Loyal Architect to Empowering Captain

Today's edition features another Case Study for a Client.

I hope you are finding these interesting and thought provoking for your own personal and professional endeavors.

Andy is an Athletic Director in a large school district.

Here was his coaching program:

Coaching Topic:

What:? To trust my ability to empower my coaches to do their jobs effectively so that I can focus on the bigger picture issues in service of the program.

?Why:??

???You are dedicated to serving the athletes specifically and the community at large.?

?? You feel that you have to handle everything for fear of it not being done right.?

???You know that this is not leaving time for the issues that need your attention and you also want to have the biggest impact possible from your focused efforts.

???You want to empower the coaches for themselves, for you to rely on them, and for the good of the program.

I use metaphors to capture Andy's current way of operating within his topic.?

Current Way of Being Metaphor:

?Way of the Loyal Architect

Your Architect is a hard worker.? You like to build a good program. You are deeply loyal and committed to others.? Your diverse nature translates into your ability to truly be of service to the students, parents, and the program.?

I get a sense of you holding a value of excellence – not perfection.?

Your high level of interpersonal skills has made you stand out in your role and has been invaluable in necessary interactions with parents.

You enjoy challenges that are unconventional and love solving complex problems.? You especially love solving public problems.

Because of your underlying vigilance, you foresee problems and can head them off at the pass.?

You are curious and are a natural problem solver. You tend to be practical, and hands-on which has you naturally taking on and doing whatever needs to be done.?

Seeing:? As long as I handle everything, it will be OK and everyone will be happy and the program will be successful.

?As you are feeling into this Loyal Architect, what are some of the behaviors that you see you might do?

Goings:

????You attend to as many things as you can throughout the day.

?????You attend most events to ensure they go well.

????You check up on your coaches constantly.

????You trust things will only go well if you do it yourself.

????You are the best person to interact with the parents.

????You make sure the parents are satisfied.

????You stay on top of things, so things run as trouble-free as possible.

Checking:

????Parents indicate they are happy with the results I have achieved.

????Do I have any energy left – if yes, then I could be doing more.

????Superintendent praises and wants to keep me.

How this has served you:

?????You have successfully solved several problems – significantly.? As you said, you like to field curve balls – the story of 2 rival teams combined.

????You foresee problems and often head them off at the pass.

????You manage 114 coaches, which is a lot to juggle and ensure things go well.

????8 years ago, you undertook an immense job:

o???69 Teams

o???900 athletes

o???114 Coaches

And you proved yourself and illuminated what this role really requires.? You rose to the occasion brilliantly through hard work, dedication, drive and enthusiasm.? And you are thriving in this role in many respects and people are noticing and want to keep you.

How this limits you:

?????You absolutely know that you are doing too much.? You work long hours and weekends.? Burnout is inevitable.?

?????You know you need to attend to the bigger picture issues; however, because of all that you are doing, this is being neglected – so the possibility of what could be within the program may never come to fruition.?

?????You really enjoy the larger part of your role but are being bogged down with all of the tasks that need to be delegated.

?????You want to run your program like a business.? You know this will require changes in order for you to bring forward what you envision.

?????You are not sure how to delegate and trust that things do not go off the rails.

?????What are others not getting from you? What is the program not getting from you – the students, the parents?? What are you not giving yourself?

New Way of Being Metaphor:

The Way of The Empowering Captain

You are leading your team of coaches.? Because of your leadership, they now share your dedication to “excellence.”? Through your efforts, the team is now dedicated to the program, the community, and most importantly the students.

What is the underlying belief of this guy.? As long as I provide leadership to the team, I will be able to trust them to do their jobs and I will be able to devote my time to developing a great program now and over the years.

?You have open lines of communication, yet the coaches feel empowered to act with autonomy.? You communicate directly and they know what is expected of them.?

?You enlist their help, and this brings them into the decisions that affect them and their athletes.

?You devote a significant amount of your time to creatively improving the program while trusting that things are getting done with limited monitoring by you.

