Client Story:
The Client Situation:
A client for whom DRI Consulting provided coaching held a professional degree and an excellent position in the Public Service. Since graduating from a well-respected university, she had enjoyed a series of prestigious and rewarding jobs. But, with each promotion came increased managerial responsibility, and she did not feel competent managing, instead preferring to deal with substantive issues directly related to her profession. Her current boss had no time to coach her in the finer points of management and their relationship was polite but distant. With her staff, she enjoyed debating technical points and immersing herself in policies and issues but she avoided the human resource aspect of her role and relationships were fraying as a result. Her focus and passion were technical content and her interpersonal relationships echoed those she had with her boss.
The Solution:
A principal goal of the coaching was to help her find the professional stimulation and validation she sought while better balancing the aspects of managing people which she found so challenging. Because one of the coaching goals was to focus on processes and behaviors that would meet her need for doing substantive work while improving her managerial skills, the client completed some of our standard inventory tools (i.e., California Psychological Inventory and FIRO-B). Also, the client, her direct reports, her supervisors, and peers completed a 360-degree survey. This enabled her to set out markers that she could use when searching out new opportunities for herself within the organization. With our guidance, she established benchmarks and criteria for her professional development. This gave her increased confidence in practicing new skills and engaging in new experiences as she continued to receive feedback from others. Many of our initial practices were linked to developing her self-awareness in new ways. She listed positive and negative attributes about herself and set out to find data to support each of them by observing herself in action. As a result, she began to try new ways of working and relating to others. Although the assigned exercises and practices provided new insights for the client, none was as powerful as her ability to self-mobilize. She needed space to take action in her life and we helped her to create that. In conversations, for example, she experienced some strong emotions and we worked with her to help her find language to appropriately describe what was going on. We scheduled follow-up meetings, as needed, and wrote up a summary report with her assessment and evaluation results, along with recommendations, for her to reference at her convenience.
The Outcome:
A breakthrough occurred when the client realized that she did not have to be a brilliant expert in a specific domain to be fulfilled in her career. She knew from past experience and positive feedback that she had a gift for public speaking that engaged and mobilized people. She also had the rare ability of transforming complex and arcane language into layperson's terms so that they could understand and work with the material. This was something she cared about deeply and, as she explored her talent for expressing her profession's language to enable public learning, she began to see new career opportunities for herself. She took steps to get into a position that allowed her to exploit these talents and interests. She is making a positive contribution to the learning of others and she is both recognized and appreciated for this.
