competition, moving and growing and thriving together. Nothing existing on its own, everything contributing to the whole. Your organizational culture is like that reef, a massively complex environment with infinite variables that needs carefully calibrated conditions to thrive.
In the course of our 1:1 and team coaching, we will help you assess your culture and calibrate these conditions to support the transformation you seek.
Transformational Culture =
Psychological Safety
to be ourselves
to speak up + take risks
to learn and grow
x
Meaningful Challenge
a purposeful vision
growth opportunities
constructive conflict + feedback
A toxic culture is 10.4x more likely to contribute to attrition than compensation.
—Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation, Sull, Sull and Zweig, published in MIT Sloan Management Review, 2022
Client Promise
The thing about working with change, whether it starts with a massive corporate transformation or a single leadership transition, is that you’re never quite finished.
New team members will join. Strategies will shift. Unexpected challenges will arise. Change will keep accelerating and you will continue evolving… if you’re doing it right.
But that does not mean we’ll work together forever. We won’t need to.
My promise to my clients is:
You will emerge from our work together with the mindset, skills and confidence to lead change powerfully wherever you go.
I am here as your partner, coach and guide, committed to building the leadership, team and organizational capacity for transformation that will have you leaping forward from here.