🌟 Last call to enroll in the fall cohort of Developing a Coaching Approach to Leadership! Registration closes on Wed, Aug 7. You know you want to join us!

Last Friday, I met with some of the participants in the first cohort of Developing a Coaching Approach to Leadership to see how things are going. In that conversation, we discussed a coaching exercise that had also come up in our final meeting of the program.

One of the participants had used the exercise in a meeting with their team, and it made a HUGE difference in helping the team deal with the overwhelming uncertainty and anxiety that often comes with a major renovation project.

Feedback after the meeting included:

⭐️ “Thinking about what we can control is helpful to assist us in feeling less helpless”
⭐️ “was feeling super neg, now seeing potential”
⭐️ “I like that it turned into brainstorming”
⭐️ “This is my favorite thing that we’ve ever done”

So what is this exercise?

It’s an exercise that a lot of coaches use, called “Spheres of Influence” or some variation on that.

Essentially, it challenges you to categorize things into one of three concentric circles:

1. Inner circle: things that you can actually control
2. Middle circle: things that you have some influence over, but not full control
3. Largest circle or just the rest of the page: things that you have no control over

When facing a big scary change like an upcoming renovation or reorganization, things in the “Everything else” category tend to loom really large. People who may not even know your name are making decisions that are going to affect your work environment for years to come. It’s easy to worry about what they could do, and difficult to feel like you have any influence over anything.

This exercise helps to shift that focus back into those inner circles of influence and control.

As you might imagine at this point, this person reported that when they used this exercise with their team, the outer ring filled up first with all of the things that feel completely out of their control – for example, will those who are making the decisions even listen to any of their concerns?

The leader had shared the exercise and instructions in advance to prepare the team. But, despite time to think about it on their own, team members arrived reporting feeling like they have no influence at all.

In the meeting, they discussed the outer ring, then spent some time brainstorming what could go in the middle “sphere of influence.”

And then shifted to brainstorming that inner “sphere of control”.

By the end of the meeting, the number of ideas in that inner circle far outnumbered the list of things that are out of their control.

And that’s what led to the feedback from team members that I shared above.

The purpose of this exercise is to help shift focus from those looming things that we can’t control to the things that we can actually control, even if that’s only how we respond.

In this case, they came up with a lot of ideas for how to engage students outside of the library through a disruptive renovation, ways to proactively communicate about the changes and what is still accessible during the renovation, and changes they can make for their own wellbeing, like taking breaks and going for walks around campus more often.

This meeting happened months ago, shortly after our final cohort meeting.

The best part of this story, to me, was a surprising thing that happened recently.

Along with all of the other major changes, this library just got a new website that everyone in the library hates.

(Honestly, this part gave me flashbacks to a website redesign my old library went through, in which the university’s “communications & marketing” department pretty much ignored all of the input from library staff to create a site that looked pretty for marketing but was completely inefficient for anything we actually needed it to do. But I digress! 😂)

In a department meeting, everyone was venting their frustration for a bit.

And then, one of the members who has a history of being highly resistant to change, spoke up.

They shared that they’ve decided to just block off a couple of hours to explore this new website – learn how to navigate the mess and figure out any workarounds for the bad design that they can find.

The big website change is completely out of their control, but this is one thing that is within their control to do to help them move forward.

Of course this is correlation and conjecture, but I can’t help but wonder how much using that one coaching exercise in a department meeting months ago helped this person shift their focus to identify this small way to regain some control over their own response, so that they can move forward in a productive way.

Some results of coaching show up right away, but it takes time to see the full effects of using a coaching approach to leadership.

If you decide to try this exercise with your own team, please let me know how it goes! I love hearing about how you’re putting any of the ideas I discuss here into practice with your teams!

As an added bonus for those who do enroll in Developing a Coaching Approach to Leadership, I’ve started trying out building a community for alumni of the program to check in on how it’s going and create ongoing peer support for keeping up with these new habits. Right now, we’re trying monthly Zoom meetings, plus a dedicated space in moodle for asynchronous discussions. I’m not making any promises for the future just yet, but this is one of a few new ideas I’m trying out this year!

It’s not too late to sign up for the fall cohort – you have until Aug 7 to enroll!