Become Smarter Leaders

Leaders inside companies are hungry to create more manageable lives, for themselves and their staff. As a mid-level manager, are you experiencing:

• Back-to-back meetings, all day long.  Real work gets done after 5pm or on the weekends. 

• Electronic leash. Tied to your Blackberry, cell phone, and/or laptop, you are never really away from the office. There are no boundaries between your work life and personal life. You’ve trained others to expect an immediate response. 

• Information overload.  200 emails a day. No matter how many hours you put in, you still feel behind on your work.

• Continual raising of the bar.  Get better, faster.  Do more with less budget, headcount and time.

• Multi-tasking as a way of life. Listening with one ear, reading with one eye, and never fully present in any one place. Important information gets missed, causing problems afterwards.

• Continual firefighting. Everything is a priority and the result is a feeling of coming apart at the seams. The adrenaline rush leaves you exhausted at the end of the day.

• No fire prevention. You spend time reacting vs. proactively designing your future. You can’t seem to make time to work on the strategic stuff.

• Constant reinvention of the organization and the business you are in. New roles, new behaviors, new way of doing business. Change is hard.

• More rules to the game. Like Sarbanes-Oxley.  Process is good AND it can slow things down to a standstill.

If this sounds all too familiar, you are not alone.

The Leader Coaching Circle Program

In the Leader Coaching Circle Program, you’ll meet twice a month by phone, with other leaders, to learn how to:

• Be present in interactions with others, so that your time is used more effectively
• Sort through what’s important and what’s not. Work smarter, not harder. Think strategically.
• Create healthy boundaries between work and the rest of your life.
• Maintain your balance in the middle of chaos
• Engage others to successfully create change in your organization.

The Leader Coaching Circle Program is typically sponsored by a company for top performers on a leadership track. We target mid-level managers because this is a critical layer for any organization and one that often gets "squeezed."

The Leader Coaching Circle Program is intended to maximize the combined energy, experience and wisdom of the participants to achieve organizational and individual goals.

Benefits of Leader Coaching Circles

Leader Coaching Circles are a facilitated group process, co-led by two professional coaches who shape the environment to enable the group to thrive. The agenda is co-created with the participants, to focus on issues in real time. Coaches provide “laser coaching” on issues that the group is grappling with and trigger the best thinking of the participants with powerful questions. Participants have described coaching circles as a:

• Whine-free zone
• Circle of caring advocates
• Platform for accountability and responsibility
• Harbor of honesty and truth-telling in a confidential setting.
• Comfort zone in times of difficulties, a place to ask for help
• Reservoir of wisdom

In the process, individuals create manageable lives, with a new sense of ease and control. They transform their businesses and relationships.

Ready to move beyond where you are today, with the support of like-minded professionals?

Investment in Time and Money

• Two 75-minute calls per month.
• 6-8 people in a coaching circle.
• Six-month duration
• $300/person/month

FAQs

• How do you decide which leaders form a group? Two words. Affinity and safety.  Coaching circles work best when participants are facing similar challenges and have similar circumstances. And there must be safety and confidentiality for participants to fully participate.  What we look for when forming a group:

1. Are all the individuals facing similar challenges, as described in the bullet items on what mid-level managers are experiencing?
2. Are all the individuals at a similar place in their personal development (e.g., in a place of empowerment vs. a place of victim energy, similar level of self-awareness)?
3. Is there a fit between what this program offers and what the individual is looking for?
4. Can we establish a place of safety and confidentiality with this group? 

• How do you ensure confidentiality?  The calls take place on a bridge line set up by Carol Ross and Associates.  Our ground rule with participants is that you can talk about your experience in the group, but not about others’ experiences.

• How can a company measure the effectiveness of this program?  We ask participants at the beginning of the program to identify their most challenging issues and assess how well they are meeting those challenges. We then have participants re-assess in three months and six months. We make this data available in compiled form (not as individual responses) to the sponsoring company.

• Are there tools for helping the group communicate outside of the calls?  Yes, as an option, we can provide a password-protected blog for the coaching circle. 

• I’m still not sure this is for me. How can I get a taste of being in a Coaching Circle? We offer a free one-hour teleclass for interested individuals.  Contact info@leadercoachingcircle.com for more details.

About Your Coaches

Carol Ross, president of Carol Ross and Associates, certified executive coach and team development consultant. Carol's passion is leveraging whole brain thinking to create more effective and enjoyable workplaces. She worked for nearly 20 years in energy and telecommunications companies (Exelon, Telcordia, U S WEST, Lucent, and Avaya) as an engineer and later, as an internal organization development consultant. Since 2003, she has coached leaders inside Accenture, Avaya, Caterpillar, Harley-Davidson, Motorola, Nelnet, SUN Microsystems and Wells Fargo.

Deb Siverson, president of Xponents, certified executive coach and team development consultant. Deb is passionate about unleashing the potential of organizations, by helping individuals and teams move exponentially towards their goals.  Deb's experience in the financial industry includes nearly 20 years at Wells Fargo, where she was Senior Vice President responsible for sales culture development and sales leadership training in a multi-state region. She later developed new markets for consulting and sales management services at Siebel Systems. Her work today as an executive coach gives her a constant pulse on the challenges of managing inside large companies today.