Why invest in a coach?

The role of a coach is to partner with their clients in a thought-provoking manner to facilitate growth and positive change.  While studying a book or attending a training session may help drive incremental change, often they have a limited lifespan before you return to old habits. A coach will work with you to uncover untapped skills and potential. Coaching will help you  clarify goals, uncover blind spots and build lifelong skills that you can use beyond the coaching engagement.  

The following is a select list of topics that leaders may bring to the coaching engagement:

• Professional growth - What got you here is not what will  help you get there. As you progress in your career, where you focus your time and what skills you use need to evolve. Managing up, down and across require you to flex in different ways. And the skills required to maintain a steady state are different than those required in turnaround situations. A coach can collect input from colleagues and key stakeholders to assess your growth potential and measure your progress throughout the coaching engagement.

• Agile leadership - Whether you are a first time or seasoned people manager, learning how to motivate, delegate, advise, support your teams can be rewarding, frustrating and challenging. A coach can work with you to translate your business strategy into results by working through and with your  direct and indirect teams.  Understanding the impact of your leadership style will help you create systematic changes that allow you to quickly pivot and adjust to evolving business needs.

• Work/life balance - Time is the most valuable commodity we have. Learn how to be more strategic about how and where you are spending your time. Coaching can give you a broader perspective of what gives you energy and what depletes your energy. A coach can help shine a mirror on where your time investments may be skewed which can allow you to confidently make changes that allow you to thrive both in work and beyond.

• Living with purpose - Perhaps you got that well earned promotion, but somehow you are surprised by how little excitement you feel now that you are here. Sometimes it takes an 'event' to help us push pause and slow down just enough to ask "is this enough?" Finding fulfillment is not up to your work, your family or your friends. This is personal. Coaching will identify  your unique values and define the impact you want to have on the world (not just specific to your  work, family or community). Living with purpose means creating the environment that allows you to live your life to the fullest.

• Career transitions - You  may have been promoted into a new role, or landed at a new company. You may be dealing with different performance expectations, new teams, new companies or maybe you have made a geographic move. As the number of changing variables increases, so does the risk of failure. Coaching can help set  yourself up for success, make sure you are focusing your time and energy appropriately and creating clarity on your goals and expectations not only for the next step, but for your longer term ambitions.