Coaching is the new leadership. The days of leaders commanding and demanding people with little to input are way behind us. People crave strong leaders, but they also want an opportunity and a platform to share their ideas and insights.

When you think about conflict, or confronting someone, does it make you nervous? Doesn't it make a lot of people nervous? I want to share a notion with you that conflict, in certain moments, can be unbelievably healthy. Let me give you a couple of examples.

One of the toughest things that we go through is our ability to recruit employees. The toughest thing we need to consider is that the world is shrinking and it is very easy for candidates to find out what our organizations are like as well as specific managers and their leadership styles. A brief example might be a candidate going to work for a company and not knowing much about the company. What..

The most fundamental mistakes managers make when they're coaching is that they coach to the situation and not to the issue(s). Let me give you a brief example. Let's say you walk by and you hear three people at the water cooler gossiping and talking negatively about other people. You hear them demonstrating very mean spirited comments. They are really being poor teammates and employees. Often, we..

What's been a pleasant surprise in the last two years is that the coaching industry and the coaching movement has gone from this concept of, "It would be nice to coach if we had time," to organizations stating, "We must coach our employees." This has been, needless to say, refreshing.

This still begs the question- how do we motivate our managers to coach?

This article is not about how to coach,..

One of the questions I receive frequently from managers is about getting their managers or executive team to coach them. They often fear retribution if they bring it up- as if they are crossing a line. When we provide our program to organizations, everybody says you should start with the executive team, which I agree with, but often it gets pushed down to management levels below the executive..

When you hear the words engagement and coaching used together, you generally think about your employees. Are they engaged enough in their work and with each other? What can I do as a coach to improve their engagement? However, one of the most important questions generally goes unasked. Am I fully engaged in my coaching and with my employees? As a coach, it is important that you are 100% engaged.

Bad attitudes are a choice. However, they are a choice made by one person, that can affect an entire company. As a coach, you should always be coaching to positive attitudes, regardless if bad attitudes are present in your employees or not. Coaching employees to have positive attitudes can help prevent bad attitudes in the future. 

The purpose of coaching is progress. We coach to help employees progress toward their goals and eventually achieve them. Coaching is the means to a successful end. Progress can be seen in many aspects of an employee and their work. Motivation, attitude, engagement, effort, relationships, etc. all show how an employee is progressing, and each of those aspects is developed by coaching. Progress..