Leader as Coach

Why This Course?

Coaching is a comprehensive approach to leadership that transforms working relationships through learning conversations that impact individuals, teams, and business outcomes. In learning the foundations of coaching, leaders become better at delegating, creating shared agreements, providing feedback, and leading with clarity resulting in more impact (and happier teams) with less effort.

Leader as Coach is an immersive 7 week program designed to equip leaders with the mindsets, techniques, and hands-on practice to develop coaching capacities that drive organizational success.

Grounded in an experiential learning approach, the course focuses both on one's interior presence as a coach and practical methodologies to structure empowering coaching conversations with team members. Key topics span understanding the foundations of a coaching approach, cultivating levels of listening and questioning that spark insight, delivering feedback for accountability, and integrating coaching skills holistically into one's leadership style.

Participants walk away not only with core competencies but also the ability to foster more purposeful, transformational relationships that ultimately create greater employee ownership, engagement, development and business performance. 98% of past students say they are actively applying learnings in leading their organizations. You will leave this course able to:

• Establish a mindful, empowering “coaching presence”
• Discern when coaching is the right leadership approach vs. directing
• Utilize different levels of listening to spur employee self-discovery
• Ask powerful questions that shift mindsets and behaviors
• Observe effectively and share feedback that sticks
• Have structure to move through coherent coaching conversations
• Comfortably manage emotional dynamics and resistance
• Use coaching to generate accountability and ownership
• Integrate a coaching approach into day-to-day leadership

Syllabus

Week 1 - The 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, attention, and values - as impactful tools for coaching.

Week 2 - Listening and Asking Questions

The ability to utilize several forms of listening combined with an understanding of the anatomy of powerful questions gives coaches the ability to facilitate change in others. By the end of this lesson students will have experience with different levels of listening and proficiency with asking open and honest questions in service of creating space for others to think.

Week 3 - Making Observations and Working with Emotions

Learn how to make grounded observations based on data to facilitate increased awareness in a learning conversation. And learn what emotions are and how to work with them in organizational settings to build trust and create psychological safety.

Week 4 - Practice (no live class)

Week 4 is a practice week where students will take everything they have learned in the first 3 weeks and apply it at work. The extra time for applied practice in organizational settings is a critical step in developing a unique coaching leadership style.

Week 5 - The Coaching Conversation

Session four is fully focused on the process of coaching from beginning to end. Utilizing a simple framework along with tools and methods from previous sessions, students are guided through each phase of a coaching conversation with structure and support. By the end of our time together, students will have an understanding of how the coaching process works and what makes coaching different from everyday conversations.

Week 6 - Feedback and Accountability

Feedback is an essential part of coaching and can often be one of the hardest skills to master. Learn how to give effective and impactful feedback, learn how to use feedback in a coaching conversation, and learn the difference between giving feedback as a coach and as a manager.

Week 7 - Integration

In our final session we bring everything together from the past five weeks. We'll cover some additional tools for your coaching toolbox, explore what it takes to build a coaching friendly culture, and create learning plans for what comes next in your development as a leader who coaches.

What People Are Saying

This thoughtful, well-designed course fills a critical gap in existing Leadership training and curricula: a cohort-based, short-term immersive program for leaders that effectively coexists alongside the busy schedules and competing priorities that often get in the way of leaders’ ability to focus on their professional growth & development. The agenda has a great flow, with dedicated time for active participation and practice of the frameworks introduced – both as a full cohort and in breakout groups. And the Leader’s Little Book of Coaching is a valuable companion for ongoing support of Leaders and their commitment to integrating coaching skills into their leadership repertoire.

Andi does such an amazing job at slowing you down and reframing the way you approach problems in a positive, conscious way. The course materials are invaluable, and the experiential learning was the best out of any course or leadership education I've been through. I felt really close to my cohort by the end, and have already started implementing pieces of the training with my direct reports. Looking forward to seeing how this framework can help me empower my team!

I recently joined a Leader as Coach cohort and learned what it means to coach. Andi is a fantastic instructor who gave us powerful tools, exercises, and examples. Going into this training, I knew very little about coaching aside from it's different from mentoring. After completing the course, I walked away with a much deeper understanding of coaching and techniques I can immediately use. I highly recommend working with Andi to incorporate coaching into your skillset and improve your communication with others.

Andrea's thoughtful approach, calm presence and immense knowledge on coaching and leadership really make for such a valuable, insightful experience. The things you learn about “leader as coach” are immediately applicable while likeminded souls in similar fields make for interesting cohorts to learn with. 10 out of 10 recommend!

I really enjoyed the course and I would definitely recommend it to anyone that want to become a better leader, coach, manager and combine those 3 things more effectively. Even if some of the lessons happened after a long day at work, I always finished the videocall feeling renewed, energised, ready to try new things with my team the next day.

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.

Leader as Coach is a fantastic course. Andrea is a wonderful teacher who provided valuable tools and models for the students. I appreciated the role playing which helped cement the theory.

For Individuals

Cohorts run in Q1, Q2, and Q4 of each year. Learn more at Maven.com (and stay in the loop about upcoming cohorts).

For Teams and Companies

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

The Eight Competencies of Leader as Coach

1. Be Present

   The most powerful coaching tool isn’t a framework or methodology, it is you. Presence is the embodiment of your essential identity — how you carry yourself and make connection with others. Give the gift of attention by being fully present with another person and see how transformative your presence can truly be.

2. Be Curious

   The world is amazingly complex and we can never know it all, but sometimes we think we do! And as soon as we think we have the answer we close off the possibility of learning. Being curious is about cultivating the ability to be in the "not knowing" and open to what we might have missed in order to create the conditions for meaningful insights and novel paths forward.

3. Cultivate Learning

   Learning happens on boths sides of the coaching conversation. As coaches utilizing presence and curiosity, we are always learning about both ourselves and the person we are working with. And through coaching conversations we create space for others to engage in their own experiential learning process to access their innate wisdom and take ownership of their development.

4. Listen Beyond the Words

   Words point to the content of a situation. Tone, gesture, body posture, energy, pace, and other non-verbal cues hold important information about the context. Listening beyond the words is about the ability of the coach to be open to and impacted by the totality of emerging situation, getting to the underlying issues at play.

5. Honor Emotions

   Emotions are fact of workplace life, though most office cultures pretend otherwise. Emotions can be daunting — both our own and those of others — but once we know what they are, what they have to share with us, and how to work with them, emotions become a gift that help us navigate tricky situations with skill and care.

6. Build Partnership

   Coaching is a relationship built on true partnership, where power and responsibility are shared. The coach knows that people are doing the best they can with the resources available to them, and trusts in the capacity people have to find their own solutions.

7. Combine Advocacy with Inquiry

   It's important for managers who coach to be able to state their opinion and perspective clearly, while also being open to what might be missing from their view. By combining advocacy with inquiry, leaders build trust, clarity, and connection with their team.

8. Host the Conversation

   The coaching conversation is an invitation to slow down, reflect, and think about a situation, challenge, or opportunity. Managers who coach are able to create a structured space that hosts others and supports them to access their innate wisdom and find new possibilities for growth and change.

Newsletter

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