Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Coaching Your Coach: How to Deal with a Boss

Coaching your coach or Achieving Leadership Qualities In School other words dealing with your boss at work is one of the most challenging aspects of working life. People who Achieving Leadership Qualities In School this well can often count on Assuming Qualities In How To Achieve Leadership compensation, advancement and visibility to more senior leaders. Those who do not do this well often find themselves with limited if any raises, dead-end careers and little if no face time with senior leadership. What differentiates those who do this well from those who do How to Achieve Leadership Qualities poorly? While there are many elements to the dynamics of dealing with your boss or coach, several are proposed here.

Do not:
Constantly use face time with your coach to ask what to do or how to do it.\ Use time with How To Achieve Leadership Qualities Within Self boss to talk only about you, your work and your career unless you have scheduled it in advance as a career development session. Limit these to a couple of times per year maximum.

Spend the time with you coach criticizing your company, organization, peers or subordinates. If you are asked about these topics be honest, concise and Delegating In How To Achieve Leadership Qualities it in the best possible terms.

Do:
Come prepared with an outline of what you want to talk about including a brief update on any major projects including quantifiable performance results.

Be prepared to propose what you can do to make you coach more successful and offer to assist in ways that will leverage your strengths and skills. This Achieving Leadership Qualities in School picking up additional projects that may have been assigned to your boss since your last meeting.

Listen more than you talk. Make constructive and specific recommendations. Do not guess. If you can assist with something but need more information, write it down and offer to follow up with the details in a specific period of time.

Optional: if you coach likes things in writing, follow-up the meeting or session with a summary of what you have committed to doing and by when. If this is not consistent with your coaches style, then within one business day, follow-up with a call if your on not co-located summarizing what you committed to doing and by when.

Following these suggestions in dealing with your coach can serve to make you more effective and can also serve to demonstrate to your boss that you are a person he can count on to make the most of their time and deliver consistently on important projects. Both are important to success and advancement in any organization.

George F. Franks, III is the founder and CEO of Franks Consulting Group - a Bethesda, Maryland based management consulting and leadership coaching practice. He is a member of the Institute of Management Consultants and the International Coach Federation. Franks Consulting Group can be found on the web at: http://www.franksconsultinggroup.com George's blog is: http://consultingandcoaching.blogspot.com

I was co-facilitating the Intranet Leadership Forum workshop in Melbourne today, and we started the day with a discussion around collaboration. We covered a variety of questions, but one Effective Persons in How to Achieve Leadership Qualities topic was: how do we make collaboration work well?

In five minutes the group had brainstormed the following list:

  • involve key stakeholders
  • training
  • find out what people need
  • single sign-on
  • communicate
  • define role of collaboration
  • make it easy to use
  • build trust via some security
  • user Achieving Leadership Qualities In School
  • when complete, get rid of collaboration spaces
  • establish owner
  • governance
  • demonstrate successes
  • ongoing remarketing
  • get champions
  • target ideas and opportunities
  • value for users

Need I say more...