The first session with the leader is an important one. It’s the perfect opportunity to set the stage for the entire coaching journey. Both you and the leader will have your first opportunity to become deeper professionally acquainted with one another and the coaching process. You will have a once-in-an-engagement chance to delve into the leader’s readiness (and willingness) to grow. Through a series of leading questions, you will guide the leader towards a profound exercise in assessing & determining their commitment to grow: leadership is not about “me” but “WE”. Through a question-led approach, you will guide the leader in a discussion that concludes in a commitment to the coaching process. After planning feedback timelines and selecting respondents, you will conduct a behavioral interview with the leader.

We all love a great story. Great stories can take us on an emotional journey of excitement, anger, love, despair - and can stand the test of time. As a coach, you will harness the power of storytelling to tap into the leaders’ emotions to overcome their predisposed notions and beliefs. More specifically: using feedback to tell a story. 

Through this, you will support the leader in identifying their areas to develop. You will do this by debriefing the 360 assessment report and the behavioral interview report.

With a great deal of reflective information in front of them, the leader is ready  or still grappling with the feedback.  Regardless, you have an important role to play. Through a powerful debrief session, you will play a critical role in guiding the leader from awareness and acceptance towards action by articulating the numerous benefits that they and others will get from their leadership growth.

We can only commit to doing something if it is truly important to us. This especially holds true for any development endeavor. In coaching, it starts with the individual leader’s commitment. Next, is reaffirming the leader’s commitment to others.By reinforcing the leader’s awareness of the benefits they and their coworkers will get when they measurably improve, a pivotal commitment in the coaching engagement takes place: commitment to involving coworkers. Through storytelling, you will expose the leader to fresh perspectives, notably beliefs that successful people hold and how they can be used to create leverage in the change process. At the same time these beliefs, if left unchecked, can create roadblocks that give way to ineffective leadership habits. You will help the leader understand how these habits form, learn how to prevent them, and briefly evaluate which habits they may already be demonstrating to others.

You and the leader will embark on a review of the past month’s behavioral change performance.Through a set of cyclical questions, you will guide the leader in reviewing their feedforward suggestions and distilling actionable items to be refined and used in their Action Plan and shared with coworkers. Coworkers were onboarded with the promise that their suggestions would be seriously considered. Through punctuating the Action Plan with behaviors distilled from suggestions provided by coworkers, as well as behaviors that the leader is committed to putting into action, it meets that promise made to coworkers. Plus, this reaffirms the leader’s commitment of improving the perception that others have as a forefront priority. Accountability for leadership growth is integral to this process. Once the Action Plan is finalized it is shared with coworkers, which reinforces accountability in leadership growth. 

As the adage goes, “you can only manage what you measure”. On a quarterly basis, coworkers are asked to reflect over the past several months to provide feedback related to past performance and open-ended suggestions regarding future change efforts. These quarterly Pulse Surveys provide a clear ROI of the leader’s efforts to improve in the context of their work environment. Coworkers’ perception is the leader’s reality.