• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Michele Woodward

Powerful Coaching. Powerful Results.

  • Home
  • Coaching
    • Individuals
    • Executive Services
    • Groups
  • Resources
  • Books
  • Blog
  • About
    • Media Mentions
    • Speaking
    • Testimonials
  • Contact

Harvard Business blogs

Challenge Assumptions

March 17, 2013 By Michele Woodward 3 Comments

 

Grocery shopping cart“So, Michele, it must be nice to be paid to tell people what to do,” says the friend I ran into at the grocery store. I noted the raised eyebrows and head shake, and sensed that he was…amused at my livelihood. “Well, the sad news is that I don’t get to boss anyone – not even my kids, it seems, unless I’m holding their car keys and my wallet. Coaching is more about guiding a client to find the right answers for them.”

As I rolled on down the aisle, I was sort of wincing, wishing I had thrown out a better comeback. C’mon, Michele – What is executive coaching and why does it matter?

Thankfully, the folks at Harvard Business blogs posted something this week that really helped. In Before Working with a Coach, Challenge Your Self-Assumptions, author John Boldoni says to those  thinking about getting a coach:

“Effective coaching is often a matter of challenging assumptions, and the biggest assumptions often reside in the mind of the person being coached.”

Yes! That’s it! I help people challenge their assumptions so they can get extremely clear. And working from that clarity, take the steps necessary to get the results they need.

[Now I am fully prepared for the produce aisle, thankyouverymuch.]

Case in point: my client Joe. Now, of course his name isn’t Joe, but we’ll call him that to preserve his confidentiality. Joe came to me a couple of years ago to reinvigorate his career. See, after a divorce he’d made a decision to throttle back a little on the career front so he could be a custodial parent. Once one kid was in college and the others nearly finished with high school, he decided to throttle his career back up. He wanted to get promoted, use his leadership skills more and do something more meaningful.

But he had a few assumptions about what was really possible, all tied up in confidence, self-esteem, and comfort with risk-taking – key elements required for effectively putting himself back in the mix. We had to tackle those assumptions and plenty of others as they came up before we could construct the plan that he would execute. And day by day, over about eighteen months, Joe executed on the plan.

And just this week, he said to me, “Michele, this coaching thing has really paid off. I wasn’t so sure there for a bit, but everything we’ve covered has put me where I am.” And the place he’s in is this – the candidate for a new big position internally and being recruited for a big position externally.

A few weeks ago, I sat down and crunched some numbers about my executive coaching practice. Who are my clients, and why do they come to me? How do they come to me? Anyone who’s in business for themselves can benefit from this sort of analysis. I learned:

Since January 1st, I have coached 10 men and 21 women in one-on-one, hour-long sessions. This excludes the laser coaching I do in The Club program, which has 44 members.

Of those 31 individuals, nine were senior executives, and seven were lawyers. Six were senior-level job seekers. Five owned their own businesses. Three were mid-level professionals and one was a coach. The bulk of them came to me by referral from past clients or professional colleagues.

With the exception of the job seekers, everyone wanted pretty much the same thing – “how can I be better at my job? How can I lead better? Communicate better? Manage crisis better? Create a strategy? Build?”

And every single client needed to challenge assumptions. Like the assumption that they are too old. Or too young. Or that the gap on their resume is too large. Or that Charlie won’t change. Or that Charlotte is their mortal enemy. That their lack of a specific degree is a deal-breaker.

That this isn’t the path I thought I’d be taking at this point in my life.

Oh, man, I love my work. I truly do. Because all day long, I’m challenging assumptions. All day long, I’m helping people find a new way.

Each day, with every session that concludes, I see minds opening and possibilities born.

I gotta tell you – it’s so much more fulfilling than bossing.

 

Filed Under: Blog, Career Coaching, Clarity, Uncategorized, WiseWork Tagged With: assumptions, executive coaching, getting a new job, getting promoted, Harvard Business blogs, limiting beliefs

Curiosity Gets The Job

February 3, 2013 By Michele Woodward 3 Comments

 

A few weeks ago, I was a guest on a radio show hosted by the fantastic Koren Motekaitis. Our topic was “Jobs Over 50” – the conventional wisdom being that in “this economy” it’s doubly difficult for people over age 50 to land decent jobs. Of course, I never met a conventional wisdom I couldn’t refute, so I outlined tactics, mindsets and approaches to help anyone find a good situation. You can hear the interview here.

