Manila, 19 April 2023 — About the surprising power of coaching. 

Story 

It happened in 2007. That’s when the story of coaching leaders to transformational changes started for me. Before that, I was already engaged in many informal coaching conversations with colleagues, albeit without the benefit of formal training. In fact, it was a colleague who alerted me to what I was doing when I mentioned the growing number of colleagues coming to discuss their frustrations as well as aspirations for their careers. “You are coaching,” he explained.

His remark led me to immediately look for a coach training program. Reflecting on how those informal conversations felt to my colleagues and me, I knew I was onto something valuable. More than a year later, after getting certified, I received my HR department’s support to set up the first on-the-job coaching program for my fellow water professionals. Soon after, I observed changes starting to happen as they discovered new ways to build trust with their clients, leading to closer collaboration in their projects.

With these exciting results happening after only a short time, I realized that coaching—more than training, counseling, and even facilitation—had the power to transform people, projects, and outcomes. Soon, I was looking for opportunities to expand my coaching work, with a focus on leadership development in people, teams, and organizations. Seeing ever more positive changes rippling out through coaching has been a dream come true, with every relationship a unique experience of transformation.

Challenge

In each coaching relationship, the reason to start the coaching process offers an opportunity to bring out the best in the leader. If you imagine yourself as a glass, training can feel like being filled up with water. Coaching, on the other hand, will more likely feel like becoming a bigger glass. In every relationship, the process of transformation is customized to the leader’s unique personality and circumstances. What I learned over the years is that it usually works best when the coaching process is allowed to flow through three stages.

At the start, we begin by building trust and discovering what the leader ‘brings to the table’ to deal with the situation at hand and navigate the transition they desire. In this stage, we find out about their values and their unique combination of strengths that they can build on. We call this the Assessment stage. What comes next is for the leader to discover a unique Challenge to focus on during the coaching period. This will often ‘bubble up’ in creative ways by reflecting on how they can best use their values and strengths in the situation they’re in. 

Following the discovery of their Challenge, the third stage is about helping the leader develop ‘muscle’ to gain momentum in implementation. This often involves specific leadership behaviors to build on their strengths and gain the results they want to see. We call this the Execution stage, recognizing that any strategy is only as good as its execution. Here’s where we focus on progress and finding ways to celebrate every step, making good use of a range of positive psychology tools.

Question

Adding up the three stages of Assessment, Challenge, and Execution, we call the process ACE Coaching. By building on their unique combination of values and strengths, leaders can ‘ACE it’ in navigating every career transition they want to make. Coaching leaders using this process is an enormous privilege for me, and I feel thrilled whenever they describe their career transition as a life-changing transformation, especially when they start with a healthy dose of skepticism about what to expect.

Meanwhile, as a life-long student of leadership, I keep expanding my own learning about applying the latest insights from leadership research, psychology, and neuroscience to influence positive change in people, teams, and organizations. Last month, I joined fellow practitioners in the International Association of Positive Psychology Coaches to discover the latest insights from research and practice in that field during a three-month challenge.

Reading this far, I’m sure you have realized that helping leaders with coaching has become my passion and purpose in life. Fifteen years after discovering coaching, I’m privileged to help many leaders make changes in their workplaces, careers, and lives. If you are in an executive or professional role and you would like to make the very best of your next career transition as a leader, you’re welcome to book a free strategy call to discuss what change you want to influence in your workplace and yourself. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.