Coach of Our Talent

One of our roles as a leader is that of being a coach who develops a strong team of contributors – talented individuals (let’s call them our “talent”) whose skills, experience and enthusiasm allow them to make a contribution to our group and our community. The purpose of this seminar is to strengthen your interpersonal bonds and provide you with an interactive framework for engaging the talented people you lead in a constructive coaching conversation. To the end, during the seminar, I will:

explore the essential qualities that those individuals look for most in a coach
give you an experience of how you can nurture and enhance those qualities in yourself – in the service of strengthening your bonds with your “talent”
teach you and ask you to practice applying a framework for coaching – a sequence of questions designed to help you grow and support the members of your team

I begin by positioning and defining the role of coach in the larger context of all of the roles that you assume as a leader. In so doing, I also explore the distinction between the call to lead, the need to manage, and the situations that sometimes cause us to mandate – to boss.

Be a Coach

I follow with a focus on you, the coach. I ask you to go inside and to reflect on your predisposition to want to be a coach. This is all about building your own self-awareness before sailing into the what-can-be choppy waters of commending, challenging, cajoling, or critiquing someone else. Your predisposition to want to be a coach is going to greatly influence how you are perceived and believed (or not) by others. Before you don the coach’s jacket, you are well served to be truthful with yourself about whether you want to actively engage in the effort to help your players grow. The work here is not to judge your own truth. The work here is to ask you to own your truth, and then to act on it in a way that serves both the team member and the team.

The remainder of Coach of Our Talent assumes that your truth is, “Yes, I want to fully engage as a coach with my players.”

Honor Our Talent

I begin by asking you to examine the quality of the current relationship you have with your individual players, and provide you with a progression of questions to help you make informed decisions about the actions you will need to take in order to deepen your bond with each of them.

Grow and Support Our Talent

Next, I map out and ask you to apply an interactive framework for coaching individuals – for growing them and for supporting them. The coaching framework is a progression of questions and talking points designed to help you deepen the coaching conversation you will have with your talent and, in so doing, strengthen your bonds with them. It is applicable across a broad range of coaching situations: career planning, situational coaching and corrective feedback.

Appreciate Our Talent

I finish this seminar by asking you to tap into the renewable source of energy that you can draw on to fuel the enthusiasm of your team members: a meaningful expression of your appreciation and gratitude for their contributions to the group and to the community.

As you work your way through the elements of Coach of Our Talent, I will be encouraging you to consider how you will actually apply them to help your individual team members and contributors grow. It is my hope that you will walk away with more finely honed skills to engage your players in conversations that will prompt them to take greater responsibility and ownership for their own growth – conversations that will pump up their enthusiasm to serve, to act and to persevere as you all pursue your worthy goals.