My Top 8 Leadership Coaching Resources from 2021

Are you a coach or mentor looking to build your skills for the coming year? Here’s a selection of 8 curated articles with new perspectives, tips and strategies to enhance your toolbox: Essential questions, 10 Permissions, Adaptive Communication, Avoiding Hostages, Energy Management, Role-Modeling, Balance and Transparency.

These Three Questions Will Make Anyone A Better Coach

This article, published in Careers in Government, outlines three critical decision points along the journey to personal and professional growth, and provides guidance on how coaches can facilitate ownership for these decisions.

Ten Permissions That Should Be Part of Any Leadership Program

Permission is one of the most powerful enablers of growth. As a coach, you are a trusted guide along your client’s journey. This article outlines ten empowering permissions that coaches can offer their clients, and clients can give themselves to overcome obstacles toward greater wellness and performance. The list of permissions comes with several focused reflection questions to guide the coaching process.

How to Increase Engagement With Coaching Clients Using Adaptive Communication.

Adaptive communication goes far beyond rapport, and helps coaches create a strong, trusting, working relationship that greatly improves the chances of helping clients achieve their goals. 

The National Coach Academy featured this article about how the Process Communication Model helps coaches adapt their approach to connect and motivate different personality types. Learn more about PCM.

Learn about six different personality types in each of us, how they prefer to communicate, how they are motivated, and how they predictably sabotage the coaching relationship and their own success when in distress. For coaches, this article alerts you to potential blind spots and unintended power struggles.

Does Your Mission-Driven Organization Take Hostages?

If you coach top leaders, you’ve probably experienced this dynamic with your clients; perfection is the enemy of excellence, and being justified is the enemy of effectiveness.

This is particularly true for mission-driven leaders and organizations, who take hostages when they don’t effectively manage their energy, passion and drive. This post from my blog helps coaches detect personality styles that are most likely to fall into this trap, and how to guide them toward more healthy and productive leadership.

If you like this topic, here’s a related post, Making a Point vs Making a Difference.

What The Martian Can Teach You About Charging Your Batteries

Energy management helps leaders stay healthy, focused, and productive. This article uses a popular sci-fi movie to illustrate how important it is to meet our psychological needs every day, and provides principles for energy management. If your client is struggling with self-care and energy management, this is a great resource to share.

Why Role-Modeling New Behaviors Is So Challenging

When coaching clients begin to implement new behaviors, they are often met with suspicion, resistance, or defensiveness. This can feel discouraging. This article explains why employees and peers don’t naturally jump on board with new behaviors, and offers seven success tips for implementing new habits that create a positive ripple effect. A great resource to keep healthy momentum going in coaching.

Here’s How To Know If You Are Overdoing It 

Character strengths are your greatest asset, and can become your greatest liability when overused. Relying too much on our most developed strengths, however, can reduce resiliency and lead to burnout.

Any coach who uses strengths assessments in their work will find helpful insights in this article. It’s well known that overusing our strengths can lead to problems, but what’s less obvious is the failure mechanism that causes all the problems. With this article you can help your clients connect the dots, gain insight, and reverse the damage.

Being Transparent About Feelings

Unless we take 100% responsibility for our feelings, which includes sharing them with others, our path toward win-win solutions will be obscured.

Emotional intelligence starts with identifying and owning our feelings. This article identifies a common shortcut people use to bypass emotions and jump to conclusions. Coaches can use this article as a resource to help clients with emotional authenticity.

Are you needing help leading during a crisis? Read these seven principles of leadership to maintain a healthy culture!

Copyright Next Element Consulting, LLC 2021