How might you be checking that things are going well?? Less anxiety, more free time outside of work, higher degree of the feeling of accomplishment??

?You have learned that in order for you to truly lead the program, you will have to take some risks in allowing others to make mistakes – knowing that your problem-solving skills are honed and certainly able to handle whatever comes up.

?You have a deep sense of accomplishment as you are working on developing and running the program holding the value of Excellence.

We then created specific objectives to move him through to realize his topic.?

Developmental Objectives:

?1.???You have learned to recognize and trust your own inner guidance which translates into letting go and trusting your coaches.

2.???You have increased delegation of work/projects to staff to support your own productivity and support staff development making your work deeply meaningful for you.

?3.???You have honed your leadership style which empowers your coaches to fully embrace and participate in the shared goal of program excellence.

As you remember his attention was very focused on each request that came to him.? Request - Respond.? Everything else fell away.

?He needed to develop the ability to keep a wider bigger picture.

And this took muscle building. Which he did over time in our work together.

?And just to wrap up about Andy, he was able to realize his topic.

?And there were some surprises for him.

He clearly was able to see his CW Architect present in his interactions with his coaches.? He noticed that he operated in this way because he began to see his CW at play within his coaches.? He was able to see this as object in another and then see it also in himself. They were often modeling him!

Most dramatically he saw his NW Empowering Captain take a confident leadership role in a recent meeting with his coaches.? It was interesting how he emphatically said when asked who led that meeting:? Oh, the Captain most definitely!?

Andy was able to handle a difficult discussion of what was ahead for all of them in the coming year by stating Who he is, Why he does what he does, and Who he is tethered to in service of his athletic program.

This “showing/revealing of himself” was what engaged his coaches into his vision.? This was absolutely The Captain inspiring them and leading them.

Andy is doing well.? It took a new way for him to see and relate to his topic.

My work with Andy took place over the course of 5 months with sessions every 2 weeks.

He lacked the skillset to develop in this topic. To go from his Current Way to his New Way.

We designed practices and reflections to help him gain insights - which is critical in this method. The insights come from the active practices and the reflections.

And so does the building of new capacities - new muscles.

We had deep coaching conversations every 2 weeks to explore his insights and growth.

For most of us, our way of thinking about change is that, well, you build a good plan that has a set of really good actions that make sense, and if you could carry out those actions, you get the results you want.

Actually, that works many a time. And so it has a place.

But where it doesn't work is when you're actually finding that no matter how hard you try, how intentional you are, or how motivated you are, somehow or another, either you can't get yourself to carry out all those actions, or you do, but you can't maintain it.

I describe these kinds of changes as ones where you can't seem to get from here to there. There's something that's being asked for in this change that goes beyond what I call the normal range of what exists in your way of being.

And so this is the change that I'm talking about.

And why is it that it's so challenging??

Well, it turns out each of us has a unique way of being that shapes and colors our focus, how we see and relate to a given moment,

It defines what we expect. It defines the conclusions we make, and it totally guides what actions we take and how we check to know how things are going.

All of this is sourced by a set of embodied beliefs and assumptions that we've built through experience, over time.

We don't really notice all of these. They're embodied. And by embodied I mean they're unconscious to us, and yet they're present. If not we would be paralyzed and not able to act.

And they define how we pay attention, how we see and relate to things, how we make sense of things, and what we do and don't do.

And they have served us well in many instances.

And so this way of being is at play in a situation where we're trying to bring about change.

And it's worked for us great up to now, as you've probably experienced already.? To a degree.

It's just that when we're trying to actually bring about a change that's hitting the edges of this way of being, then by its very nature, the way of being is going to keep things intact and keep things within the confines of this focus, of this view, this way of making sense of things.

This is how Integral Coaching differentiates itself from other methodologies.

It is intensive yet elegant.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Please reach out to me to discuss your ideas of what you would like to work with in your unique topic.

?~ Sheila

?[email protected]