Job Description for Executive Coaches

Leaders’ jobs are confusing, and pretty much impossible. They must do them anyway, and do them with apparent confidence. What makes leadership so hard? Consider the job description. Wanted: Leader who can Align people who have different ideas and skills to a common purpose. Select the right people, and put them in the right positions, so that they can accomplish that purpose. Catch people being successful. Have difficult conversations when things go wrong. Inspire Build relationships that engage followers. Understand how organizations work. Understand their business and all its component parts. Manage the myriad emotions that followers bring, arising from followers’ experiences with past leaders. Have self-awareness regarding their own emotions, and how they impact others. Have enough resilience to bounce back from mistakes and unfair criticisms. There is more, but you get the picture. Leaders need you, and it’s no wonder! But let’s be clear about what they do…

Money Addiction

In this blog, I like to offer practical ideas for coaches, mixed with challenges to experiment with thinking differently. Come to think of it, that’s what I do with my coaching clients as well. Today I’m focused on challenging some of our thinking about money. Let me be clear. I like money. I like having enough money socked away to be confident that my wife and I will be comfortable now and later. It is calming. While we don’t have lavish tastes, we enjoy an upper middle-class lifestyle. Further, money does a lot of good in the world. It provides safety. It provides access to good healthcare, for example, and not just by allowing people to pay for it. It allows hospitals to be able to stay in business, medical schools to be built and function, roads to be built so that we can get to hospitals, cars to be…