You'd like to have someone who can help you navigate challenging situations, and help advance your career. This needs to be someone who will be both empathic enough for you to open up to, but also able to deliver honest feedback in a way that you can take it in. And then help you to make the changes you want to. How do you find the right person? First, choosing a psychologist ensures that you have a coach with extensive training in human behavior.
"Executive Coach" has become a title that anyone can use. Even the title "coach" conjures up the image of someone cheering you on, or urging you forward. I prefer to think of coaching as consulting to you in your role. I am there to help you identify areas you'd like to develop, and then provide the guidance to help you make the changes to get you where you want to go.
- How does the coaching process start?
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Sometimes we start the coaching process by doing a 360º evaluation. This entails getting feedback from people above you in the hierarchy, people who are peers at your level, and people who report to you. You would select the people to tap for their honest appraisal of your performance. The most helpful lineup includes people who really understand you and who you work well with, people who are challenging for you to work with, and people who don't recognize your talents.
There are two main ways of getting this data. One method is for me to interview the people you select, and then distill the data collected into feedback I present to you (without identifying the source of specific items). Another way to get 360º feedback is through a questionnaire. There are many such platforms - I am certified in the Hogan Assessments 360º tool. This yields a valuable report that we can review together. Both of these means provide a menu of areas for you to decide for us to work on in our coaching process.
- Self-assessment in the coaching process
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I am certified to administer and interpret the Hogan Assessments. This tool provides comprehensive feedback on 154 variables, including an assessment of your every-day best performance, what might happen when you are under stress or not monitoring yourself as carefully, and what are your motivations, values and preferences in the workplace. The results provide a complex picture of your capabilities and areas for development, as well as data indicating what sort of work environment is a good fit for you. They will point to potential areas that might be "detailers" creating "repetitional scars" that could undermine you. This data leads to areas for us to work on in our coaching sessions.
- Using Drawings
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Sometimes I may ask you to make some drawings. This is a way tap the right side of your brain, and get to some deeper understanding of your work situation. My coaching clients are often surprised by the helpful data that can emerge when they let their guard down and allow their creativity to flow.
- Organizational Role Analysis
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Another way to access deeper dynamics that may be operating in your work situation is an Organizational Role Analysis. This is a structured process of exploring a work situation challenge through the lens of the history of your role in your family. Seeing the parallels that emerge can be enormously helpful to breaking stalemates or puzzling impasses.
- Leadership Development Through Coaching
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Sometimes the best way to develop leadership skills is to examine the functioning of your team. Using the Team Assessment Survey (TAS), based on the deeply researched Rocket Model, you can get a TQ, an overall measure of team functioning, compared to other similar teams. In addition, the TAS provides a measure of eight components of team functioning, and the resulting profile leads to activities to address areas that need improvement. This can be used for C-Suite teams and Boards, forming new teams, on-boarding team members, training leaders to build high-performing teams, identifying high-potential people, and helping entire organizations foster effective teamwork.