Do you want to use your coaching skills to help people develop and reach their goals? Then you need to know how to give a strong start to your coaching conversations. Since your coaching conversations are confidential, there is no one to observe them and give you feedback. That’s why it’s good to know in […]

Here are the next twelve ideas for you as a first-time manager. Do they all make sense? Probably they all do. But that doesn’t mean they all worth acting on immediately. They will help you only when they resonate and make sense in your circumstances. So here they are: 1. Think about how you want […]

Do you want to know which ideas help first-time tech managers? Bear with me. The problems new managers and leaders have are not unique. The solutions to them are also not unique. But they should be personalized to really help. That’s why advice is problematic. It doesn’t take into account all the specifics of your […]

I get this question often from the participants of the coaching skills training I conduct. Coaching is not a panacea. There are cases when it is better to teach and direct. So it’s a great question to ask. Given that I mostly work with techies, the variation of this question goes like this: shouldn’t all […]

What do leaders do, when they want to help? When our subordinates have some difficulties the natural urge is to step in and tell them what to do. If we had a similar experience, it only seems natural to share it with other people. For example, you have this great employee Lisa*. She is a […]

We all know examples when we want to change something, and it happens smoothly, almost by itself. Other times seemingly reasonable and desirable change doesn’t occur. How come? What conditions are necessary for a change to happen? Let’s say you want to start working on your side project. And you decided that you will spend […]

Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson had an ingenious way to induce anesthesia in his patients. He has a patient who was experiencing a lot of physical pain. Naturally, the pain was absorbing all of this patient’s attention. So Milton Erickson would start by asking: “What would happen if you looked over there and a huge hungry tiger […]