Coaching
Attentional Leadership™ Advising/Coaching
To succeed and thrive in a 21st century—or what some call the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world—individual contributors, new supervisors, managers, high potential—even legacy leaders—need to consistently assess where they have been, where they are, and where they want to go—placing their “attention with intention” on the technical and leadership skills and experiences necessary to move forward towards their personal and professional goals. Knowing where, when, and the proper duration for placing one’s “attention with intention” is the essence of Attentional Leadership™.
Assessing your current situation in relationship to your core motives, values, aspirations, capacities, personality, and other factors is an important part of the equation. Translating these insights into new values, attitudes, and sustainable behaviors is the other part of the equation and can be accelerated significantly with the assistance of an Attentional Leadership™ advisor or “coach.”
An effective Attentional Leadership™ advisor (coach) can help you:
- Assess and understand where you are in relation to your personal and professional goals
- Clarify the skills and competencies necessary to succeed in current and future roles
- Co-identify the most relevant factors for which to place your attention with intention
- Explore problems and challenges as a thought partner from multiple angles and perspectives
- Co-create options and action-steps designed to fortify strengths, minimize weaknesses, and manage potential derailers en route to accelerated growth and development
- Support, encourage, and challenge you throughout the process of upping your life and leadership capacity
- Maintain accountability and commitment towards the achievement of valued goals and outcomes
- Reinforce positive changes while setting the stage for new challenges and possibilities
Coaching Cases
Using Flow and Attentional Leadership™ as a theoretical base, I work with clients to help them explore the “flow factors” that compel and hinder their peak states of performance, engagement, and Flow.
Whatever Meaningful Life Arena (MLA) needs attention, I take a 1080° perspective and collaborative approach towards identifying “What’s Important Now” (WIN) with C-Suite executives, managers, individual contributors, and highly aspirational students/emerging professionals.
Client Engagements:
Chief Operating Officer
A division manager with 30 years field experience, was promoted to Chief Operating Officer within a large mining company. His goal: to refine his leadership skills and grow influence within a new executive team. He recognized the process would take several months to accomplish in an authentic manner.
I designed a long term strategy to help him meet these his goals over the course of a year, which included internal influence to managing work/life balance.
Tactically, I identified protocols for growing key executive competencies. At the same time, created opportunities to bring his years of front-line leadership to help his new colleagues better understand the dynamics of field operations and opportunities for managing challenging economic circumstances.
A key variable to this engagement was finding the right balance between learning to fit in while bringing unique value and perspectives to the C-Suite. A strategic executive hire allowed this client to optimize his value to the front lines while providing strategic insights for company-wide strategy.
Chief Operating Officer
A division manager with 30 years field experience, was promoted to Chief Operating Officer within a large mining company. His goal: to refine his leadership skills and grow influence within a new executive team. He recognized the process would take several months to accomplish in an authentic manner.
I designed a long term strategy to help him meet these his goals over the course of a year, which included internal influence to managing work/life balance.
Tactically, I identified protocols for growing key executive competencies. At the same time, created opportunities to bring his years of front-line leadership to help his new colleagues better understand the dynamics of field operations and opportunities for managing challenging economic circumstances.
A key variable to this engagement was finding the right balance between learning to fit in while bringing unique value and perspectives to the C-Suite. A strategic executive hire allowed this client to optimize his value to the front lines while providing strategic insights for company-wide strategy.
Family Business Employee
Caught between the desire for independence and loyalty to the family business, this client was divided between two loyalties—her family and her own career path. With tension growing between career pathways, we worked together to explore those factors keeping her connected to the family business as well as her desire to find her own unique brand. While exploring various go-forward options, we identified the criteria for migrating away from the family business while clarifying her values, brand and expertise. While preserving family relationships, this client is now building her own business and focusing in on her own professional journey.
Sales
A regional director of Latin American sales was promoted to Global Sales President during our work together. Early collaboration had us working to grow his influence, coach and develop regional directors, and explore ways to empower his leaders to support and learn from one another. Finding and developing talent, mapping significant sales wins and losses, and designing tools to produce greater focus were also on the table. With transition into a global role forthcoming, we continue our work: to stay focused on managing personal performance and family balance while exploring new strategies for organizing global resources, building culture, identifying top talent, clarifying roles, and designing strategies, tools, and forums to build greater regional and organizational capacity.
