Creativity and Innovation Coaching

Coaching innovators on creativity, innovation, leadership, change, and transformation

Innovation requires creativity, influencing skills, critical-thinking, risk-taking, and leading change. Creativity and innovation coaching provides leaders, innovators and change agents, with the support they need to develop talent, and turn lead into gold, rather than gold into lead.

Turn ideas into action, put creativity to work, and develop strategies for innovation.

• Identify opportunities for innovation
• Build creativity and innovation capabilities at the personal level and within your organisation
• Identify and remove barriers to innovation
• Learn a language and structure for developing and managing creativity and innovation in your organization
• Build your personal brand, and develop your reputational power
• Learn influencing and persuasion skills to present your ideas, get people on board and turn your ideas into action
• Map an execution strategy

Coaching helps innovators address the following leadership challenges:

• Collaborating, partnering and co-creating
• Fostering a culture that supports creativity and innovation
• Stimulating innovative and solution-focused thinking
• Navigating complexity and ambiguity
• Effective decision-making
• Mobilizing teams and implementing innovation
• Improved communications with boss, co-workers and colleagues
• Improved business performance

How does coaching work?

Coaching is an experiential process  that helps you focus and move forward on your personal, professional or organizational goals through the exploration of ideas and candid dialogue with a confidential and unbiased thinking partner. Coaching is solution-focused, goal orientated and designed to help you achieve measurable results

Coaching for creativity and innovation will help you  find clarity in chaos, navigate change, make informed decisions, brainstorm ideas, revitalise your creativity, and develop strategies, all for the purpose of helping you achieve your goals and aspirations. As your thinking partner, I’m here to listen to you objectively, give you insightful feedback and help you navigate the future with more ease, confidence and resilience.

The Coaching Process

• Setting the stage: Identifying a topic or issue, defining what you want to accomplish, and establishing how you wan to be coached
• Discovery: Explore ideas, opportunities and possibilities. We will probe, challenge, listen and question until you have developed a clear and compelling vision and goal to move toward.
• Design: Designing the future you want to create, and developing a strategy for implementation
• Removing barriers: We will identify barriers and discover points of leverage
• Taking action: Develop a clear action plan to move your goals forward
• Refining and reflecting: To support and motivate you through the process to the achievement of your goals

Time and commitment involved: Coaching takes place by phone or in person. Each coaching session ends with a request for actions (homework) and/or an inquiry for further reflection. The frequency of meetings ranges from  once a week to twice a month, for a minimum of 3 months.

Tools and assessments: These include conducting an innovation audit, innovation thinking profiles, and communication assessments to uncover strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for growth, to help you be more effective as an innovator.

What are the benefits of coaching?

The coaching process encourages the development of leadership, creativity, commitment and responsibility.

While training and facilitation can produce powerful results, coaching provides the missing components to creating lasting change: Accountability and commitment. Transformation occurs more readily when organizations include coaching, to support leaders and teams to follow-up and follow-through.

Asked for a conservative estimate of the monetary payoff from the coaching they got, these managers described an average return of more than $100,000, or about six times what the coaching had cost their companies.” —FORTUNE

• Coaching provides focused time to address matters of importance.
• Build capacity for leadership.
• Develop coach-like qualities in leaders that foster creativity and innovation
• Accelerates progress in learning new skills and changing behaviours
• Improved relationships (personal, professional and volunteer)
• Increased creativity, productivity and efficiency in teams
• Improved communications with diverse personality styles
• Increased earnings
• More free time

 Coaching programs: Transform and Sustain Organizational Learning

One-on-one coaching: For Innovators, who will benefit from having a confidential thinking partner to act as a sounding board, to develop innovation skills, and to stay focused. See also Life and Business Coaching

Team coaching helps teams improve communications, synchronize and optimize performance. Coaching can also help groups become a team. Team coaching can help you keep your creative spirit alive during the innovation process, and increase your capacity to achieve your goals with greater efficiency and ease.

Peer Coaching: The Coaching Triangle System is an innovative organizational learning framework for professional development. A Triangle is a self-directed group of three people who come together to support each other in learning and development using a coach-like approach and dialogue.  The overall value of the coaching system can be realized in measurable results such a lower number of grievances, increased engagement, higher retention, local problem solving, or more effective knowledge transfer. See Peer Coaching: Tri-namics

My background

My work is informed by my background in business, art and design as well as Appreciative Inquiry:  Appreciative Inquiry suggests that human organizing and change, at its best, is a relationship process of inquiry, grounded in affirmation and appreciation.