Is 1:1 Leadership Coaching Right for You?
Stepping into a leadership role is an exciting milestone, but it also comes with a lot of ambiguity and self-doubt. For those of us in design, product management, engineering, or data science (to name but a few crafts that are close to product innovation), our early focus as practitioners is becoming better at our craft. That all changes when we transition into leadership.
Why leadership roles are so challenging
Those very skills that helped us excel as individual contributors are not the ones that will help us succeed as a leader. To take on a leadership role, we need to develop a different skill set and focus. We can no longer just do what we’ve always done and expect to see the same results.
But often there is little or no support to help you navigate this and figure out how to become a great leader in your context. For most of us, the tendency is to look inwards to our own practices since that’s what’s worked for us in the past. But becoming a leader is less about your individual performance and more about how you’re contributing to strategic business goals and representing your practice and your team to the business. Your role becomes much more about stepping outside your discipline to collaborate with peers from other functions to achieve organisational goals together.
If you don’t have a manager or peers from the same practice or background, it can get lonely very quickly. This is why many people stepping into this space wonder whether they’re doing it right or how to even tell if this is the case.
If you have access to a circle of peers you trust outside your organisation, you should absolutely go to them. Share your questions and frustrations and encourage them to do the same.
But if you don’t have such a group—or you’re still looking for something more—working with a coach can be beneficial. A coach is an experienced thought partner who can help you think things through, identify unknown unknowns, and grow your capability.
What it’s like to work with me
I offer 1:1 coaching with passionate human-centred innovators, and I’ve had the opportunity to support people from my team and clients in the space of product innovation. My coachees come from a range of disciplines, but they tend to be Heads, Directors, or Leads of User Experience, Design, Innovation, and Product Management.
We explore topics that fall into the broad categories of: people, products, and practice. Here are a few examples of what we might cover in our sessions:
How to shift gears to collaborate and align with your peers and stakeholders from other disciplines to achieve business goals
How to set strategic direction
How to increase business agility
How to grow a happy, high-performing team
How to establish or mature your innovation practice
How to create a succession plan to step up
What’s next for you in your career? How do you get there?
My past coaching clients have used our time together to:
Step into more senior leadership roles
Set up and launch their own business
Change the focus of their career (e.g. from UX to PM)
Develop their innovation capability
Identify their next career goal
I don’t endorse a fixed coaching framework. I draw upon my user-centred design background to identify your goals and chart our course together. To give ourselves enough time to do this and tackle your most pressing goals, I recommend booking a block of five coaching sessions or signing up for ongoing coaching. If this is of interest to you, schedule a chat!
