Pillar 03
Coaching and Behavioural Change
Thinking on executive coaching, stakeholder-centred methodology, feedback culture, and what actually produces durable behaviour change.
Stated Positions on Contested Questions
“It’s amazing how many drivers, even at the Formula One level, think the brakes are just for slowing down.”
Elite Formula One drivers know the brake is a strategic tool, not a safety mechanism. The same principle applies to leadership. The most impactful leaders are not always the fastest moving. They are the most intentional. This article explores what high-performance driving teaches us about judgment, reflection, and the discipline of the deliberate pause.
Senior Leaders Resist Coaching for Three Reasons. Two Are Addressable. One Tells You Everything.
Resistance to coaching in senior leaders is common, rarely fully explained, and worth understanding carefully. The first two reasons are practical and addressable. The third is the one that tells you what the engagement is actually working with.
The Difference Between Coaching That Produces Behaviour Change and Coaching That Produces Insight
Insight and behaviour change are related but not equivalent. Most coaching produces more of the former than the latter. Understanding why matters for how coaching is designed, commissioned, and evaluated.
A Coaching Culture Is Not Produced by Training Managers in Coaching Skills
Most organisations that want a coaching culture invest in coaching skills training for managers. This is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. A coaching culture is a specific kind of organisational environment, and environments are produced by systems, not by individual skills.
Feedforward over Feedback: Why the Direction of the Conversation Changes Everything
Feedback is information about the past. Feedforward is information about the future. The distinction is not merely semantic: it changes what the conversation produces, how the receiver engages with it, and what actually changes as a result.
The Coaching Engagement Is Often Won or Lost Before the First Session
The quality of a coaching engagement is determined, more than by any other single factor, by the quality of the contracting that precedes it. Most coaching failures are contracting failures.
The Stakeholder Is the Data: Why 360 Feedback Changes Behaviour When Coaching Alone Does Not
Most executive coaching is a private conversation between a coach and a coachee. The coachee's stakeholders, the people whose daily experience of working with this leader is the primary evidence of whether development is happening, are largely absent from that conversation.
Chasing The Bright Side – Pragmatic Optimist!
The pragmatic optimist does not pretend the difficulty does not exist. They hold the reality clearly and act anyway. This is not a personality trait. It is a practised leadership orientation that can be developed deliberately.
DESTINED TO BREAK | 40% of new leaders fail within the first 18 months
Four out of ten newly promoted managers and executives fail within 18 months of taking a new role. The research has held at that number for at least 15 years. The landmines are the same across industries and levels: culture, relationships, stakeholder expectations, and the absence of a structured transition architecture. The cost of failure has been calculated at between two and twenty times total compensation. The opportunity cost is larger still and almost never measured.
Leaders need to appreciate Power
Power can be a useful tool for leaders, as it allows them to make decisions and take actions that can help their team or organization...
You Don’t Learn From Experience
Raw experience without structured reflection produces habit, not growth. The leaders who develop fastest are not the ones with the most experience. They are the ones who reflect most deliberately on it.
The Work-Life Balance Debate: A Perspective on Career and Personal Growth
The work-life balance debate misses the point. The real question is whether the work you are doing is worth the life it is costing. Integration, not balance, is what leaders actually navigate.
The Look of Leadership: Hot or Not
Dynamics of Appearance & Leadership In the realm of leadership, the adage "dress for success" has long been hailed as gospel truth. From...
From the Facilitation Room
Three Things That Happen in Every First Session with a Resistant Coachee, Without Exception
Resistant coachees are not a special category. They are the norm. The first session with a resistant coachee follows a predictable shape, and knowing that shape makes it considerably less difficult to navigate.
How to Tell Whether a Senior Leader Is Being Genuinely Coached or Merely Managed
The difference between a senior leader who is genuinely being coached and one who has learned to perform coaching engagement is visible if you know what to look for. It is rarely visible in the coaching sessions themselves.
Managers Trained in Coaching Frequently Collapse the Coaching and Performance Conversations. The Collapse Is Costly.
The coaching conversation and the performance conversation serve different purposes, require different conditions, and produce different outcomes. When managers conflate them, they typically get neither.
The Moment a Coaching Engagement Should End Before It Is Scheduled To
Not all coaching engagements should run to their contracted conclusion. The moment when ending early is the right professional choice is worth knowing how to recognise, because the pressure to continue is almost always higher than the pressure to stop.
When the Coachee Disagrees with Their Own 360 Data: What to Do and What Not to Do
Disagreement with 360 data is the norm, not the exception. How the coach handles that disagreement in the first session largely determines whether the engagement becomes developmental or remains defensive.
The Question That Makes the Room Go Still
There is a kind of question that is not primarily a request for information. It is an invitation to a different quality of attention. When it works, the person being asked stops, and something in the room changes.
Fear of Who You Really Are : The Imposter Syndrome.
According to a research paper on the subject, it is estimated that 70 percent of people will experience something that is known as...
LEAP : Leaders are made like anything else, through hard work & discipline!
'Leadership is all about taking people on a journey. The challenge is that most of the time, we are asking people to follow us to places...
A Practitioner Lens on Books
Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith: The Book That Explains Why Coaching Often Does Not Transfer
Marshall Goldsmith's 2015 book on the environmental triggers that undermine behaviour change is, in some ways, more useful than his earlier work on what change requires. It explains why the thing that works in the coaching room so often fails in the meeting room.
The Coaching Habit: Excellent Entry Point. Insufficient Foundation.
Michael Bungay Stanier's 2016 book is one of the best entry points into coaching practice for managers who have never thought systematically about how to have developmental conversations. It is not a sufficient foundation for those who have.
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