InPower Coaching Community
Unlocking Potential: How the Right Coach for Executives Can Transform Your Leadership Skills
Excerpt from most recent post on InPower Coaching. - Published July 6, 2024
As an executive–or an executive-wannabe–enhancing your leadership effectiveness is pivotal to career success. After over a decade of executive coaching, I can confidently say that the right coach for executives can be the catalyst you need. Through personally tailored strategies, a compatible executive coach can offer transformative insights that refine your decision-making, communication, management, and mentorship skills. Effective coaching benefits you, helping you reshape your approach to leadership and your personal brand, and it also delivers results for your organization’s performance. But AI is coming! What does this mean for executive coaching? Can a bot help you?
Key Takeaways
Executive coaching is a powerful partnership that boosts performance and fosters personal development, helping leaders confidently navigate the complexities of corporate leadership.
Investing in executive coaching can yield substantial benefits for both individuals and organizations, including enhanced leadership skills, better decision-making, and a stronger alignment with business strategies.
The effectiveness of an executive coaching program rests on its tailored and personalized approach, with clear goal-setting, regular progress assessments, and actionable feedback that culminates in measurable professional growth.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will enhance executive coaching but will not replace it.
Exploring the Role of an Executive Coach
In the ever-changing world of business, an executive coach is your ally in navigating a complex web of leadership, management, persona brand, office politics, and career challenges that come along with greater responsibility and visibility. Executive coaching is more than just a service; it’s a partnership designed to enhance your performance, provide critical support during uncertainty, and guide you through the often-turbulent waters of organizational leadership...
Continue reading the full article on InPowerCoaching.com
How to be Feminine, Ambitious and Successful: Navigating the Gender Gap in Workplace Ambition
Excerpt from most recent post on InPowerCoaching - Published June 4,2024
A common theme among the women I coach–at all levels–is a clear awareness of the gender gap in workplace ambition and confusion about how to navigate it. - Dana Theus
How to be Feminine, Ambitious and Successful: Navigating the Gender Gap in Workplace Ambition
Key Takeaways
Understanding Gendered Ambition Norms: Many women feel pressured to choose between achievement and agreeableness due to societal expectations. Men often lean towards assertiveness, while women may prioritize niceness, reacting to and perpetuating gendered stereotypes.
Reframing Ambition: Ambition encompasses various motivations beyond vertical advancement, including personal growth, social connections, and making a difference. Recognizing these diverse motivations can help redefine success beyond traditional measures of authority and status.
Evolving Gender Dynamics: Women are increasingly ambitious, challenging the notion of a gender gap in workplace ambition. However, corporate cultures often prioritize competitive and vertical ambitions, hindering the recognition of alternative career aspirations.
Authenticity and Self-Knowledge: Navigating the gender gap in workplace ambition requires authenticity and self-awareness. By clarifying personal goals, remaining flexible in approach, and aligning actions with values, individuals can navigate stereotypes and biases to pursue their ambitions effectively.
Managerial & Employee Challenge: Managers and employees need to recognize and manage diverse employee motivations, moving beyond traditional concepts of incentive structures that favor vertical ambition.
[InPower Update] Which Double Standard for Women Applies To You? All of Them?
Excerpt from InPowerCoaching.com blog post from April 30, 2024
Double standard for women in leadership is an age-old problem, but it turns out that it’s not just a problem for leaders; it’s a problem for all women in the workplace.
Key Takeaways:
Numerous Double Standards: The article highlights the plethora of double standards for women in the workplace, ranging from leadership expectations to compensation differentials and age biases.
Rooted in Unconscious Bias: Unconscious biases and stereotypes drive these double standards, shaping perceptions and expectations about how women should behave and be treated in professional settings.
Personal Brand & Communication Evaluation Disparity: Women’s communication is evaluated differently, often with negative consequences for their reputations and careers, such as being stereotyped as “bitchy” or “bossy” for assertive behavior.
Age & Wage Disparity: Despite efforts to address it, women still earn less than men, with factors like weight, age, and parenthood affecting women’s pay negatively compared to men.
Leadership Challenges: Women in leadership roles face unique challenges, including the need to balance agentic and communal behaviors, along with differing gender expectations for delivering critical feedback.
[InPower Update] Career Coaching Tip: The Limits of Empathy
Excerpt from most recent InPower Coaching blog - Posted February 1, 2024
Early in my career, empathy was my ace-in-the-hole management technique. I was all business when it came to helping my team on technical, process and performance issues, but if they had an emotional reaction or issue, I reverted to empathy because it was the easy thing to do. I learned that when I was empathetic, people liked me more, and early in my career, I really wanted to be liked. In retrospect, there might have been a correlation between my empathetic management style and the glass ceiling I smacked my head on the first time around, but then again maybe not. One of the folks who got the job I wanted was a woman… though now that I think of it, her management style was anything but empathetic.
Empathy didn’t work on everyone, though. I remember Employee B at a subsequent job. He just pretty much hated me and did everything including lying to my face to try to undermine me – despite the fact that I was the one with the VP title. I was flummoxed and pissed off. I kept trying to empathize in order to connect, and failed time and again. I never did figure out Employee B. I rejoiced when he transferred to another department and to this day I consider him my biggest management failure.
InPower Update: Out with the old 🗑️
Excerpt from InPower Coaching newsletter - sent January 4, 2024
The New Year is here! Are you ready? If you find yourself stuck getting excited about the new possibilities ahead, it could be because you haven't put away the old ones. Here's a way to think about getting ready for the future by closing out the past. ~ Dana Theus
INPOWER POSTS
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CLOSURE
This is an oldie-but-goodie post. Be on the lookout for some fresh energy from InPower Coaching this year. More soon!
