Lir Cowman

A 150-person company was recently acquired by venture capitalists who required them to change from a traditional, hierarchical, siloed, risk-averse approach to an Agile, experimental, collaborative environment.
Part of my work as a consultant was working out their current processes and tools and introducing new ones, identifying what issues they had that I could help with.

The other part of my work was as a coach. As an Agile coach, I helped teams and individuals understand the new approach and adopt a new mindset. As a team coach, I worked with the leadership team to help them inspect how they worked together. Lastly, as an executive coach, I worked with a range of senior managers to help them in a complex, changing environment where they had lost confidence in their ability to find a good way forward.

The senior manager in a software company was highly skillful but burned himself out by helping with everything. Everyone came to him for advice and help, but this had grown so that his work and priorities were postponed to evenings and weekends.

We worked together to help him inspect his desire to do well by helping others and identify how his unique skills could best benefit the business. After the first session, he practiced saying “no” and discovered that people responded positively. He rapidly developed confidence in putting himself first and prioritizing his work. He improved his ability to delegate and push back, realizing that doing the job for others hindered their growth. A few months after we started working together, he was promoted to VP level; he attributes this partly to the changes he made through coaching.

A highly experienced and skillful CEO was struggling, as her impostor syndrome and drive to perfection meant she was burning herself out with extended hours. She was so stressed that work problems were constantly on her mind, and her physical well-being was suffering.

We worked together on where this feeling came from and what triggered it and found ways for her to recognize when her feelings were disproportionate to the issue. She built up more constructive mental habits, using a realistic approach to inspect the problem and decide what to do about it. We also looked at other practical ways of reducing her stress and taking other pressures away. We also gathered feedback from others for external evidence to disprove her impostor syndrome.

By practicing these new techniques, she started solving problems with instead of focusing on her errors. Through analysis and inspection during coaching, she rapidly regained her life balance and felt better and more confident.