Aha! Leadership Moments / Leadership / Values and Beliefs

Darren’s Story – An Aha! Leadership Moment about Authenticity

My friend, a professional hockey player, was driving us to a sporting event. At a certain point along the way, my friend spotted someone on the street – someone with all the appearance of a homeless vagrant.  My friend’s reaction surprised me. He carefully maneuvered through two lanes of traffic to pull to the curb, get out of the vehicle and connect with this person. Not…

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November 28, 2016
Aha! Leadership Moments / Leadership / Leadership Skills

How do you know it’s an Aha! Leadership Moment?

How do you actually know when you’ve had an Aha! Leadership Moment? For me it was walking away, shaking my head in awe at what just happened.  I was a recently-hired young supervisor in an information technology department, responsible for a team of ten programmers working on systems that automated a cereal plant.  For the life of me, I can’t remember the details of the problem…

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October 4, 2016
Values and Beliefs

Girls should be…

Girls should be seen and not heard?  You’ve got to be kidding.  Such a sentiment today seems ludicrous but as you will see in Darlene’s story, in 1950 it was a real belief system with insidious and strangling tentacles. Darlene was always excited when her Aunt Betty was coming for a visit. Aunt Betty was her favourite aunt who played games with Darlene and her siblings,…

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September 1, 2016
Learner Mindset

Which Mindset Do You Value in a Leader?

I have found myself drawn to watching the American political conventions with curiosity and fascination.   Normally I would have flipped past the channel but now I find myself listening intently to the messages behind the words.  As a Leadership Coach, who believes passionately in the importance of leadership reflection, personal development and a Learner mindset, I cannot help but observe the diametrically opposed underlying mindsets of…

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August 4, 2016
Feedback / Trust Environment

Elizabeth’s Story: The Heart of Feedback

Re-Framing the Heart of Feedback Can you think of a time when your self-esteem smarted from negative feedback or maybe from well-intentioned but hurtful feedback? Given an option, most of us would likely skip the experience altogether. As a leader, we sometimes put off giving feedback, for fear of doing it wrong. The result often means no feedback at all, and in the pain-filled words of…

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March 19, 2016
Feedback / Trust Environment

Introducing Life Lessons from the Coaching Lens

In this series of postings, the Coaching Lens team would like to share some learning gained in our lifelong journey as coaches. Life lessons are best heard when told as stories and we hope you'll enjoy both the tales that we tell and what we can unpack from them. Seeing the world through a "coaching lens" helps raise our awareness of who we are and who we…

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February 15, 2016