Encouraging Responsible Conversations
Collaborating with You to Achieve.
Performance coaching for individuals and teams.
Do any of these images or comments resonate with your desires?
All 6 images by ©HarrietMuller
- All comments are from my research interviews shown alongside anonymised names in square brackets.
- These came after project managers had experienced minimal coaching practice.
Do you want to take on more as a project manager?
- Have more responsibility e.g. coordinator to manager role?
- Run bigger projects?
- Become a contractor?
- Work more confidently in the Agile space?
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Maybe you need to
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1 Convince yourself you can do it first?
- get away from doubt or overwhelm?
- know you can influence others?
- know your comfort zone and thus risks to success?
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2. Convince those with more power you can?
- produce slightly better results short term?
- be more assertive about previous achievements?
- show you can develop others?
I can support you to
- understand yourself more e.g. recognise strengths as well as weaknesses
- make mindset changes
- move towards stretching yourself more often
- communicate more collaboratively
- consider your development needs
- empower others and delegate
Individuals
Project management needs discipline and project managers can be chosen by their task-focussed, 'get the project done' attitude. As soon as I became a project manager it quickly became obvious I spent most of my time communicating - oh dear, not my strength! Soft skills help any stakeholder conversation. Soft skills recognise emotions which bubble constantly in any team, especially when pressure comes from all sides, as it so often does in projects. Where do we learn these though? My recommendation is to understand coaching principles: they give a brilliant model for soft skills more generally and insight to the myriad recommendations about leadership.
In early career, we can be judged to lack self-confidence if our decision-making appears a little slow or diffident. Later on, we overcome our unease by using knowledge from our experience that can lead to habits that ignore the need to get the team on board.
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I promote more conscious awareness of self and others, so that personal and team emotions are recognised and dealt with, for better team-building, and less personal stress, in an objective, respectful yet professional fashion.
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Teams/Groups
Ask about learning soft skills through coach practice
With a group of 10 people it becomes viable to run a day's introductory coach training, and arrange some coach practice for you over six months to boost your soft skills at work. Previous students have improved their self-confidence and their collaboration skills. I use an associate - John Chisholm of Crescente - because PMs love his training style and some of his courses can be accredited with CMI. This is not formal coach training; if you're interested in becoming a coach, ask me about websites to look at at e.g. The Coaching Academy, Barefoot Coaching,
Ask about collaboration skills workshop
This and tailored versions are possible. I run these with an associate - Mike Tanner - and space is
provided for you and your team to think about all your working relationships and everyone's personal intentions so you can see and agree 'shared intention'. Conflict can be positive for high performance and innovation.