How I found my way to coaching
This blog was originally published as a LinkedIn article in May 2023.
Back in May of 2023, I finally decided to offer one-on-one coaching sessions. For real this time. When I founded Quire, our goal was to help our clients bring people into their decision making process through design research and strategy. So often the people we serve through our products and services are an afterthought. Especially in the early stages, we overemphasize our own perspectives and struggle to understand the (very different!) worlds our customers, clients and students inhabit. I thought this understanding would come to our clients by running research projects and sharing the insights through workshops. Coaching was never part of the plan.
Surprisingly, I really enjoyed and found value in coaching through Create Consults with Create Birmingham and Team Up with the Birmingham Business Alliance. Initially I saw myself coaching from the perspective of a fellow entrepreneur, sharing the lessons I had learned along the way - the same way others had shared their wisdom with me. Each session helped me understand that leaders were asking for more time. They wanted a safe space to figure out how to develop their business into its best next version. Our early stages are overwhelmed with doing. Finding a space to plan feels both necessary and impossible. Companies struggle to implement research insights because they aren’t set up to process organizational change.
Advice, insights, recommendations and all the other “shoulds” - however well meaning - felt like being “shoulded” on to death.
When I started working with my own coach via Zoom I realized it can be done in a way that’s helpful. We start with a self-directed check in where I talk through what’s working and what’s not. Through her questions, she helps me uncover the roadblocks and figure out whether they can be moved and how I might move them. She offers suggestions with the understanding that I know my context and will evaluate with my team whether something would work for us. Each session, directly or tangentially, moves me toward my ultimate project goal.
But back to you and me. What is coaching with me like? We’ll take time to figure out what you want to work toward and how our conversations can help you get there. We’ve helped clients think through understanding their customers and building their audience, developing new processes and systems, navigating work relationships, developing their culture and a host of other topics.
Our coaching is still research and strategy centered. We believe in learning, applying our learnings through an experiment and improving our work from our findings. We believe that people are the heart of any organization, and its growth. When we invest in leaders, we give new ideas the best chance to flourish.