Leadership has a big effect on an organization’s ability to thrive. Yet very few companies feel their leadership bench is strong, and they feel challenged in their ability to develop it. Executive coaching is an important tool for growing leaders and has been shown to improve results for both leaders and their organizations. Coaching typically uses goals as a way for the coach and leader to focus their attention and gauge progress, and today’s extreme uncertainty and change calls for new ways to use goals in coaching relationships.
I was intrigued by my clients’ frequent reluctance to commit to goals, and decided to study this in more depth for my Masters work in Organization Development. The purpose of my study on Evolving Learning Goals is to explore how a more fluid coaching approach can help leaders grow in volatile, rapidly changing environments. The model is evolving learning goal coaching where “evolving” refers to the idea that the goal itself should change over time, and “learning goal” refers to goals where the aim is to learn something new rather than meet a fixed target. This study explores a coaching approach using evolving learning goals, seeking to understand how this can help leaders to reach their goals and grow personally during times of great uncertainty and change.
The coaching research is complete and I’ll be presenting the findings at the ICF Converge 2021 virtual conference on October 27th. Stay tuned!