When I think of "regular" coaching in the workplace I often have flashbacks to coaching employees on my team as a call center manager on what they "needed" to do better or how they compare to others in terms of performance. This was how I was trained to lead, but the practice never felt quite right. These were certainly during the early days of my work life, before I learned new ways to bring out the best in leaders and became a coach. So let’s be clear: that type of “coaching” was NOT professional coaching or leadership development.
Let’s instead focus on the word “framework.” My coaching strategy is based on the idea that each person has their own operating system (a framework) and our job as coaches is to update that system through the process of coaching. Our endgame is to have everyone operating at their highest levels as people and leaders. This benefits the individual and the company.
When I got into coaching, I could see right away that I needed multiple tools in order to draw the very best out of my clients. I started with Energy Leadership, which is a process of showing how our attitudes and mental perceptions affect our lives, relationships and outcomes in both leadership and life. Energy Leadership is still one of my favorite tools and, thanks to iPEC, it was the start of my coaching training journey.
Still, I noticed Energy Leadership alone wasn’t highlighting people’s natural talents and strengths to the best of their ability, so I added StrengthFinder to my clients’ assessments, and created coaching curriculum to increase their awareness of how to use their strengths more effectively in pursuit of their goals and the goals of their company.
During this same time, I noticed that my coaching style would change depending on the client’s personality type. This was a natural strength for me, speaking to people in their own unique language depending on their personality. So, I began implementing personality education for the individual and also started teaching my clients how to most effectively speak to different personality types in the workplace. This helped shift my work into the coaching of leadership teams and whole organizations.
The last tools that I added addressed values. Our values shape a big part of that personal framework when it comes to how we operate and interact with other people. Our values are also often at the root of stress patterns, communication conflicts and division within an organization. Therein lies the power of values-based leadership and why it is so important to the future of all companies that they understand the impact made by their employees’ values.
When all of these angles of leadership development are pulled together in a cohesive way it then lends clarity to your company’s culture and leadership patterns, as well as your company’s future trajectory.
For organizations, we offer training in all these areas, and follow up with one-on-one and group coaching in order to help this new information live out within an organization. We also find that we are effective at influencing team and management meetings by asking powerful questions about how we take these new tools and prospective and use them to create solutions and stronger frameworks within the company in ways that benefit everyone involved.
At Endless Ocean Coaching, we know the only way to truly improve an entire culture is through long-term development work. This development work will not only serve your organization now, but its impact and benefits will also continue to unfold for years to come.
If you would like to try a sample session and get a taste for how coaching can impact you as an individual, book a free, 30-minute consultation now.