One-Size-Fits-All Solutions
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What’s the best way to organise my work? How do I motivate my team? How do I motivate myself? How do I deal with toxic colleagues? How do I learn to stop micro-managing?
Often, people think that, since I am an executive coach, I have a response for each one of these questions. However, there is no single response to any of them: the answer depends on a multitude of factors including, to name but a few, your brain, your education, your line of work, your culture, and the culture of your workplace.
And that is precisely the reason that coaching often succeeds where training fails.
Teaching someone “the” ideal way to do something presumes that there is such a thing as “the” ideal way. However, “one-size-fits-all” solutions to improve productivity — although they may be effective for certain people — are ultimately illusory because they fail to take into account the specific needs unique to each person.
Coaching, on the other hand, takes as its foundational principle the fact that each person is unique and that their approach to work needs to be tailored according to their unique needs. My role, as a coach, is to help my clients to figure out what works for them. In this way, they come up with solutions that take into account their unique qualities — instead of attempting to force them into a mould.
If you have ever done “time management training” or if you have ever read a book about “the best way to…(organise your work day, manage your team, delegate work…)” you know how things typically go: the things you learn seem like a great idea at first. Once you resume a normal work day, you put into place a handful of the tactics you picked up at the training. So far, so good. Until a week or so later, when your old habits start to creep back in. Until finally, as soon as the first big emergency comes up, everything goes back to exactly the way it was before you lost those precious few hours of work in the training.
But why does it always happen that way? The problem isn’t you; it’s that one-size-fits-all solutions fail to take into account the most complex thing about being human: our psychology. What motivates you? What stresses you out? What are you afraid of? It is often factors such as these that have the greatest influence on the way we work. And working one-on-one with a coach allows you to find responses to these questions and then test out new ways of working that are tailor-made for you. And because you have built these new ways of working yourself, with your specific needs in mind, they are not only likely to help you achieve significant improvements in performance — but you are also much more likely to stick with them over the long term.
What objectives could you realise if you made a few custom modifications to the way you worked? Contact Jon here and set up a time to speak about it with him. Would you like to know more about his background and qualifications before you get in touch? You will find all of the relevant information by clicking here.