Ignite your purpose, refine your process, accelerate your progress.

I had a ‘lightbulb’ moment a month or two ago when reflecting on how the coach training has impacted how I am in my everyday role. I’ve been doing roughly the same job for a decade now and have been feeling pretty stuck, having returned to it after a two-year attachment at a more senior role. Learning to be a coach and starting to practise re-energised me and gave me a new sense of direction and purpose, but I still struggled to see opportunities for continued learning and development in my day-to-day work. Then I realised – while the projects I work on may remain broadly similar for now, the quality of my working relationships and conversations are enriched when I apply the learning I gained: being fully present, listening intently, recognising when my own ‘stuff’ is coming up, and asking challenging, open questions. Those richer relationships and conversations have the power to deepen the engagement and effectiveness of my team, and ultimately to improve the quality and impact of our week.

The coaching gave me a greater understanding of why I show up the way I do, what my own frames of reference are and how my past experiences influence my perspectives and decision making. Through having this greater understanding I am now more conscious of my thoughts and behaviours and see even more importance in listening to understand and develop multiple perspectives on any given situation. Personally, I feel empowered by choice, I have felt comfortable implementing boundaries and choosing to focus on a particular area of my work rather than focusing on anything and everything which comes my way. Being conscious of my thoughts and behaviours has helped me to find more helpful ways to communicate.

For me, what the leader coach training really brought home is that noticing is a valuable activity in itself. My default position is analysing: not just how people are behaving, but why. That often means judging and projecting my own experience onto others, as well as spending a lot of time anticipating what’s going to happen next. Coach training teaches you to offer what you’ve noticed and letting them go into the why and how. Recently, I was having a difficult conversation with a direct report and offered what I noticed about their behaviour, instead of telling them they should stop behaving in a certain way. Their response was remarkably different from what it would have been had I been more directive. Another nice by-product of noticing instead of judging is that I feel more at ease with people and situations that would cause me a huge deal of stress.

Learning coaching skills has benefitted my leadership role in two key ways. Firstly, it has improved my ability to notice and understand my own patterns of thought and emotion in relation to things that happen at work. This can be in the realm of wider organisation change, or difficult interpersonal relationships and situations. With better noticing and understanding, I am (sometimes!) able to adjust my behaviour accordingly. Secondly on a very practical level I use coaching techniques regularly in my one-to-ones with team members. Where I might have jumped in with suggestions I now, where appropriate, leave space, ask questions and try to prompt thought. Almost without exception in these situations, my colleagues come up with interesting solutions and ideas they didn’t have before.

For me coach training has led to a better dialogue and understanding with myself about what is and isn’t in my control. It means I’m clearer as a leader to make responsible decisions and has improved my relationship with staff as in turn I’m clearer about their responsibilities and the role I play in nurturing and allowing them the space to come to their own conclusions. There is a freedom in that for me and my direct reports which removes a level of unnecessary hierarchy. It has freed up much more space in my head and my own diary as they feel more equipped/confident at thinking through situations themselves and has set our relationships on a more balanced path.

I’m more aware of what I say and how I behave; I’m more attuned to what triggers certain emotions in me and as such I’m better able to manage them. I am much more confident working with peers who I may previously have seen as ‘more senior’. I see less hierarchy in the organisation now, I think in part due to my exposure to other leaders’ challenges – it’s a great leveller!

A coaching stance in leadership acts like a foundation stone from which I can build and develop more inclusive, creative and effective teams. This is particularly important during periods of change within our organisation and in the technological market we compete. My training has helped me to trust the talent of my team, welcome more voices into creative thinking and realise more of their ideas. As a leader, it gives me a language and way of being with which I can find purpose and calm, freed from the impossible, egotistical expectation of needing to be the smartest in the room. For my team, this creates space for them to step in with their natural curiosity, knowledge and imagination. This also creates an environment where we ask more questions about the constraints we impose on ourselves. As a result, the team feel more included in the way we work together, more agile in absence of unquestionable norms, and freed to be more creative in the work and content they produce for our users.

The coach training course is demanding. It requires you to think about yourself in a new way, and asks you to understand better how you navigate different situations and respond emotionally to others. It requires you to take responsibility for the way you choose to conduct yourself in any given situation. For without self-awareness, how can you learn to coach others? That learning has been invaluable. It created a safe space in which I could reassess myself and look again at how I listen to, and hear, others. I’ve been a senior manager for ten years, and have spent much of that time working with the same line managers, and many of the same team. The course has enabled me to challenge and change many of the patterns of interaction that had built up over the years, in a useful and constructive way. It has changed my behaviour – for e.g., instead of stepping in to help my teams, I can more confidently nudge them to help themselves. In a professional context, where there is always more work than time, this has been a revelation.

The training coincided with a period of enormous challenge for me and the teams with whom I work, with organisational change coinciding with an ongoing unpredictable and hazardous external environment that disrupted communication and relationships. I mention this broader context as I think one of the key lessons I learned was to notice this on a daily basis, acknowledging any impact on me but also surfacing it for teams in meetings etc, acknowledging what might be there for folks and encouraging any sharing that might be wanted or needed. Heightened self-awareness means, I think, that I have felt more confident moving into emotionally intelligent spaces more often, to avoid testy pitfalls in negotiation and conversation! Understanding the very basics of TA have also helped with this, as has understanding the importance of coaching around e.g. agency – during a recent round of redundancy consultations this latter has been markedly helpful. Moving towards greater understanding of others and what can unblock hurdles to progression in the business – underlying beliefs, transference – they come up so often and taking time to excavate them and discuss them has been so helpful to moving complex projects and plans forward with everyone.