Coaching topics
Here you will find the topics where coaching can help, in four groups. Click a topic to read more.
Career and role
Shaping your career
What does it really take to build a career?
I have watched many careers, supported people on theirs and shaped my own. Two lessons stand out:
A career is like a pair of shoes. Some feel perfect from the first moment. Others never fit, and often you only find out after you have bought them and walked a few miles.
Luck plays its part. The hardest thing is admitting they’re the wrong shoes.
A career is a chain of recurring decisions: Do I have what the next step requires? Do I want to take it now? Will the right opportunity come to me, or do I need to create it?
In short: What do I really want (now)?
Specialist or management track
You have been offered a management position, but you’re not sure whether you would rather stay a specialist?
Expert or manager? Most people face this question sooner or later. It’s not easy to answer, and I have often seen a hasty decision turn out to be the wrong one.
Coaching helps you find out what drives you and what a career really means to you.
Growth is often confused with promotion, and in many companies promotion means management, because there is no career path for experts. That is exactly when it pays to be clear about your own interests and motivation.
Your first leadership role
You have just taken on your first leadership role and are looking for your own style?
Your first (real) leadership role is a special one. You need to work out how to delegate responsibility and still stay on top of things.
Often you suddenly lead former colleagues, and the very things that made you successful as an expert can now get in your way.
In coaching, we work out which leadership style suits you, rather than copying someone else’s. That way you grow confident in your new role, and your team sees that you know what you stand for.
Starting a business
You have a great product idea. Should you start a company?
A good idea is a powerful driving force. Whether it should become a company is another question. For the business plan, funding and legal structure, there is good support out there, for example from chambers of commerce, start-up centres or specialised start-up coaching. But the most important resource of a young company is you.
As head of engineering I watched many university spin-offs, and as a member of a start-up’s supervisory board I also got to know the founders’ side. Having your own company offers great opportunities and a lot of freedom. But it also means responsibility, uncertainty and a new role: from expert to entrepreneur.
Psychodynamic coaching helps you understand your strengths and weaknesses and, above all, your motives. What drives you? What are you looking for in being your own boss, and what are you leaving behind for it? If you know your motives, you make clearer decisions and are better able to get through the hard times. Sometimes the best answer is: go for it. And sometimes it is: not yet.
Pressure and working together
Stress and overload
You love your job, but it’s getting too much?
Growth means leaving your comfort zone, dropping old habits and learning new ones. That’s tiring, but also rewarding. And when it becomes too much?
There is no standard answer. First, accept that it happens to everyone: if you have never been overstretched, you have never truly pushed yourself.
Coaching helps you see more clearly, shift your perspective and regain room to act. And sometimes it helps you accept that this step was simply too big.
Conflict
Similar conflicts keep coming up, even though you have just resolved the last one?
Recurring conflicts are part of working life. They cost energy, time and often trust. And they have a peculiar habit: they seem settled, and at the next opportunity they return in a new form.
Often the cause is not the issue itself. The people involved see the same situation through different eyes and judge it against different backgrounds: where they come from, their training, their experience, their role in the organisation. What seems obvious to one person crosses a line for another. As long as this stays unspoken, everyone argues about the outcome, but never about the lens through which they see it.
Coaching can help make these lenses visible:
- How do the people involved see the situation?
- What experiences and expectations lie behind their view?
- What part do you yourself play in the pattern repeating?
In individual coaching we look at your role in the conflict; in team coaching we look at the pattern together with everyone involved. Often, understanding the other view is enough to turn an ongoing conflict into a practical question that can be solved.
Committees and boards
Active in politics, associations or standards bodies, but struggling to win support for your ideas?
Committee work takes patience above all: understanding what others want, sensing the mood in the room and finding solutions that balance everyone’s interests as fairly as possible.
Coaching won’t do that for you. But it can sharpen your awareness of the dynamics at play and help you get clear about what you want and how your strengths can get you there.
Projects and ways of working
Project management
Working on international projects, or leading them?