Then, this week, New York Times writer Tom Friedman wrote an interesting column about where employment is headed, titled: “It’s P.Q. and C.Q. as Much as I.Q.”

Friedman’s thesis is that the modern world’s easy hyperconnectivity has radically changed the way we work, and we all must understand this “Great Inflection”  to be prepared for what’s coming next.

In short, you’ve got to talk about what you are able to do today and tomorrow, rather than solely rely on what you’ve done in the past.

For example, the marketing degree you got back in the 1980s? Practically irrelevant today, given the explosion of new media, hyper-personalization and micro segmentation. Lead your pitch for a new job or a promotion with that educational credential? Dinosaur alert. Lead with your recent social media campaign success? You’re in the mix.

In his piece, Friedman says, “That means the old average is over. Everyone who wants a job now must demonstrate how they can add value better than the new alternatives.”

Today, regardless of your age, you must stay current – especially because things are happening so fast. In essence, every 40+ person who says, “I just don’t get Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Foursquare/Vine/YouTube/email”, is effectively saying that they’d prefer to sit around with Lord Grantham and shoot grouse.

To grow in your career, or to re-enter the work force – or even to have your own business – if you’re an older person, it’s vital that you get across that you not only have a wealth of experience, tempering and seasoning but are also fully current with all of today’s tactics and approaches.

This means:

  • Take classes. In-person, online, formal, informal. Get a tutor to teach you one-on-one. Check out the robust free classes at Coursera, and iTunes U.
  • Read. Sometimes it astonishes me that people don’t read trade coverage of their industry. How can you suss out where things are heading? How can you help but be blindsided by a new innovation? So spend 10 minutes a day staying abreast of your field, and develop your own expertise – hey, you can make it easy on yourself – subscribe to SmartBrief for your field and get a handy news summary in your in-box every day. And follow key bloggers in your field. When you are up-to-speed and connected, you have a huge asset. Expertise, synthesis of information and the ability to say “what this means” can never be outsourced to computer code, people.
  • Expand your comfort zone. Yes, you may have gotten used to doing things a certain way. And those ways worked in the past and got you where you are. I totally get it. [I, too, remember carbon paper. But modern work requires less and less paper, and you don’t have to have blue fingers to be successful.] Appreciate the past for having been the past – but welcome the fun and growth in the learning that’s yet to come. This may mean you have meetings by Skype, or conduct business by text, or maybe work in a virtual team that’s very flat. It may not be what you know, but you can learn to make it work.

Friedman says: “How to adapt? It will require more individual initiative. We know that it will be vital to have more of the ‘right’ education than less, that you will need to develop skills that are complementary to technology rather than ones that can be easily replaced by it and that we need everyone to be innovating new products and services to employ the people who are being liberated from routine work by automation and software. The winners won’t just be those with more I.Q. It will also be those with more P.Q. (passion quotient) and C.Q. (curiosity quotient) to leverage all the new digital tools to not just find a job, but to invent one or reinvent one, and to not just learn but to relearn for a lifetime.”

Dig in to tradition, then, at your own risk. Hold on to the past at your own peril.

Instead, challenge yourself to be curious, to learn, to grow. Bring something valuable to the table, every day.

And you will see your career flourish and grow until you are ready for a change, on your own terms.

 

Filed Under: Blog, Books, Career Coaching, Clarity, Managing Change, Uncategorized, WiseWork Tagged With: Abundance, career trends, getting organized, Harvard Business blogs, Jobs over 50, Koren Motekaitis, learning, Thomas Friedman

Footer

Subscribe

Recent Posts

  • It’s a Time Warp
  • Making a Plan – When Making a Plan Feels Really Hard
  • A Pandemic Is Not A Snowstorm
  • Nothing Slips Through The Cracks
  • Becoming UnBusy

Looking For Something?

Contact

Phone: 703/598-3100
Email: michele@michelewoodward.com
FB: /michele.woodward
LI: /in/michelewoodward
 

  • Download the 2020 Personal Planning Tool

Copyright © 2021 Michele Woodward Consulting · All Rights Reserved.