Coaching Leaders

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…So You’re Thinking about Coaching?

No-one manages on their own anymore. Organisations are too complex, too fast and too changeable for any single person to manage effectively all by themselves. Whatever changes you’re dealing with – big or small, individual or team-based – most people find it hard to change on their own. They need to be supported, guided and facilitated through the change. In other words, they need to be coached.

Forward-thinking leaders increasingly see coaching as an essential adjunct for building their leadership capability and achieving their development outcomes. Coaching is a powerful, personalised way to ensure learning is retained, acted on and applied - in real work-time. Numerous studies substantiate its superiority over traditional training strategies to help you get long-lasting results that matter.

Everyone can benefit from some coaching from time-to-time – having a supportive, sounding board to help you help yourself learn to lead more effectively – with calm, poise, balance, judgement and integrity.

We Can Help...

Maybe you just want to find out what “all this coaching stuff is about”. Or perhaps, you’ve already decided you want to do some coaching and you’re looking to see who might be the best choice to help you. Either way, you’re probably wondering about things like:

	What is coaching and why do it?
	What can coaching help me with?
	What is your coaching approach like – and will it suit me?
	What happens inside a typical coaching session?
	What do I need to do to make coaching work?
	How can I tell if coaching is working for me?

Coaching Leaders is one of the services we're pleased to offer and we've prepared a detailed Coaching Prospectus that shares our thoughts on the subject, some things we think you ought to consider and how we might be able to work together.

There's a full length version if you're already serious about looking for a coach and a slightly more condensed version if you're just exploring the idea...

Coaching Prospectus-The Change Forum - in full (PDF 4.1Mb)

Coaching Prospectus-The Change Forum - condensed (PDF 2.3Mb)

We’ve given you (we hope) extensive insights into our coaching approach so you can decide whether it might suit you. All coaches have different approaches, use different frameworks, tools and techniques and have a different personal flavour. What suits one person just won’t suit someone else. The fit between you, your coach and the coaching approach is critical for your learning comfort and success.

We hope you find it useful in making up your mind – and good luck with you coaching journey!

About your Coach…

Bill Cropper is principal coach at The Change Forum. He has been coaching and mentoring individuals and teams around leadership and change for many years. He has a down-to-earth, outgoing and open style; personal mastery of a wide range of facilitation tools, techniques and processes and customarily works comfortably with people at all levels – senior executives, operational managers, staff, community members and other consultants.

A message from Bill follows and his on-line Profile is a bit more expansive, but in summary...

He has a strong background in workplace improvement and cultural change and an ongoing passion for learning-centred leadership and team-based approaches to ‘living-at-work’ work. Bill is keenly interested in the benefits of conversational coaching and emotional intelligence to promote more productive, open interchanges and facilitate personal growth and change mastery. He runs a very popular public series of coaching clinics on Leading through Conversations, Dealing with Difficult Discussions and Personal Mastery: Leading with Emotional Intelligence as well as leadership forums on Learning-Centred Leadership, Leading through Teams, Learning to Lead Change and Learning to be a Coaching Leader.

Bill's consulting assignments consistently embrace coaching and skills transfer as a fundamental strategy in strengthening the learning capacity and self-reliance of individuals and teams. He is a preferred learning consultant and leadership coach for a number of public sector agencies, providing facilitation/coaching services to senior executives, managers, facilitators, work teams and community groups around change management, team reformation, organisation renewal, strategic planning, and the application of Peter Senge’s 5 Learning Disciplines to strengthen the leadership-learning capacity of organisations.

What Can you Expect? A Message from Bill...

Hi! I’m Bill – and you’re probably wondering what to expect if you choose to engage me as a coach. So for starters, here’s what I think coaching is about…

Whether its one-one-one or group-based, coaching is a conversation I’ll have with you about learning leadership, about the challenges you face in your role – both personally, professionally and operationally and about helping you to formulate improvement goals and try-out actions for yourself (and your team) that moves you closer towards where you imagine yourself being...

As you gather from that last bit, I think having a personal vision of what can be better or different is absolutely fundamental – as is the concept of voluntarism. You can’t forge a very productive coaching relationship with someone who doesn’t want to be coached. Here’s some ideas about what will happen though if you do want to be…

We’d need to meet first and have a preliminary chat about your goals and what you expect out of the coaching relationship. This might change later as new information or perspectives emerge but whatever the specifics, coaching in a work context needs to be outcomes-based and have clear linkages to real management improvement priorities to ensure that what’s learned is used in real work time and that you try-out actual improvements as we work through coaching sessions together.

From this, you now know that I think coaching is action-orientated, aiming to reform long-learned habits of thinking, doing and acting in certain ways. None of this by the way means that what you’re doing now is necessarily falling short. But you are now leading in the midst of times of terrific change that can be for some exhilarating and for others frightening. And change calls for new ways of thinking, new roles and new approaches to leading and managing. I also don’t believe coaching should be used for ‘performance management’ or ‘correction’ – there are different processes for that. Nor is it about ‘giving you answers’.

While I do have in-depth knowledge of different coaching strategies, subject-matter expertise and experience in leadership, change, relationship management and many other facets of organisational life and can show you how to use a variety of tools and techniques that may help you with your specific coaching improvement goals, most times I reckon you know the answers. My role is more to help you clarify your own thinking about where to find them and ‘try out some new moves’.

From my point of view, coaching is ‘cognitive’ – it’s more about positively challenging some of your own thinking and asking the right questions rather than providing you with answers. On the other hand, I’m also not averse to exploring options and giving ideas and advice when its asked for or needed. But the changing is still up to you!

After the first meeting, you may well decide you can’t work with me. That’s OK. There are different styles of working together and one coach can’t suit all people. If you do decide to go further, then we’ll draw up a coaching schedule for a block of sessions. Over that time, I’ll be taking a collaborative, ‘minds-on’ approach where you control the pace/content within agreed limits and I work at empowering you to set coaching goals/outcomes that have personal meaning for you first and foremost.

I hope we’ll develop the idea of coaching into more of a learning partnership …

Cheers…

Bill Cropper

coaching@thechangeforum.com OR +61-(0)7-4068 7591 or Mobile: +61-(0)429-687 513