Coaching

Our coaching practice is unique for the following seven reasons:

1.  We Don’t Believe In Coaching. Caught your eye didn’t it. Actually, we don’t believe in the traditional usage of coaching. We don’t believe people are broken and need to be “fixed.” We believe that problems may exist and individuals may not always know how to solve them. Our job is to facilitate the problem-solving process—not fix a person’s dysfunctional behaviors. Often nebulous topics come up and we have developed an expertise in solving these. Again, the solutions are not about “fixing” someone, but rather identifying goals and developing a path for getting to it. Topics include:

          a.     Performance issues
          b.     Motivational issues
          c.     Political issues
          d.     Interpersonal dynamics

2.  Partnership. We partner with those we coach. Our coaching process focuses on identifying a problem, setting goals, and solving the problem. To do this, the coach is not better, of higher status, etc. We have an outsider perspective and experience solving performance issues.

3.  Facilitate, Not Dictate. As partners, our role is to facilitate a problem solving process, identify and gather tools that may help, and provide data and fact-based feedback to our partner. Therefore, we don’t need to be subject-matter-experts technically. We need to be facilitation experts.

4.  We Want A Short-Term Gig. The few times we got into long-term coaching relationships led us us to believe we were doing our client a major disservice. We were essentially establishing over-reliance on us—an over-reliance that undermined the client’s ability to develop self-sufficiency. This was wrong. Therefore, we set up our coaching relationships as short-term gigs, with targets and milestones, and established exit strategies.

5.  We Don’t Differentiate. We have coached CEOs, Executives, Senior Managers, Managers, Supervisors, and Independent Contributors. Our process is the same. Our end-results are the same. We adjust the way we engage the individual, but we don’t change our principles or approach.

6.  We Don’t. We don’t beat up our clients. We don’t coddle our clients. We don’t save our clients (we facilitate them to save themselves.) We don’t break our client’s confidences to their bosses. We don’t coach without a clear problem to solve. We don’t fix people.

7.  References. Lots of our competitors have experience equivalent to ours. So, we won’t claim our experience as a unique qualification. It is our reference-ability that differentiates us. Our client’s companies are repeat customers. Our client’s are always referrals and willing references.