Tom Watkins Coaching

Leadership Coaching | Self-Management | Capacity Development

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How shall we argue?

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Ideally, at the start of any significant relationship we'd agree on answers to this question before the first inevitable important disagreement. Attempting that agreement while actually arguing is a complex process, like trying to fix an aircraft while flying it. However, in its absence these nine strategies can help limit the risk of damage when we're up to our armpits in challenging interpersonal conflict. They are for most people easier to grasp than apply, because acquiring and entrenching … [Read more...]

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Assumptions for coaches and coaching

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Our coaching practices reflect whatever assumptions we hold about the process, the relationship, our role, the client's,  and the wider workplace context.  Which are useful assumptions are for you to determine.  Use this extract from my Coaching Practices guidebook to shed light on and clarify yours. It's important  that you remain aware of them and moderate those that need change. These are the basic beliefs and assumptions I've distilled and refined from my 25 years as professional … [Read more...]

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Our Interpersonal Inheritance

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Conversations are the barometers of organisational health but personal objectivity about the quality of our contributions to them can be like asking a fish to describe water. Mostly they're a constant, unnoticed system in which we conduct interpersonal relationships. And it's never just us involved: we inherited many of our practices uncritically from our families-of-origin as our parents inherited similarly from theirs. Because they may be based on redundant or unhealthy patterns, the topic's … [Read more...]

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The coaching relationship

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A constructive workplace coaching relationship (one that serves to improve, is practical and productive) depends on skill for which the coach is responsible and the presence of order, impartiality, trust, safety, and mutual respect for which the parties have equal responsibility. Rather than focus solely on the content of coaching sessions, coach and client should have a shared understanding of their approach to  these matters. Responsibilities of the coach: While coaching may be arranged … [Read more...]

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Why delegate? Why not?

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On the face of it, delegating work is a simple and straightforward matter:  identify tasks you want someone else to carry out and ask them to get on with it.  So why do many leaders and managers find it difficult and delegate insufficiently or not at all?  What are their practical and attitudinal obstacles? We delegate by assigning authority or duties to someone who acts for us. As a leadership practice it involves allocating, entrusting and supporting others to carry out work towards … [Read more...]

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Shooting yourself in the foot?

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When I asked how she tended to give feedback to staff, the CEO told me, “Oh, I’m very direct. They always know where they stand with me.  I tell them straight.”  In her mind there was no contradiction with what I’d witnessed at her meeting less than an hour earlier.  She’d told the 40 staff attending, “Some of you were late for this meeting, though you’ve known about it for weeks.  It’s disappointing and disrespectful behaviour.  You need to do better.”  At this there was much eye-rolling and … [Read more...]

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Hostility: it’s probably not about you

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To what extent is boredom and dissatisfaction behind picking fights? If the author and journalist Gaby Hinsliff  is correct or if what she suggests is right sometimes, we ought be able to make very useful shifts in our responses to much of others' "difficult" behaviours:  annoyance, antagonism, hostility, nastiness, unkindness, spite, meanness, malice, malevolence,  plain old bad-temper and other forms of poking sticks at people. I believe she is right and that the insight, coupled with … [Read more...]

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13 Ways to encourage the heart

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Whatever we think of our leadership, management, other services or products, success depends on meeting our customers' needs. For that reason alone it's wise and necessary to methodically gather feedback from customers including those within our organisations we exist to serve – our staff, our teams, colleagues and managers.   However, I strongly advocate shifting the balance of feedback away from the everyday preponderance of negative judgements, to observations that acknowledge and support … [Read more...]

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Encourage!

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We know from personal experience that our capacity for performance is significantly enhanced when our efforts and we ourselves are appreciated.  When we believe otherwise, we become easily stressed and soon give up or stop caring.  We also understand that people who go out of their way to acknowledge our effort and output, even if only with simple words of sincere thanks, go far beyond the limits of performance appraisal systems or conventional customer-client relationships:  they nourish a … [Read more...]

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Leadership lessons in a merger

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A merger-in-progress of two large service organisations is struggling to achieve its intentions. What’s happening has important lessons for everyday leadership and self-management practices.  The distinctly different organisational cultures are not a natural mix; each has a long history of operating idiosyncratically in separate areas, serving distinctly different demographics with strong local loyalties and attachments, and of growing their own unique responses to local problems over many … [Read more...]