Leadership coaching supports individuals and teams to realize their full potential and achieve personal and professional transformation. The pathway to realizing your potential calls for a broad spectrum of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual resources. Coaching unlocks the leader’s full range of capabilities and enlists the leader’s own creativity and resourcefulness to develop and apply solutions.
The Lead Smart Approach to Coaching
Coaching is based on cura personalis, or care for the whole person, supporting leaders to examine themselves, their beliefs, and their actions. Our approach to executive and leadership coaching combines the integration and application of mindfulness and leadership practices to support vibrant, self-aware, grounded, and compassionate leaders, individuals, teams, and groups. This integral and unique approach to executive coaching is designed to help leaders identify core values, challenges, “shadows,” and strengthens, to deepen self-awareness, self-compassion, emotional intelligence, and understanding, to enhance well being, and to hold leaders accountable for their commitments toward their leadership goals.
How Coaching Works
Coaching is a highly-focused one-to-one structured conversation with individuals or with teams that involves three phases.
Phase 1:
- Contracting & Agreement
- Assessment of Current State
- Strategic Goal Development
- 360, Style, Preference & Strength Assessment
Phase 2:
- Strategic Coaching
- Self-Awareness & Mindfulness Development
- Skill Development through Action
- Review & Accountability
Phase 3:
- Reassessment & Goal Review
- Feedback
- Evaluation
- Assess Results
A typical coaching engagement lasts six to 12 months and can be done in person, by phone, or videoconference. Using evidence-based mindfulness practices, inquiry, powerful questions, active listening, support, and direct communication, we partner with leaders to create new awareness, align values with actions, challenge leaders to question their own stories, uncover blind spots that block possibility, shift stuck patterns of thinking and acting, and help leaders develop an effective action plan to achieve defined goals.
Lead Smart Coaching offers the following coaching services:
- Highly-personalized one-to-one coaching with individuals and teams
- Application & integration of mindfulness practices for personal and professional transformation
- The Leadership Circle 360™
- Coaching & consulting on issues of race, culture, equity, power, privilege, and diversity
Valerie is an extraordinary coach. She helped me improve my communication with staff, reducing internal school conflict and helped me clarify the elements of mission-driven, child-focused education in our school.
—Karmela Sherwood, Executive Director and Head of School, Smith Leadership Academy, Dorchester, MA.