Ginger Lapid-Bogda’s The Enneagram in Business portal contains an “Ask the Coach” feature, where a coach of each Type answers the same question about coaching, to give a flavor of the different possible perspectives. Ginger asked me to be the Type 9 – or Peacemaker – representative on this panel. Here’s my answer to the…
Category Archives: coaching
The Leadership of Letting Go, Part 9
The second path to curiosity for leadership is to view things from another person’s perspective. It’s a common pitfall not to do this. In a recent coaching conversation, a manger was telling me about how one of their direct reports had turned hostile and rude. They couldn’t understand why. As we talked further, it became…
The Leadership of Letting Go, Intermezzo
When I started this series on the leadership of letting go, I thought there might be four or five entries in it. The I decided to drop my preconceptions and my planning and allow the series to emerge, piece by puzzling piece. If there is a piece of the puzzle that you’d like me to…
The Leadership of Letting Go, Part 6
In Part 3 of “The Leadership of Letting Go” I touched on the role of trust in leadership. People want to be able to trust, and be trusted by, their leaders. This demands that leaders be authentic. One roadblock on the road to authenticity is that what we say may not match what we really…
Ask the Enneagram Coach, Part 2
Ginger Lapid-Bogda’s The Enneagram in Business portal contains an “Ask the Coach” feature, where a coach of each Type answers the same question about coaching, to give a flavor of the different possible perspectives. Ginger asked me to be the Type 9 – or Peacemaker – representative on this panel. Here’s my answer to the…
Ask the Coach, Part 1
Ginger Lapid-Bogda recently launched The Enneagram in Business portal. The learning portal is part of this great resource, with great contributors such as Jerry Wagner (describing the Types or Styles in detail) and Bea Chestnut (on the Sub-types). There’s also an “Ask the Coach” feature, where a coach of each Type answers the same question…
The Best Advice I Ever Got
The current issue of Fortune contains mini-interviews with 22 well-known people from business and politics, including the usual suspects, e.g. Bill Gates (together with his father) and Warren Buffet. The interview with Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, caught my eye, since he describes how John Doerr recommended a coach to him in 2001….
A Basic Equation of Leadership
In his inner game work, Tim Gallwey distills coaching to the equation p = P – i. In longhand: performance = Potential – interference. In working as a leadership sculptor I’ve come to see the i as standing for imbalance. A lack of life balance — as Klaus Linneweh pointed out several years ago —…
How Well Does Your Communications Center Work?
On my way home from a leadership seminar yesterday, I was faced with train chaos. The train staff just announced it was country-wide. Once in a train that was actually able to travel, I asked the ticket collector what was going on. After a bit of squirming, he explained that the central computer in Berlin…
Give the other person a chance to do some of the work
In a recent leadership team-building workshop, we practiced giving clean feedback. Later, Jane asked me during a break for a chat about how to deal with another participant who had blocked her attempt at giving feedback on a behaviour causing a lot of friction between them – during shift handover, Mary reacted to improvement suggestions…
