Leadership Coaching Tip

Leadership Coaching Tips / July 2005

When working developmentally with an executive and one goal is to develop capabilities for working with change, innovation, ambiguity and surprise, this will involve attention to leadership. Try scenarios. The executive can participate fully in designing the scenario. For example, scenario questions might be, how would s/he respond if a competitor became more aggressive, if there were a significant change in the market, or if the company bought another business? Capture the executive’s response with text, on tape or video. Review this from the point of view of lines of development, behavior, culture and systems. Take the review to the next level by examining worldviews, values, alternative beliefs and their implications for generating alternative responses and playing out their implications. A key question that will surface different levels of development would be, “How does leadership show up in this scenario and where does it come from?”