Services
Leadership Coaching
What is Leadership Coaching?
Leadership Coaching is essentially a simple but extraordinarily powerful process of engaging in a meaningful conversation with leaders, using smart, insightful questions and active listening.
The purpose of any coaching is to support and challenge, to provide inspiration and confidence, to encourage curiosity and to try new things. Coaches can help leaders change the way they show up: by raising awareness of themselves and others, by encouraging them to address specific issues, and by helping them generate insights and explore options.
Leadership coaching can be a vehicle for providing simple practical tools to help move something forward, create something new, as well as generally enhance an individual's performance in their role.
- Coaching 'shines a light' to help people see things differently and more clearly.
- Coaching buys the individual time, and gives them space to think and reflect.
- A coach will encourage you to articulate what you are thinking - and then challenge you to do something with those thoughts.
- A coach will ask many questions to make you stop, think, consider.
When the coach and "coachee" have chosen well it has the potential to deliver extraordinary results for individual leaders and their organisations.
It can be lonely at the top
Coaching challenges, supports and helps clients reflect on essential leadership activities:
- Creating the Vision and Direction - creating and sustaining purpose and direction, creating the journey which the organisation can follow, translating the vision into what people need to do, creating a culture which lets people deliver
- Building the Organisation - creating an organisations which delivers results
- Focusing on Delivery - joining up thinking, understanding what can move the whole organisation towards the vision, focusing the organisations emotional, intellectual and practical resources, spotlighting the current and future "must win" battles whilst maintaining momentum and delivering
- Building the Critical Enablers - strategic priorities, business plans, performance, budgets and commercials, communication and stakeholder management, development of key people, aligning culture
- Building and Sustaining the Team - picking the right team - making sure it stays the "right team", continually pushing forward on performance and delivery
- Managing stakeholders - gaining their attention, telling the "story", winning their trust, delivering performance, managing and delivering expectations.
Facilitation
Offsites - are not just another meeting
They are a powerful tool in the Leaders’ armory
They have the power to transform the leaders' approach to:
- creatively engaging their most senior people
- developing the vision, the strategy, and the goals of the organisation with their senior team
- collaboratively identify strategic priorities
- figure out both the 'what' and the 'how' the leadership team will be able to deliver the strategic priorities when back in the cut and thrust of the day job
A well designed offsite addresses business challenges, working relationships, and moves the leader and their team forward.
External facilitation - a more effective result for everyone
External facilitation starts with understanding results you need from the event - start with the end in mind, and be ambitious but realistic.
To deliver the outcomes, a coherent structure, solid engagement with the outcomes required, and an open and honest dialogue are all required.
The benefits of having the session facilitated are:
- you get to concentrate fully on content without worrying about process/ timekeeping/ agenda etc.
- your ‘fully present’ role with the team means a better overall result
- facilitation allows for flexibility – an agenda should be a guide not a straight-jacket
- the team gets constructive 'no agenda' objective challenge
People, Organisation, Culture & Change consulting
Hilary's core business is Leadership Coaching and Facilitation.
However, a deep experience of People, Organisation, Culture and Change means that clients often ask for support with specific projects.
Coaching principles remain at the heart of each assignment.
Hilary has a network of experienced Senior Associates where projects require a more significant resource input.
