Tag: executive-coaching
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Is This Person Coachable Right Now?
“This person is amazing, BUT…” I call this the big “BUT.” It comes up so often in conversations with leaders that I could finish the sentence for them. The BUT is a list of behaviors they want changed in someone on their team. The ones I hear most often: micromanaging, talking over people in meetings,…
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The Patience Game
I wrote Make Them Think for leaders of all kinds whose job, by trade or by nature, is to help people learn, grow and change their lives for the better. What a lot of people don’t know about the book is that it was born out of a corporate training I used to give for…
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The Conversation Move that Gets People Unstuck Fast
A client once stopped me mid-session and asked: “What are you doing?” He’d noticed a pattern. Every time he brought me a problem, I wasn’t asking him to explain it further. I was asking him something else entirely. I told him: “Every time you talk in problem terms, I ask about the solution.” He looked…
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The 90/10 Rule: What great coaching actually sounds like
A few weeks ago I received this review from Rachel M., a Lead Counsel who read Make Them Think: “I’ve always been most impressed by leaders who ask thoughtful, well-timed questions that seem to change the direction of a project. This book helped me understand why those questions work and how to start using them…
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The Most Natural Question in the World (And Why it’s the Wrong One)
A reader named Layne, a CMO with 20+ years in startup tech, wrote something in her review that I keep coming back to: “I thought good coaching meant having better answers. This book showed me it means asking better questions.” That one sentence is the whole paradigm shift. Most of us were trained, implicitly or…
