Find answers here to the most common questions about emotional intelligence, leadership, and performance coaching with me.
Business coaching is a process of self-reflection about important questions like: What do you want to achieve? What is holding you back? Instead of giving advice, I ask questions to help you become aware of patterns, question assumptions, learn from experience, and make better decisions at work. I work with you to develop best practices for leadership and build business relationships that will improve your outcomes. Drawing on my years of leadership experience, I help you identify common business mistakes before you make them.
Like therapy and consulting, coaching is a way to improve your knowledge and outcomes. All three methods share some similarities and have some important differences.
Coaching is not therapy: Therapy looks backward to connect emotions and behaviors to events, situations, and relationships that caused pain or unhealthy attitudes that interfere with a happy, healthy and productive life. By contrast, coaching looks forward. In our coaching conversations, you may become aware of thoughts or behavior patterns that are not serving you well. Where a therapist might explore the past further, as a coach I will ask you what you learned from your past that will help you move forward more effectively. We’ll explore options for thinking and responding that open up new possibilities for success.
Coaching is not consulting: When you hire a consultant, their job is to give you their expert opinion of what you should do. They give recommendations or advice. As a coach, I assume that you are the expert in your life. My job is not to advise you but to help you explore what is going on, make you more aware of how your thoughts and behaviors affect others, and be a thought partner as you find new ways to move forward more effectively. Like a consultant, I have expertise that I can share. I have deep experience with entrepreneurship, leadership, and high performing teams. Rather than advise you on how to apply knowledge, I’ll give you access to information, proven methods, and tools. You can decide what knowledge is relevant to you and what works best to help you move forward.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware of your own and other people’s feelings and to use emotional information strategically to make better decisions and influence better outcomes. Our emotions are an innate system to respond to threats and seek safety. Emotions operate largely outside of conscious thought. When people feel threatened, they instinctively respond with a flight, flight, or freeze response, which in a workplace can manifest as undermining, blaming, absenteeism, etc. People with emotional intelligence raise the emotional component of people’s words and actions into consciousness to understand and respond to people better. Leaders with high emotional intelligence bring safety to those around them. Even subtle threats in a workplace are a significant distraction from working toward goals, which is why emotional intelligence helps create the conditions for higher performance. Learn more here.
I use the EQi-2.0 for emotional intelligence assessment. It gives people a way to think about skills that are often difficult to talk about like assertiveness, empathy, flexibility, and impulse control. In coaching conversations, we use daily interactions as the basis for exploring issues, opportunities, and options, and committing to a plan of action. On average, my clients gain 12% in emotional intelligence in 6 months, leading to promotions and better relationships.
Performance is defined differently at every organization. You, as the client, must define the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) or metrics that are most important to you. It’s my job to help you reach them.
Effective leaders motivate individuals and inspire collaboration across teams to achieve the most ambitious goals, solve the most difficult problems, and adapt to the fastest rates of change. As a leadership coach and corporate trainer, I develop leaders who create the conditions for high performance.
Those conditions primarily involve developing real trust up and down the organization and a dedication to listening and supporting employees in ways that motivate them to put their best efforts toward reaching your metrics. These skills are in the realm of emotional intelligence.
In one-on-one coaching and group presentations, I help individuals and teams develop the emotional intelligence skills that are essential to effective leadership, and the courage to live their values in ways that inspire others to reach higher and try harder.
Most leaders are highly skilled in the technical aspects of their job, but they often lack the people skills needed to be effective. In frustration, they often become more demanding. As a result, morale drops and results decline as workers disengage. Productivity falls and office conflict rises.
Read the research here.
- Gallup studies show that command-and-control leaders actually have a negative impact on team performance. Here are some key quotes from their research:
- “The Problem With Traditional Command-and-Control Performance Management: It Never Worked.”
- According to Gallup research, only about 2 in 10 employees strongly agreed that their performance was managed in a way that motivated them to do outstanding work.
- According to a famous meta-analysis spanning 90 years of research, more than one-third of feedback interventions result in worse performance.
- A Leader’s True Threat: Losing the Trust of Your Best People
I offer one-on-one coaching and corporate training for the key emotional intelligence skills that predict leadership success. My clients gain an average of 12% in emotional intelligence in six months, which is the difference between average and leadership-quality emotional intelligence. As clients learn to become high performing, effective leaders, the results of whole teams and organizations rise in response.
See more about how leadership styles affect performance here.
One-on-one coaching is particularly useful for:
High performers making the transition to leading high performing teams. Learning how to get work done through others, rather than doing work yourself, is a difficult transition.
People at any level who want to build the leadership skills that promote high performance. Leaders who use inspiration, consensus, and empathy get better results than leaders who use authority or directives.
My coaching process uses every-day experiences as the basis for learning. Through a process of inquiry and self-reflection, I help clients discover their own pathway to increased confidence, higher emotional intelligence, and advanced leadership skills. As the coach, I act as a guide. I offer research and best practices about what is working for other people in similar situations. Clients control their own focus and pace of learning. In our conversations, I help clients see patterns, question assumptions, envision new options, and see new solutions to every-day problems. As clients try new tools and techniques, they learn what works best for them, build confidence, and get better results. On average, my clients are promoted or up for promotion within 6 months.
For most of my clients, I recommend one session every 2 weeks. For budgetary reasons, you may want to cap sessions at 2 per month. If you are urgently in need of skills, feel free to request weekly sessions.
On average, my clients see a 12% increase in emotional intelligence in six months and are being promoted or up for promotion by that time. Studies have found that coaching results in returns of seven times more than the cost of coaching. Some of my clients have doubled their salaries after working with me.
I work on a basis of trust with my clients, so there is no contract for one-on-one coaching. I simply send you an invoice at the end of the month for sessions completed that month. How often and how long you want to work with me is up to you. You can stop coaching at any time.
If you want to team coaching for several team members, I may request a contract for team coaching to clarify goals, expectations, and deliverables.
As a certified coach, I am bound to keep all information disclosed to me in coaching sessions strictly confidential, unless the client gives me specific permission to release the information or if I am required by law to release it. I am prohibited from disclosing conversations even to sponsors who are paying for the coaching. The client is free and even strongly encouraged to discuss our conversations with others.
If you are sponsoring (i.e., paying for) an engagement for others, you have a right to specify goals and define measures of success. It is the client’s responsibility to decide how to approach goals and demonstrate progress.
Regardless of who is paying, the client agrees to be honest with themself and me, and to accept responsibility for both their actions and their decisions.
The best way to learn more is to book a time for a quick chat. You can book a 15-minute conversation here.
Or feel free to contact me directly on email: Lisa@lisadfostercoach.com.