Developmental Coaching creates an environment for identifying applications for existing leadership strengths, building new strengths, and eradicating leadership inefficiencies. This is a hands-on, working program anchored in concrete goals, and adaptive to current challenges and conditions.
My work focuses primarily on helping clients grow in their ability to engage and communicate effectively with team members, act with integrity, engender trust, effectively manage emotions, and successfully navigate both cooperative and difficult people. In short, exercising social and emotional intelligence.
Developmental Coaching includes an assessment phase followed by a coaching phase:
Initial assessment includes both subjective and objective measures. The subjective assessment is based on individual client interviews and my more than 20 years of clinical experience and knowledge of social behavior patterns. The objective criteria are drawn from the California Psychological Inventory (CPI260) and an expanded Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MTBI-Step II.)
Clients are assessed by the CPI260 regarding 18 core elements of their leadership character, and by the MBTI-Step II for specific personality and interpersonal preferences (how you gain energy, how you gather information, how you utilize that information, and how you interact with the organization and the world around you.)
Utilizing these baseline assessments and prepared with organizational and role-based objectives, I work with clients and organizations to map developmental goals to be accomplished over time. This initial assessment phase spans approximately one month, depending upon frequency of developmental interviews.
The power of developmental coaching is that learning takes place over time and “in the thick of it.”
This aspect – working in real time with clients – sets my work apart from the average organizational psychologist. My work with clients doesn’t end up deep in a file drawer. This is a hands-on, working program anchored in concrete goals, and adaptive to current challenges and conditions.
In personalized, individual meetings, clients are encouraged to become proficient in assessing their leadership nature. Within work sessions, clients take a hard look at their interpersonal strengths and weaknesses, they come prepared regarding what worked and what didn’t, and they coordinate with me to set priorities and clear expectations regarding future work goals. The relationship-based format – again, individual work, over time – provides accountability for effective follow-through on objectives. Most importantly, by creating a trusting developmental environment, my objective insight and experienced perspective encourages my clients to risk uncharted territory towards shared objectives.
We know that individual human behaviors – good and bad – have had years to become habit.
Our professional and personal histories combine to present a predictable set of approaches to our work – some of these approaches are functional, and some require modification. True developmental growth encompasses the full complexity of human behavior, individual motivations, and life-long interpersonal practices.
By experimenting with practical assignments that represent powerful steps toward positive change, a committed client can make remarkable changes in leadership manner. This powerful and sometimes difficult development is facilitated within the context of an ongoing relationship with a trusted consultant. This partnership increases both the depth of change and the accountability for follow through, and creates an environment for eradicating inefficiencies, building new strengths, and identifying applications for existing strengths.