Personal Development and Coaching

I write this post with the premise you are a manager or a person interested in accessing a management position. However, this post applies to all highly skilled professionals acting as technical experts in their field and having a decisive contribution in a team.

Why is this post about personal development, relevant in a blog dedicated to managers?

Personal development, often refrered as personal growth, should always be in your focus, for several reasons:

1. Managers are responsible for developing the people in their team. 

Only if you see and appreciate the value of personal development on yourself, will you be able to offer it or create conditions for it to happen to the people you lead. As a manager, you need to model personal development for your people. Your boss will actually keep you responsible for it, and will keep an eye on both your ability to develop yourself, and how you create an environment of personal development for your team. 

2. People confuse personal development with technical training. 

While remaining current in the labour market in respect of technical skills is absolutely crucial, your personal development goes beyond pure training and acquiring new knowledge. 

3. Personal development targets aspects of your mindset with which you will deploy and apply that technical knowledge. This means it is not about whether you have or not certain technical knowledge or skill, it is rather about you being confident you will be able to apply it successfully and apply results through the people in your team, irrespective of what technical knowledge you actually have.

And about how you deal with obstacles while doing it, about the impact you have over the team you lead in respect of their motivation and productivity, your ability to remain positive, the trust they have in each other, in you and your work together.

I give you several examples that are specific to your management position: 

• you will not be able to grow credibility and trust with other managers unless the others will see in you signs that you systematically keep your promises, deliver as estimated, contribute first before pretending, give your support unconditionally, put aside your own ego at the service the greater good, take care of your team members before them taking care of you, remain accountable for any variance from what you promise and do your (and your team’s) best to correct it, etc  
• you will not be able to make yourself heard unless you transform your listening into your main tool to learn about people around, circumstances and yourself, act according to this learning, and remain open to other people’s opinions or perspectives before applying or drawing any conclusion yourself.  
• you will not be able to gain respect from your people unless you offer it first unconditionally. However to do that you will need to take your ego out of your focus and remain open and active to that dialogue building solutions.  
• you will not be able to delegate unless you believe wholly that the people in your team can do a better job than yourself and trust they have all inner knowledge and resources to be able to handle the tasks at hand satisfactorily.  
• you will not be able to act as part of a team (even when leading it) unless you accept that other team members can have better ideas of which (ideas) you need to openly become a fervent supporter.  
• you will not be able to prioritise correctly unless you learn to draw and respect healthy boundaries for yourself in relation to your team and organisation, AND for your team in interaction with other parts of the organisation.

4. Your management performance is dictated also by the degree of maturity in life, which itself involves personal development. 

Management is always about limited resources and how these are spent. Your focus as a manager needs to always go to areas that support maximum impact towards attaining organisational objectives. 

But where your focus stays is very much related to your own system of priorities, much dependent on your values system, your beliefs, your general assumptions you apply in your life, and your past experiences, mainly the unsuccessful or hurtful ones.

For example if you believe that “success is about hard work, sweat and tears”, there is a high chance you will manage situations and relationships in such a manner that either will have a “life and death” flavour with you introducing many criticiticies where are not needed OR you will create situations where collaboration or teamwork will be indeed “hard work” in respect of: effort to be inputted by anyone (and thus overcost), your highest expectations than necessary leading to over costs to ensure increased levels of quality over what is actually enough, or larger quantities of control than necessary to be sure of the outcome you believe it is expected, etc. No wonder in such an environment people get demotivated or frustrated and start making errors, not to mention about the extra costs, monetary or not, that your environment, including your team, but also your family and friends, will pay.

The good news is that we humans have by design several cycles of maturing. Different age stages bring different challenges in our life and we are naturally inclined to step into working on our personal development in connection to those normal life moments.

5. Personal development is a lifelong process. Because there is no one moment in your life when you can afford to not grow. 

Irrespective where you are in life, you will see, understand and integrate reality in your life in a certain manner dictated by your mindset. Every new shift in awareness, will give you the opportunity to find new meaning for yourself in your life journey. At every new step of awareness, a new perspective will be revealed to you. Your mental map of how you make sense of your own way of being, your relationships, your goals, your meaning in life, shift, expand and gather new nuances that previously were not available to you. From that point onwards you cannot unsee that things are not anymore the same. And you will start feeling differently about those things, you will relate differently to your reality and it will be possible for you to start acting differently, in the new landscape formed by shifted understanding.. 

In a nutshell, you will not be the same.

To allow yourself to grow, you will have to learn to observe and study your own way of thinking, of taking decisions and of acting.

Personal development allows you to master self observation and to integrate new learning about self into the new YOU, a better version of your current self.

But how to observe yourself objectively and be able to conduct this analysis?

Where to look first? What to start with?

Which are the signs you look in the right direction?

How to not remain entangled in your own feelings?

How to do this inner work while focusing outside yourself?

How to measure success on this road?

And once awareness shifted, where to head now?

All these are perfectly valuable questions and everyone going through personal development cycles will ask themselves whether explicitly or tacitly. And sometimes, not finding an answer, it might take a lifetime to find one while living with pressure, uncertainty, dilemmas, regret for lost opportunities or guilt for not having acted in due time.

But what if one does not have a lifetime to spend to find these answers?

Usually, when a manager is appointed in a new or higher management role, they have about 6 months to integrate the transition and prove successful. Thus, managers have limited shots to prove themselves, while the opportunity window is still open (i.e. the first 6 months). Why so) Because in that period everyone would still be cooperative and supportive to you.

This translates in the reality of about 6 month after being appointed when managers - irrespective of the level they are now - need to already have become aware about the mindset shift they need to pursue in order to level up their performance as requested by the new job.

Often, the senior managers of a company know the new appointee will have to go through this shift. And in such occasions, that new manager will receive either an internal coach - be it even their own manager - or an external coach. If that is your case, you need to know that you are fortunate, and having the organisation providing a coach for you is a sign they want you well, and they ensure you the best conditions for a successful exit of this stressful process for you. 

In the companies where senior managers were not formed in a coaching environment, there will unfortunately be an expectation for the newcomer to swim easily in new waters, without formal guidance. Ideally, if you retrieve yourself in such a case, you better find yourself a coach of your choice, and start working intentionally on your own transition.

How will a coaching process bring you benefits in this situation? 

In few words: it will accelerate your personal development, will shift your awareness about what else you need to know and understand, what you need to change, where you need to focus, what would you benefit of if you would see things differently, what habits or behaviours stand in your progress to success, the gap between your perception and your reality.

In other words, will gently push you to ask yourself the right questions, will help you see yourself in an objective perspective and understand where you have to work on yourself, and will keep yourself accountable for remaining true to yourself and your shared objectives of success with the company. Everything in a protected and professionally guided environment, with one clear mandate: your success.

Are you now going though a transition period towrds a new management position? How do you relate with thi post? What is the gap you need to integrate in this process? How well are you supported?

Write me, I am curious on your experience. And I am here to your support. You can anytime book a discovery session to work out with your your transition strategy and plan for your success.