The Managers' Guide to Coaching for Change

The People Dividend Episode 031: The Managers' Guide to Coaching for Change

John Bennett

John Bennett is president of Lawton Associates, a consulting and executive coaching firm focused on helping individual, teams and organizations prepare for, excel through, and improve from change. He is a Professor of Business & Behavioral Science at the McColl School of Business, Queens University of Charlotte. He holds the Wayland H. Cato, Jr. Chair of Leadership. In addition to teaching, he is an executive coach and a frequent speaker and presenter at academic, professional, and client conferences and workshops.

In this episode, Mike Horne interviews John, about his new book, 'The Manager's Guide to Coaching for Change.' They discuss the importance of coaching skills for managers and leaders, the need for managers to focus on developing their team members, and the impact of coaching in the evolving world of work. John emphasizes the role of managers as coaches and the power of feedback, listening, and asking powerful questions. He also highlights the importance of understanding what drives and motivates team members and tailoring feedback to their needs. The conversation explores the challenges of bad managers and the value of a humanistic approach to coaching.

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"If you cannot sit down with a piece of paper and write down for every person with whom you work on a regular basis, what drives them? What are their motivators? You need to figure that out because that's what keeps people going."

"If you want to advance, what better to be known for us than somebody who is a talent multiplier, as opposed to someone who is a diminisher of the talent around you."

"What we have as leaders, as managers, as human beings interacting is it starts out with this tool called self. And so we need to understand what that tool is, but we also need to understand how to use that tool."