The Coaching Case
Shutterstock.com/ Nicoleta Raftu
A
Matter
of Trust
Micheline
Germanos, ACC
12
Coaching World
Micheline is a Leadership
Coach and consultant who
provides business leaders and
their teams with a uniquely
valuable perspective by
combining 25-plus years of
versatile, international business
and leadership experience
with deep coaching skills,
EQ, intuition and empathy.
Visit Micheline’s website at
GermanosLeadership.com,
connect with her on LinkedIn
and follow her on Twitter:
@inspir2transfrm.
As coaches, we have many of the
tools of effective facilitation in our
toolboxes. Curiosity, openness, and
the ability to listen both for what is
and is not being explicitly said are
all essential for working successfully
with groups. Being genuinely
empathetic to the issues the team
is grappling with and providing
direct yet respectful feedback is as
useful with a group as it is in our
individual coaching work. I have
found that working with teams once
every quarter or so complements
my individual coaching work and
allows me to feel temporarily part
of a tribe—probably the only aspect
of my past corporate life that I
sometimes miss.
Recently, I had the opportunity to do
exactly that when one of the sales leaders
I coach wanted to bring her leadership
team together in order to enhance their
collaboration and overall effectiveness in a
year of dramatic change.
The situation: A strong and charismatic
leader who needs to implement deep
strategic, executive and organizational
changes. A leadership team dispersed
across Russia, where ongoing tension
between Moscow and the other regions
fuels the lack of trust quietly growing
within the team. A two-day off-site
workshop intended to create a different
mindset within the team.
As my client and I explored the key issues
preventing the team from operating at its
best, the theme of trust—or, rather, t