Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Self-awareness is the
gateway for developing
positive leadership capacity.
in focus
M
ost of my career has been spent genuine desire to close these gaps—even
leading HR and organizational and when coupled with the fear of a negative
BY MICHELE NEVAREZ leadership development functions performance assessment or reward of pro-
across a wide range of industries. What I no- fessional and personal gain—often were not
ticed soon after I began coaching and working enough to bring about the degree of lasting
with executives to develop their leadership or discernible behavioral change needed to
capabilities and strengths is that irrespec- achieve consistently better results. This isn’t
tive of how well I coached someone or how to say the clients I worked with didn’t de-
receptive the individual was to the coaching rive any personal meaning or benefit from
process itself, lasting behavioral change was the coaching process, make shifts, or gain
not a given. valuable insight; they did and often were ex-
Typically, I would start by having the cli- tremely grateful for the opportunity to work
ent complete a 360-degree assessment (usually with a coach to gain greater clarity of purpose
the emotional and social competency inven- and move in the direction of their ideal self.
tory) and pair this input with a robust behavioral However, my insight was that there wasn’t
assessment (usually the Hogan Leadership As- necessarily a causal link between my efficacy
sessment), the combination of which provided a in applying commonly accepted coaching
powerful platform for the client to begin gaining methodologies, the clients’ desire to change,
insight and perspective on her self-perception and their ability or success in making mean-
relative to her reputation and to refine the cli- ingful and lasting changes to long-standing
ent’s thinking on her ideal vision of self. personal behavioral norms (which weren’t al-
What I eventually came to understand, ways serving them well) and in turn building
however, was that mere intellectual under- on existing strengths or developing new, effi-
standing of one’s strengths and gaps or a cacious ones (that would serve them better).
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