Recently one of my Practical Appreciative Inquiry graduates emailed me an interesting question. She is using an appreciative interview format in her research working with maternity staff (doctors, midwives and maternity support workers) who have worked through the Covid crisis…
Sometimes it’s easy to ‘flip’ a problem statement into an affirmative topic. But for some problems, perhaps vaguer or more complex ones, it can seem harder. Here’s a process you can use when none of your attempts at an affirmative…
Objective appraisal is impossible Although feedback is famously “the breakfast of champions”, nobody likes getting negative feedback. Now a new book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World, by management researcher Marcus Buckingham and SVP…
Coaching Works – But What Kind Of Coaching? It’s fairly well established that coaching works. For example, a meta-analysis of studies of workplace coaching in 2015 shows a strong positive effect on individual performance, and smaller but still positive effects on…
A study published in the Harvard Business Review by Leadership professor Julia Milner and management consultant Trenton Milner has revealed that most executives don’t really know what coaching is. It’s worth looking at what experts generally define as coaching. These descriptions…
Why some coaching questions can do more harm than good Coaching, if we follow Sir John Whitmore’s definition that it’s “helping people to learn rather than teaching them”, is about asking questions to help the ‘coachee’ find their own answers and…
If you suffer from ‘impostor syndrome’, or your friends sometimes ask why you don’t have as much self-belief as you should have when you are so good at what you do, this article is for you. Belief in yourself comes…
Even for experienced coaches and therapists, it’s not easy to help a person change when it’s someone close to you, because you’re emotionally involved yourself. If they’re stuck with a belief system that they know is holding them back, but they just…
Note: This article follows on from these others in the series: Questions in Coaching (1): Solution-focused or problem focused? Questions in Coaching (2): Presuppositions Questions in Coaching (3): Open versus closed questions Another important distinction in coaching questions is whether…
Very often in books and articles about goal-setting, one of the questions the author suggests you ask yourself is “What would you have to give up to achieve your goal?” This is a great question, as it reconnects you with…
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