IT Professional
A very talented IT professional within a regional bank leads a highly engaged team but struggles to “get along” with and comply with corporate IT managers who see him as “difficult” to work with. Rumors begin and reputation is at risk. After extensive analysis (360, Hogan, EQ, VIA & Interviews), key themes emerged as how to best re-engage stakeholders within the organization. This situation provides an opportunity, not only to remedy certain behaviors, but to build significant alliances who become advocates. This is a two-way learning opportunity—not just for the client himself, but also for the organization and those stakeholders who may need to adjust slightly to support a bright leader’s unique style that consistently exceeds corporate-wide engagement scores.
As an ongoing client engagement, this situation compels some very important questions that I have with most clients:
1. Where have you been and what got you here?
2. Who are you today (the good, the bad, and the possible) and where do you thrive?
3. Where do you want to be 1-3 years from now?
4. How do you see your personal and professional life emerging?
5. What is it worth to you to move forward and up vs. the cost of moving backwards and down—even to derail?
Consultant
After 25 years as a Fortune 500 division leader, this client made the switch to consulting within a top-tier human capital firm. During the early stages he struggled to find his place, learn the business, clarify meaning and purpose—even find his place amongst experienced colleagues. During this time of transition and challenge, managing physical and emotional stress was a core theme. Together, we clarified the game ahead, broke down opportunities into manageable parts, and designed a working plan that included greater levels of physical activity, changes in diet and sleep, and deeper work with a therapist while coaching towards optimal performance on the job. This client developed strategies for leading self while finding his groove and passion for the business—even branching out to build his own regional practice.
Consultant
After 25 years as a Fortune 500 division leader, this client made the switch to consulting within a top-tier human capital firm. During the early stages he struggled to find his place, learn the business, clarify meaning and purpose—even find his place amongst experienced colleagues. During this time of transition and challenge, managing physical and emotional stress was a core theme. Together, we clarified the game ahead, broke down opportunities into manageable parts, and designed a working plan that included greater levels of physical activity, changes in diet and sleep, and deeper work with a therapist while coaching towards optimal performance on the job. This client developed strategies for leading self while finding his groove and passion for the business—even branching out to build his own regional practice.
Musician
A world-class musician and graduate student was seeking to maximize his performance during an upcoming European tour. In addition to maintaining his technical prowess, we explored and experimented with many tools to help him compete on the world stage. Together we worked on building an entire repertoire of skills, including: clarifying personal and professional missions & vision, visualization and verbal self-guidance, strategies for entering moments of performance, techniques for managing physical stress, the value of daily and weekly rituals, building self-confidence, and others to help him stay focused and find his “Flow” during performances while maintaining a demanding international tour schedule.
Student
A young female student aspiring to be an attorney came to me looking for strategies to reach her professional goals. She was stuck. During our time together we began exploring her core motives, values and purpose. As part of this exploration we began looking, not just at career options, but more on career “features” that would bring out her personal and professional best. Recognizing that the exact job was less important than the type of work she would be doing, we explored a variety of career and job features (i.e., quantitative vs. qualitative work, innovative vs. traditional environments, for profit vs. non-profit environments, etc.) that helped her move confidently in a new professional direction. Now in a career path quite different than expected, she is thriving in an environment that taps into her core values and natural strengths within a positive and supportive environment.
Finance Executive
A senior level banking executive was struggling to align the firm’s senior leadership team. While highly talented, innovative, and progressive, her political and relational strategies were challenging company norms and disrupting its culture. After in-depth interviews and a thematic review of issues and dynamics, it was clear that the client as well as several members of the leadership team, needed to redefine the relationship if they were to find common ground. After two weeks of re-clarifying her role, responsibilities, and boundaries, it was clear to all involved that a separation was in order. This was negotiated and accomplished in short order, removing the tensions and disruptions being caused on both sides of the relationship.
In any of these and other client situations, we explore the Internal, Time, and External factors that need to be understood, sorted out, and clarified in order to improve performance now, but set the stage for optimizing inherent talent, potential, and intent towards optimal functioning and fulfillment in future professional and personal arenas.
Whether you are seeking to increase your value and attention in the role you are in, seeking to take your career to the next level, or to step up and re-engage your professional and personal arena’s—we work with motivated emerging leaders, high potential and senior leaders to help them close the gaps and raise the bar for personal and professional excellence.
