In its simplest form, coaching is a partnership based on well-timed questions, open communication, mutual commitment, and learning and personal development.
A great coach serves as a guide to help individuals get in the habit of taking more strategic actions and making better decisions. Marlow coaching focuses on everything from how one performs work to how one aligns a career with values and long-term goals.
As coaches, our goal is to provide you with the tools, guidance and encouragement to find your own path forward.
In coaching, you will rarely receive direct advice. Instead, your coach will guide you through questions to help you understand your assumptions, discover opportunities, and overcome obstacles in order to make progress quickly.
When it comes to taking your career to the next level, there are plenty of topics you can cover with your coach. Enhancing your skills in one area (such as communication) will likely improve your skills in other areas (such as relationship building, project management, or personal brand).
Professional Growth & Direction
Many people partner with their coaches to improve various components of their professional growth strategies. Your coach can help you assess your current situation and proactively identify opportunities for improvement, set goals and stay accountable to those goals enabling you to effectively and strategically manage your performance and professional growth.
Values Alignment: Identify which work-related values make you feel most energized, happy and fulfilled. Then you will develop a strategy to realign your values with your goals and work environment.
Goal Setting: Set clear and actionable goals that leave you feeling motivated. Whether you're setting goals for the day or setting goals for the year, having a direction leads to movement in an intentional direction.
Skill Acquisition: Identify which skills will help you achieve your goals and then prioritize them in a way that aligns with your short-term and long-term needs.
Strategic Decision Making: Assess your current decision-making skills and then utilize feedback from coworkers and managers to enhance these skills.
Overcoming self-induced obstacles: Build confidence and improve self-talk. Plenty of people discuss self-doubt with their coach and explore ways to improve.
Performance Reviews: Prepare and plan for performance reviews to increase the chances of an optimal outcome.
Productivity
Draw awareness to your workstyle and daily routines. There are only so many hours in the day and we need to find optimize for our productive time. Finding ways to become more effective at your job will benefit you personally and professionally. Your coach can help you develop an action plan to find balance in all areas of your career, not just between work and home life but also between routine and creative time. Your coach can also help you think through how to manage and eliminate work-related stress and find your balance between motivating stress and toxic stress. Identify and overcome the challenges that cause or increase non-productive work-related stress.
Form Habits and Routines: Identify when you are most productive and develop a strategy for maximizing your efforts.
Time Management & Focus: Set boundaries, with yourself and others in order to manage your time more effectively and stay focused.
Stay Motivated: Intrinsic motivation stems from autonomy, information and connections. Identify your motivators and learn how to optimize or increase them.
Get Team Buy-In: Determine how to identify stakeholders and gain their support.
Become More Proactive: Identify areas where you can plan ahead to prevent unnecessary obstacles, reduce future workloads and increase successful outcomes.
Manage Conflict: Build communication skills to manage and overcome conflict relating to projects or processes.
Delegate: Prioritize your workload and then delegate or eliminate what you can't (or shouldn't) manage.
Personal Brand
You already have a brand. It’s time to manage it. Your professional brand is your external perception of your experience, skills, capabilities and potential. Partner with your coach to enhance your personal brand within the office and through your wider network.
Consistency of Behavior: Determine how you would like to be perceived and then align your actions accordingly.
Fine-Tune Your Personal Pitch: Learn how to share your story in various settings and in a way that enables you to advocate on your own behalf.
Presence: Identify opportunities for improvement in how you conduct meetings, give presentations, or even lead 1-on-1 meetings.
Increase Credibility: Develop a strategy for enhancing your credibility in an authentic and sustainable way. Actions and communication styles impact how credibly we are perceived by others.
Self-Awareness: Develop a strategy for partnering with those around you so you can become more self-aware and identify your blind-spots.
Accountability: Reliability is critical to a positive personal brand. Partner with your coach to identify a plan for becoming more accountable.
Networking
A strong network is one that helps you gather information and identify your blind-spots. We often think of networks as helping us find a new job, but most often they are used to help us make more strategic decisions in our current roles or recruit hard-to-find talent more efficiently.
Build a Network: Identify interesting individuals in your field or industry. Build and maintain authentic relationships.
Information Gathering: Information flows through networks and can enhance your productivity and make you a more valuable member of the team. Partner with your coach to figure out how to learn from your network.
Resource Leveraging: Determine when and how to use this network more effectively.
Work Relationships: How you get on with your co-workers and manager shapes more than just your personal reputation. People who enjoy working with their team are more likely to stay in a job and more likely to enjoy their work responsibilities. Take the time to get to know your coworkers and understand them. Try to focus on this in good times, as it will pay dividends when times get tough.
Setting Boundaries: Help your coworkers understand how to work most effectively with you by setting clear and professional boundaries.
Communicating Expectations: Misaligned expectations cause challenges in all types of situations. Become skilled at communicating and clarifying expectations early and often.
Collaboration: Identify best practices for partnering with various members of your team or individuals within other departments.
Orientation and Onboarding: Not everyone gets a great onboarding process. Create an action plan for onboarding yourself into an organization.
Communication: Partner with your coach to identify and enhance your current communication strategy in various situations.
Feedback: Shape your work environment by becoming great at giving and receiving feedback.
Prepare for Difficult Conversations: Prepare for crucial conversations that may trigger an emotional response in you or your counterpart.
Enhancing Your Management & Leadership Skills
As a manager, it’s relevant to consider how you can intentionally develop your people management strategy to enable you to motivate your team and communicate effectively about expectations, goals, and feedback. To manage strategically, consider where your unique strengths lie, how you are using your time and what it means to manage a team of individuals.
Situational Leadership & Management: People management and leadership styles, like workstyles, cover a variety of interactions, communication types, and behaviors between managers and direct reports, peers or other stakeholders. Can you identify your style? And navigate between styles for proven results?
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Communication in the Workplace: As a manager, you’re constantly communicating. How you communicate has a direct effect on the people around you. Learn to enhance your communication with your direct reports.
Managing a Team of Individuals: Each individual on your team has their own individual work styles and preferences that stem from our unique personalities, habits, experiences etc. Are you managing individuals as effectively as you manage the team?
Building a Team Culture: Whether you are hiring and building a new team or considering the culture of your current team, it is important to strategically consider your team culture. What culture will help meet your goals?
Delegation, Ownership & Micromanagement: Delegation can benefit both you and your team. If your capacity is running out, it is time to look to delegate more work. While delegating, consider clarity around ownership on your team - is it clear who owns what e.g. specific responsibilities, processes, and projects?
Defining Expectations and Why They Matter: Expectations are our assumptions of actions, behaviors, and performance. How are you communicating your expectations?
Building a Culture of Feedback: Feedback is a cornerstone of professional growth. How do you and your team members discuss positive and constructive feedback?