I have led projects myself and introduced project management to a traditional mid-sized company. I saw a matrix organisation unsettle the old balance of power.
I also saw success win people over: opponents became allies, and fighting each other became fighting together for a shared goal.
Who is on the team, and how the team grows together, matters – across the organisation and in every single project.
Agile (Scrum)
Told that you and your team need to “become agile”?
Agile began as project management adapted for fast-moving software development. After the hype, it has become part of everyday work, and many of its principles and methods are now used to real effect.
But applied seriously, it unsettles existing structures just as project management does. Individuals and teams gain power and have to learn to use it. Often there is also an unspoken hope that it will deliver a better product and fix deep-rooted problems at the same time – quickly.
The good news: it’s hard, but achievable, especially if expectations are managed well.
Capacity to innovate
You think there could be more innovation in your area of responsibility?
I have often seen companies try to create a climate of innovation through the workspace. Free coffee, table football and lounge corners are popular choices. In the end, the free coffee is what lasts; the table football and the lounges go unused.
The second route is creativity workshops. But here, too, the ideas are often forgotten once daily business takes over again.
Real capacity to innovate isn’t about crazy ideas. It is about a team that trusts it can voice even odd-sounding ideas without being laughed at. About a climate in which such ideas can be discussed openly, developed together and turned into real innovation. About trusting that the credit will be shared fairly in the end.
And all of this has to work while the business keeps running, when fast, concrete solutions are needed.
I built a team like that as head of engineering. It doesn’t happen overnight. But we can work on it together.
Change in organisations
Change management and organisational development
A consulting firm has been brought in to change things, and you’re right in the middle of it?
Consultants can be a real help in times of change. Yet their frameworks often feel as if they were made for a different company. Experience shows it pays to understand the situation in depth.
Coaching can help you explore:
- How did we get here?
- What is the consultants’ official task – and what might be the unofficial one?
- How can the organisation, its culture and you yourself contribute to the best outcome?
- What is worth keeping, without clinging to things just because they are familiar?
- And how do you bring others with you?
Artificial intelligence
Everyone is talking about AI, but what does it actually mean for you and your team?
Artificial intelligence opens up many possibilities – AI helped with this text, too. But what we read in the media raises high (often inflated) expectations and fuels uncertainty. The world of work will change, roles will shift and teams will be put together in new ways. But above all, this change is one thing: an opportunity.
Where the opportunity lies for you rarely becomes clear on its own. Coaching can help you see your opportunities: What defines your work once routine tasks disappear? Which of your strengths will matter more?
As a leader, you also need to bring your team along. Support can help you address concerns openly, redistribute tasks and re-form the team.
Mergers and acquisitions
Your company has been bought or sold, has acquired another business or sold off part of its own?
In uncertain times companies reshape themselves: they add promising product lines, sell unprofitable ones and buy competitors. Very different cultures and ways of working suddenly have to coexist. Small, agile firms are absorbed into large groups; parts of large groups are spun off and must compete with lean mid-sized rivals.
For the people involved, change becomes permanent. Teams are formed, split and merged. Coaching for you as a leader, or support for your team through the transition, makes cultural differences visible, builds understanding and helps everyone reach structures that work – and last – sooner.
Globalisation
Work is moving abroad and teams are becoming international: what does that mean for you?
Our high standard of living comes at a price: work in Western Europe is expensive, so some of it moves to other parts of the world. At the same time, a volatile, globalised world creates a great deal of uncertainty, because it asks all of us to adapt quickly and decisively.
As a result, everyone’s working environment is constantly changing. Responsibilities keep being reshuffled, and teams are increasingly international. Organisational structures become global and therefore more complex, the formal ones as much as the informal ones.
Your colleagues no longer play football for the same local club on a Sunday; they play cricket in Chennai.
The upside: constant change brings constant new opportunities. If you know yourself, you can weigh up change, often turn it to your advantage, and in the end even welcome it. Cricket is a great sport.