Have you ever noticed that once you can tell a story about something, it’s in the past?
The year’s end is upon us and I observe my clients reaching for closure to make sense of another time of upheaval in the world. I encourage everyone to engage in the psychology of closure, not just at year-end, but in any transition. Closure is a powerful force for change, growth, and evolution and our brains are naturally constructed to use it.
So this year, make yourself a commitment to bring an intentional close to the year and set your sights on new aspirations for the months ahead.
To help you prioritize making time to close out YOUR year, I’d like to explore this powerful dynamic more deeply. Why do our brains try so hard to tell the story of time in wrapped-up little packages with nice neat endings? And how can we use this to our benefit? - CONTINUE READING
InPower Update: Is your 'career plan' 📝 working out?
Excerpt from InPower Coaching Newsletter - Sent December 8,2023
2023 is coming to a close! Time to reflect on how your career and life are going. Everything on track 'to plan?' If you're like me the answer is never an absolute YES! But that doesn't mean it's not worth doing some planning. Start by auditing your career for 2023. ~ Dana Theus
MOST RECENT INPOWER POSTS
Where Has “Normal” Career Planning Gotten You?
How are you doing in your career? Are you where you want to be? Is everything hunky dory? Do you end every day at work glad to be alive? If every answer isn’t an enthusiastic YES! Then it’s time to do a career audit and see just how much “bliss” you’ve got in your work and life. It may even be time for a Worklife Reset to get yourself on track.
Yeah. I didn’t used to be able to say YES! very often either. And, to be honest, that’s a tall order for every day even now that I’m there, but it’s not a tall order for most days when you’ve gotten your career on the Worklife Bliss track.
InPower Update: Cracking the Code: 🆘 Strategies for Overcoming Unconscious Bias
Excerpt from InPower Coaching Newsletter - Sent November 2, 2023
It doesn't matter who you are or how you present, we all have unconscious biases working for us, against us and in us. The latest research shows how insidious this can be. Here are some InPower strategies for reducing the ways implicit bias can hold you back. ~ Dana Theus
MOST RECENT INPOWER POSTS
The Game is Rigged: Win Anyway
When it comes to unconscious bias, the bad news is that the game is rigged–against women, people of color, introverts and others that don’t fit a certain “success” stereotype that is often male, white and extroverted. But the good news is, it’s not really a game so there are no rules you can’t modify and break, if necessary.
Recent research has identified thirty individual biases that work together to disadvantage women in the workplace. Myriad other research shows that managers reliably exhibit biases based on gender, race, education, ability and sexual orientation, to name just a few. And there is also evidence that bias negatively affects men in their careers, as well.
Read the full newsletter on "Strategies for Overcoming Bias"
InPower Update: Exploring Power 💥
Excerpt from the InPower Coaching newsletter sent October 5, 2023
This month we're doing a deep dive into ideas about power, which are complex for both women and men--though often for different reasons. The Power Code is a great way to explore these ideas, for women and men! Enjoy! ~ Dana Theus
MOST RECENT INPOWER POSTS
The Power Code [Book Review]
There are a LOT of books out there on women in professional settings. I don’t read them all, or recommend many, though all of them are worth exploring for new ideas and insights. I am recommending that women and men both read The Power Code: More Joy. Less Ego. Maximum Impact for Women (and Everyone).
Here’s why you should read The Power Code
Authors Katty Kay and Claire Shipman have written other good books about confidence, which are worth reading, but in The Power Code they do an excellent job of painting a broad picture of the challenges women have in the workplace while also offering actionable advice. They take a perspective on women and power that is realistic–eyes wide open–and hopeful. They talk to real women who struggle and still find ways to wield power with joy and impact. CONTINUE READING
Click to read the full InPower Update Newsletter on Exploring Power
InPower Update: Popular Topics - LinkedIn Mistakes & Resistance to Change
Excerpt from InPower Coaching Newsletter sent September 7th, 2023
Happy September! This month we're reposting a couple of evergreen and ever-popular topics: A new approach to change management and the 10 Biggest Mistakes you can make on LinkedIn (by the wonderful Henna Inam). Enjoy! ~ Dana Theus
MOST RECENT INPOWER POSTS
10 Biggest LinkedIn Mistakes Most of Us Make
I was at a speaking engagement about creating our personal brands and asked the participants how many had a Linked In profile. About 50% raised their hands. I asked how many felt really good about their Linked In profile. About 3 people kept their hand up. If you’re in business, the people you want to connect with are checking you out on Linked In. Here are the ten biggest mistakes many of us make on Linked In. Do any of these apply to you?
by Henna Inam
Click here to read the full newsletter on LinkedIn Mistakes and Resistance to Change
InPower Update: Selfish Reasons to Be Your 😇 Best Self at Work
Excerpt from InPower Coaching Newsletter - Sent July 6, 2023
Do you think “finding your purpose” is a personal indulgence? I used to. Not any more. I now think it’s the only way to become my best self and make a difference, especially at work. How about you? ~ Dana Theus
MOST RECENT INPOWER POST
Personal Development Plan for Leadership: Get Out of the Weeds and Bring Out Your Best Self
Early in my career, I sought leadership positions because I felt compelled to achieve my higher purpose through my career. I set out on a personal development plan for leadership believing it would make me a better, and more impactful person. But I soon became very disappointed with what passed for leadership development in the companies I worked for. - CONTINUE READING
JOIN US: JULY 19th @ 12pm EASTERN - Personal Purpose for Your Best Self at Work. [InPower Women Mastermind Zoom] Click Here!