A handful of phrases have stuck with me, and I’ve repeated them countless times to others.

• If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
• Make original mistakes.
• Stop starting; start finishing.

Each of these came from someone coaching me when they said it. They had visibility into my life, could see both my challenges and goals, and they cared if I succeeded. 

These phrases helped me navigate the moments and seasons in which they were given, but they multiplied their impact as I’ve re-used them in coaching others. 

That’s part of what I love about coaching. The impact multiplies over time, helping more and more people overcome obstacles and unlock their potential.

The impact of coaching.

Coaching is an invaluable tool for any leader. It allows leaders to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, hone their skills, and better understand the people around them. 

With guidance from a coach, leaders can more effectively eliminate obstacles that may prevent them from achieving their full potential. 

Coaching also helps leaders foster their emotional intelligence and communication skills, enabling them to work collaboratively and build relationships with team members. 

Investing in leadership coaching is essential to ensure leaders have the tools to guide teams through any challenge or uncertainty. 

My backstory

I’ve worked in the nonprofit space for over 20 years. During those years, I’ve led teams, projects, events, programs, new initiatives and more. All that leadership always involved coaching. 

Especially in the nonprofit sector, leadership involves empowering people to make an impact. More often than not, the people I led didn’t report to me in an HR way. They wanted to make a specific impact or reach a particular objective, and I was the one to help them get there. 

Rarely was there just one level of leadership below me over those years, so often, I was helping those I coach to learn to be coaches themselves. 

Leading always involved coaching.

If you want to have a more significant impact, you coach. If you want something to outlast you, you coach. If you're going to leave a legacy, you coach.

Being a team leader.

When you become the team leader, there’s a shift from focusing on your direct contribution to how you can level up your team members' contribution. 

As someone with the Strengthsfinder competition talent in my top five, I had to shift from searching for how I could win to focusing on how I could help my teammates win. I believe this is actually the healthiest way to live out my competition strength.

A great coach is more of a facilitator, helping others leverage their understanding and experience.

But once I de-centered myself, it didn’t stop at wanting to help my teammates win. I wanted to help other teams win as well. I began to facilitate regular times to connect with other team leaders for a time of peer coaching. 

These other team leaders didn’t report to me, nor I to them, but we each took on the role of coach with one another.  

Through my years leading teams, I discovered how powerful and enjoyable coaching can be.

Leading a director network.

After a few years of leading teams and then leading individual major events, I was asked to oversee all our organization's major external events. 

Each of these events had its own leadership structures and depended heavily on volunteers. The events had operated almost entirely independently of each other and therefore had little understanding of or connection with one another. 

A strong my way or the highway approach would have been a disaster. Instead, I decided to take a coaching approach.

I created communities of directors organized by three common focus areas for the events, program, marketing and operations. I combined individual coaching and group coaching within these communities.

Facilitating group coaching sessions with each of these communities took a while to take off because none of these directors had experienced a community of peers. But things began to move once they realized we were there to help them diagnose obstacles and move forward. 

The next step in coaching directors was helping them become coaches themselves. A few were already applying some coaching principles, but most weren’t sure how to live it out in the complexity of their teams. 

This season was extraordinarily rewarding and gave me the vision to apply coaching more broadly and professionally.

What coaching looks like for me.

Coaching can take many different forms depending on the context. But for me, it usually falls into one of two categories.

Helping others navigate.

Many people are looking for a coach to give them the correct answer and tell them what they should do. 

But a great coach is more of a facilitator, helping others leverage their understanding and experience to navigate the challenges and opportunities they encounter. 

Leading always involved coaching.

When a coach helps someone else develop their own solutions, they train them to create new solutions in the future. Quality coaching doesn’t create dependence on the coach.

There are times when a coach can take a more participatory and thus, collaborative approach.

Collaborating together.

Often leaders want someone to join them in the problem-solving process but not solve it for them. I enjoy coming alongside others and working together to develop creative solutions. 

The collaborative process might be during a one-off ideation session or through a structured approach like a design sprint. The form really depends on the nature of the problem being solved.

What next for coaching

I want leaders to live a life centered on the people and purposes that matter most. This begins with knowing your priorities and then living from them.

I now focus all my coaching efforts toward intentionality living expressed in four areas. 

1. Leadership
2. Innovation
3. Messaging
4. Agility

I’m keeping my 1:1 coaching engagements limited, but it’s still something I love to do.