On September 15, 2008, I sat at a trading desk at Lehman Brothers (my first job out of college) watching the collapse of the firm and the Dow’s 500 point drop as a panic period peaked across the world.

Three years later, I wonder, where do we stand now?  Watch this BBC video hosting a trader who frankly said that the Eurozone Market will crash in the next year.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC19fEqR5bA&w=560&h=315]

This video gives me recurring chills-it was direct, confirming, and shocking all at once.

At the same time, I’ve been following the #occupywallst protests escalating as we speak in downtown Manhattan. I still wonder how much Generation Y is preparing for these crises, as we enter the workforce, launch ‘hot’ start-ups, and amass the tuition loans of undergraduate and graduate education. This is the leadership challenge of our generation.

When we enter a new community, we come with assumptions. Assumptions are not bad; they are truths that we walk with. Yet when we feel someone does something very offensive in our own community, we often forget to unearth their assumptions and we don’t decipher between their intent and impact.

I recently had a conversation with Jawole Zollar, dancer and founder of Urban Bush women, who uses dance to bring untold stories and histories of marginalized communities to light. We discussed her lessons from movement about the intent and impact when entering new communities to create change

Jawole articulated that the best situations are when intent and impact for change in a community meet together. Bad situations are when there is great intent but the impact is not so good. Ugly situations are when a person entering a community never had a good intention or that the impact was so bad, it doesn’t matter what the intention is.

The Brad Pitt houses in New Orleans depict the difference between intent and impact. After Hurricane Katrina, Brad Pitt formed the Make it Right foundation that built homes in the Lower Ninth. Architects designed beautiful, energy-friendly homes, but people from the lower Nine had no input regarding the ‘spaceship like’ houses that were being built for them. Brad Pitt’s intent was great, but without the neighborhood input, the overall impact made it hard to foster a community around these houses.

As leaders, when you enter new communities, how do you decipher between your intent and impact?

Coaching is a core leadership practice that enables others in a variety of contexts from companies and nonprofits to campaigns and trainings.

A good coach doesn’t take over.

A good coach waits for the question. The coachee first needs to own his situation and once they do, a good coach asks the right questions, helps them take action and holds them accountable to take action.

On Saturday,  I facilitated a Strong Women Strong Girls leadership coaching session for 40 professional women. Strong Women Strong Girls is a nonprofit that utilizes the lessons learned from strong women throughout history to encourage girls and young women to become strong women themselves through mentoring and coaching programs.

Since February, I have been doing leadership development workshops for SWSG college women at Tufts University. This time, I got to work with 40 professional women across companies in Boston who will now serve as “Leadership Coaches” for SWSG college women on 5 university campuses in Boston.

Using roleplay and coaching in pairs, we had the group learn coaching by practicing asking probing questions that both supported and challenged the person they were coaching. One woman in the session had a great definition of coaching:  “coaching is about helping someone answer something where they already know what to do, they just haven’t realized it yet.” I thought this was a great description, coaching is almost like being a mirror for someone to see themselves.

Marshall Ganz, professor at Harvard University, describes that the first step in the coaching process is to observe and diagnose what type of coaching is needed. He describes three types of coaching below:

–        Motivational (heart) coaching is aimed at enhancing effort.

–        Strategic (head) coaching is aimed at helping the team or individual plan, evaluate, or think about its strategic or structural approach

–        Educational (hands) coaching is aimed at helping the team or individual execute with skill (and learn from execution).

Once you have diagnosed the challenge, a good coach intervenes by asking questions to help the coachee to find the answer on their own. Then, a good coach will step back and observe the coachee trying the intervention in action. Lastly, a good coach always debriefs with the coachee to help them reflect on the experience: What went well? What were you challenged by? What are your goals/next steps?

I’ve recently joined a Collective Presencing Circle, a holding space for deep, generative listening. What has amazed me is how this holding space is created through a process of storytelling and context sharing.

 

The shift in this circle is that we have power over the place versus the place having power over us.  It is though our practices of intentional silence and generative dialogue that we actually transform our place into a holding space.

This quote from Theory U best describes the feeling when I leave circle practice:

“What happens is that you leave that conversation as a different being-a  different person-from the one who entered the conversation a few hours earlier. You are no longer the same. You are (a tiny bit) more who you really are. Sometimes that tiny bit can be quite profound. I remember that in one instance I had a physical sensation of a wound when I left a particularly profound conversation. Why? Because that conversation created a generative social field that connected me with a deeper aspect of my journey and Self” (Theory U, Scharmer).