John's Blog

Sitting in a meeting about culture, the Logistics Manager blurted out: I hate it when employees say ‘The Company should’, or ‘you should’, never taking ownership of their jobs or showing loyalty towards the company.   The manager had moved herself up in a medium sized pharmaceutical company, a family business, from receptionist to Logistics Manager in a few short years. She didn’t get the sympathetic and understanding response she was hoping for.

An ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’ culture is more than just a un-resourceful state for a team to be in, it is a team culture that can leave a trail of failed goals and broken dreams in its wake. The ‘we’ team appears greater than the sum of its individual parts, producing results that are bigger than the collective effort. The individual’s sense of belonging to the team is the culture every leader should strive to accomplish.

Business is a cold hard world of facts, calculations and evaluations with little tolerance for esoteric philosophies. Life Coaching and leadership, on the other hand, fundamentally believe in the unseen. Potential, beliefs and attitude are un-measurable forces that drive the existence of Life Coaching and leadership. As a Life Coach, we owe it to the business community to make the process and principles less ‘up in the air’, and a little more ‘concrete’. Dealing with Potential is just such one area that needs to be reviewed in Life Coaching. The Business World believes that Track Record is what determines someone’s worth, and not their latent Potential. This article serves not to evaluate the ‘truth’ within the statement, but rather to pose a question: If that was true, how would a Life Coach deal with this ‘reality’?

Life and Business coaching became an international “buzzword” concept in the early 90’s. As a psychologist, counsellor and pastor, I spent much of my time educating people on the concept of what is a life coach. Today coaching is common in the workplace, yet the need to define what coaching is has now come full circle. Sports coaching is well understood and an easy example for us to investigate. A sports coach passes on specific techniques, designs and oversees the athlete’s training schedule and confronts un-resourceful mindsets to replace it with motivated attitudes.

Life coaching should be a collaborative experience, a shared responsibility between the coach and coachee. The responsibility of the coach is to identify weaknesses in mental process, and change them for to the strong processes, allowing the coachee to actively pursue and achieve their dreams. The coach/coachee relationship is a delicate dance of outcomes, observation, trust and curiosity that could last from just one project to a life time of achievement.

Navigating change can be a tricky process with the “pull of the past” tugging at your heels to get you back to your comfort zones. Seeing the process through until change has been firmly set in the normal routine requires discipline and direction. Change happens automatically, but not all change brings positive development with it. Expecting a positive result at the end of the process requires conscious effort to correctly guide the change.

9 Key Questions to gudie change << Part 1    5. Control: Can you start and maintain the outcome?