Good leadership is satisfying for so many reasons. The most satisfying part for me is assembling the teams who multiply our good. As business owners, Melinda and I have a business operations team, a marketing team, and a special team that produces the Good Leadership Breakfast. But the most significant team is the team Erin Wilken manages – our coaching team. They are an amazing group of people visiting us in Minneapolis today for our annual summer coaching retreat. Some traveled from afar. What makes them so special?
Background
You won’t find a booth in the college job fair to promote Executive Coaching as a career choice. That’s because coaching requires years of learning about business, psychology, and culture. And it requires the wisdom of aging. You know, the things you can only learn by getting your hands into the beautiful messiness of running a business. Hiring and firing employees. Confronting dishonesty. Encouraging, rewarding, and cheerleading when people are down. And living with the responsibility to deliver big results on small resources. And there’s something else…
All of the coaches on the Good Leadership team had the guts to quit their job and become sole proprietor business owners – freelancers. Each has the confidence required to become fiercely independent in their professional life… because they don’t want it any other way. That’s why it’s so satisfying to work with this team – they don’t need to work with us. They want to work with us.
Nothing significant ever happens alone.
I’m writing this blog in the midst of our annual summer coaches retreat, where we stimulate both personal and professional growth. Yesterday, we met at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum and took a dinner cruise last night on Lake Minnetonka. Today, we’re sharpening our coaching skills working together in the Aspiration Suite of our offices in Edina, Minnesota.
What’s completely obvious and satisfying to me is this: with this coaching team, we can impact the hundreds of thousands of employees who work in our clients’ companies. And we believe we are spreading goodness to the multiple-millions of customers our clients serve every day. That’s how we multiply our good.
Here’s your coaching question for today: What teams are you creating to multiply your good?