The pressure to measure the effectiveness of any form of coaching intervention can be intense. Coaches and sponsors both feel driven to demonstrate a high return on investment (RoI). Unfortunately, most of the attempts to measure RoI are not methodologically robust and hence don’t carry much credibility. In particular, they rely on self-report by clients...
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Having a team full of superstars doesn’t lead to high performance, according to research by Roderick Swaab, a professor at Insead business school, and his colleagues. His researches indicate that when two-thirds of the team are star performers, they co-operate less and become more competitive with each other. The reason seems to be that stars...
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Coaching one-to-one is a very powerful way to help someone reflect upon issues that affect their performance and well-being. But just focusing on the individual and what is going on for them internally, is only part of the picture. All really effective coaching addresses not only the individual, but the systems, of which they are...
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Team coaching requires a portfolio of skills beyond those in one-to-one coaching. Most of these relate to the difference in context between individual conversations and group dynamics. For example: Many of the standard approaches and qualities of one-to-one coaching are also essential in team coaching, but they tend to demand a higher level of skill....
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When a successful female entrepreneur is held up as a role model, is it a good thing or not? There is now so much evidence that women can be as effective (and in some circumstances, such as rural economies in developing countries, considerably more successful in business creation) than men, that the fact we still...
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The ability of humans to collaborate in teams on large-scale projects goes back thousands of years, according to theories emerging from the evidence of excavations of ancient monuments. Ancient monuments like Stone Henge, the Egyptian Pyramids, the statues of Easter Island and the 3,500-year-old Poverty Point in Louisiana are often depicted as the result of (more…)
The concept that humans are composed not of one single self or personality, but of numerous different “selves” that think and behave differently in response to different stimuli, is now well entrenched (Bern, 1964; Rowan, 1990, 1993). Bachkirova (2011) and Lawrence (2018) have explored the implications of multiplicity theory in the context of one-to-one coaching....
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One of the biggest impediments to team performance occurs when there is a mismatch between the leadership style and behaviours the team needs and those that the leader and the team default to. The word default is appropriate because there is usually an unconscious process of adaptation, which may be driven by: Having a language...
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The Abilene effect (where a solution is adopted that no-one really favours, but no-one feels sufficiently opposed to, to go against the majority) happens remarkably frequently, even in high performing teams. It is actually quite easy to prevent, with the use of a simple procedure. The starting point is to discuss the question: “What are...
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I took an executive to task the other day, when he talked about gender inequality as a “women’s issue”. The implication was that he and his colleagues would take more notice, the more of an issue female employees made it. Of course, it’s actually a man’s issue as well. As a director of a large...
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