Leadership Coaching

I have been providing this service for years and the way I approach it is a pretty straightforward process of listening, advising, and inspiring.

This article from the Nonprofit Quarterly examines it.

An excerpt.

“Ruth McCambridge: If coaching is the answer, what’s the question?

“Bill Ryan: The question is, “If my organization wants to get to Point X, how am I, as a leader, in the way, and what do I need to do to get out of the way?” That’s a negative formulation of it. Another way to put it would be, “If my organization wants to get to Point X, what do I, as a leader, need to do to build on my strengths and manage my weaknesses to help it get there?”

“RM: It was interesting to see in the report how vague and all over the place the definitions of coaching are. Can you talk a little bit about what people mean when they talk about coaching?

“BR: There are lots of people attempting to nail down the definition. The practice of coaching is still relatively new, so everyone is trying to definitively type it, and, in particular, they’re very anxious to distinguish it from consulting or therapy. Some people, invested in the practice as a profession, want to put coaching on the map as something highly distinctive.

“RM: But isn’t it kind of a weird combination of consulting and therapy?

“BR: That’s right—when I talk to coaches and they describe what they do, it reveals that they’re doing a blend of things, and there was a nice typology put together by editors at Harvard Business Review that did show the overlap.

“I think, probably, the big difference many are trying to emphasize is that consulting would be about trying to come up with the answer, therapy would be about trying to get to self-understanding by understanding the past, and coaching is in the middle.

“[Coaching] should help you gain enough introspection to come up with your own solutions looking toward the future. [Leadership guru] Warren Benning was quoted as saying, basically, that the effort to distinguish it from therapy is partly just to make it more legitimate. No manager, certainly no for-profit one, is going to say, “I’ve got to stop our meeting now, it’s time for me to meet with my shrink.” But to say, “It’s time for me to meet with my coach” would be acceptable.”