“Everyone wants to shoot the messenger!” says Mary, who’s the messenger for a boss who would rather “not get involved.” Here’s her story. It might have familiar ring: Mary is a seasoned executive assistant. She’s able to see what needs doing and gets it done. She thinks on her feet, consistently makes good choices, and [...]
Executive Coaching and Mentoring
Coaching is really about moving valuable people from where they are to where they want to be. It’s simple and powerful. Even individuals at the top of their game can benefit from individual coaching to improve their performance. Athletes have known this as far back as ancient Greece in the original Olympic games in using [...]
A high-wire acrobat crossed Niagara Falls on a cable strung from New York to Canada. He was equipped with only a very long and heavy balancing pole and his courage. During the crossing he occasionally sat on the wire, stood on one foot and actually lay down to take a nap. He even jumped in [...]
Executive coaching has become very popular. An executive coach provides one-on-one assessment, evaluation, feedback, problem solving, and advice to a leader. The goal is to increase self-awareness, identify areas for improvement, and develop an action plan to enhance personal and leadership effectiveness. The “coachee” can be at any level in an organization but typically is [...]
A new resource called I/O at Work has started publishing reviews of various articles, books, and other publications in the field of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. A recent post is a review of Hidden in Plain Sight: The Active Ingredients of Executive Coaching by McKenna and Davis. The take-away messages from reviewer Samantha Paustian-Underdahl are: [...]
I visited the website featured on a recent newsletter (Click here: :: Authentic Happiness :: Using the new Positive Psychology founded by Dr. Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism, and was captured by his latest research on happiness interventions. What does this have to do with coaching, you may well ask. After all, it’s hard [...]
The next time you see geese heading south for the winter, flying along in a “V” formation, you might be interested in knowing what science has discovered about why they fly that way. It has been learned, that as each bird flaps its wings, it creates an “uplift” for the bird immediately following. By flying [...]
Leading for Results. It’s one thing to master the technical aspects of a job. It’s quite another to move into the realm of motivating, influencing, and driving the performance of a team, department, or organization. Every new role you take with more responsibility requires different skills. You manage to provide controls: Planning, Organizing, Reporting, Developing [...]
Once you have decided that coaching is the developmental approach you would like to take, the next step is to choose the right coach for you. Recommendations from colleagues are helpful in terms of coaching effectiveness, but coach selection also requires some important personal considerations. Will you benefit more from a coach with an outside [...]
Someone who can innovate and execute is indispensable to employers and is often a skill that leads to entrepreneurial success according to an article by Jonathan Fields (click to read his blog post on the subject). Here’s an excerpt from the post: “Truth be told, though, there’s one person who’s even more valuable than the [...]
Coming Soon!