Leader as Coach

Why This Course?

This was an excellent course with well-structured material, providing valuable insights. It helped me re-evaluate my management style and gave me practical tools that I’m confident will enable me to lead my team more effectively. I feel better equipped to take my team to the next level and foster a more productive and supportive work environment. — Investment Operations Lead

You care deeply about your team. You want them to grow, to step up, to take ownership. But right now, it feels like you’re doing too much of the heavy lifting. You’re solving their problems, jumping in to fix things, working late to pick up the slack. And despite all your effort, people aren’t developing the way you hoped they would.

You might also notice that you leave 1:1s drained of energy, important conversations keep getting pushed back, and your team tends to seek answers and permission more often than discovering their own.

And you have probably tried a number of things along the way:

• Giving people full autonomy and hoping they will figure it out
• Being the fixer and problem-solver
• Trying to gently give feedback (too gently)
• Providing lots of context and hoping people will “get it”
• Winging it in conversations
• Leaning on your technical expertise
• Always making yourself available
• Taking on too much
• Hoping annual or quarterly performance reviews will drive change
• Trying to be everyone’s friend
• Over preparing and planning for every conversation
• Listening with no boundaries (e.g. conversations can go for hours)

These approaches are incomplete because they don’t impact your mindset. Most leaders first learn a “management” mindset in which they see their job as solving problems, getting work done through people, managing the business, and communicating clearly.

But people aren’t resources to be managed. They long to find meaning and ownership in their work, to stretch into new challenges, and to feel the satisfaction of a job well done. What is missing in your leadership practice is the developmental approach that coaching brings. This allows you to build the capacity of others to solve problems, develop their thinking, create conditions for growth, and have conversations that transform, while simultaneously creating more time and energy for yourself.

Who this is for

Leaders (whether you have positional power or not) who want to have better, more direct conversations at work. People who are willing to bring self-awareness to their current leadership approach, who want to build better relationships with their team and peers, and who are willing to get a little messy while doing it.

This is not for leaders who want to manipulate people to choose a specific solution, who hold negative assumptions about the people around them, who just want to tell people what to do, and who lack curiosity.

What you can expect

I learned so much about showing up for my peers and direct reports in a way that opens them up and leaves me energized. I learned when to use coaching, feedback and direct action. This course has been designed with care and learning from Andi has been a joy. — Engagement Manager

This course covers:

• The five roles and types of conversations you typically have as a leader
• The myth that leaders need to have all the answers
• The secret to why helping your team is making you more exhausted and what to do instead
• How to shift into the developmental mindset of a coach
• A simple and effective coaching framework to guide your conversations
• The two most essential techniques that contribute to impactful coaching conversations
• Frameworks for 1:1s and having coaching conversations over time
• Discernment to know when coaching serves best and when direction is needed

Syllabus

This course helped me learn what it means to coach. Andi is a fantastic instructor who gave us powerful tools, exercises, and examples. After completing the course, I walked away with coaching techniques I can immediately use. I highly recommend working with Andi to incorporate coaching into your skillset and improve your communication with others. — Head of Product Design

Session 1 - Foundations of Coaching

To have effective and impactful coaching conversations, leaders must first make a shift in their mindset and approach. Foundations introduces students to the idea of a "coaching presence" and builds skill in the ability to utilize the self - presence, awareness, curiosity, and values - as impactful tools for coaching.

Session 2 - Coaching Methods

Learn the two most important methods for having an impactful coaching conversation—sharing grounded observations and asking open and honest questions. We have lots of hands-on practice to get a good handle the methods, which benefit all kinds of conversations, not just coaching!

Session 3 - The Coaching Model

This session introduces students to a simple and effective coaching model and gives them ample time to combine the model with the coaching methods learned in Session 2. A coaching demo by Andi wraps up the session to illustrate how coaching presence, methods, and the model work together to support another.

Session 4 - The Coaching Conversation

This week students take everything they have been learning and put it into practice in the Coaching Conversations Lab. This is a safe and confidential environment where folks get hands-on practice in real coaching conversations.

Session 5 - Coaching at Work

In our final session we bring everything together from the past four sessions. We'll cover how to coach to career development, look at coaching in 1:1s, and create learning plans for what comes next in your development as a leader who coaches.

eBook

If you’ve ever wondered whether there's a more thoughtful and nurturing way to lead, the answer is yes. I truly loved this course. Andi has a way of slowing you down, observing and noticing to build your EQ to the next level and then ground you in a leadership practice that's build on a coaching approach to allow you and your team to succeed. — Head of Transformation

To get an idea of how great leaders use coaching approaches to transform their organizations by grabbing a copy of “How Great Leaders Coach,” a free eBook covering the eight essential competencies that help leaders create deeper trust, stronger collaboration, and better results.

Logistics

• Five live, 2 hour sessions (think of these as mini-workshops) over Zoom
• Experiments and reflection questions between sessions to put the lessons into practice
• A coursebook with materials for each session to support your learning
• Videos of didactic sections (recording will be turned off for Q&A and sharebacks for confidentiality purposes)
• Hosted on the Maven platform
• $949, with discounts for folks in non-profits and government services

For Individuals

I generally run 2 - 3 cohorts per year. Learn more at Maven.com.

For Teams and Companies

I also run Leader as Coach in-house for organizations that want to support their leaders in developing a coaching leadership style. If you would like to run this program for your team, please reach out.