Kantor Consulting Group, Inc

Very often with my clients, as we get towards the end of our coaching time together, I invite them to create a self-coaching plan. The reason that we do this is because, just like any other project that we try to execute, we are much more likely to be successful when we have a written plan than when we don’t have a written plan.

The other reason that this is so important and works so well is that I’ve learned over the years that when we assess our own performance, we tend to look at our intentions, and as long as our intentions are or were good, we assess that we have performed effectively.

However, when we assess the performance of others, we look not at their intentions, but at their actual behavior, and we look at the behaviors as we can observe them. And based upon the observable behavior, we can see whether or not they have executed successfully.

As this translates back to our own behavior around our self-coaching plan, the best of intentions don’t really deliver to us the leadership development improvement results that we aspire to when we think about doing such a plan.

So the structure of the plan is very simple. We identify 3-5 areas in which we want to improve our performance. Examples of those might be:

• Performance management
• Delegation
• Holding people accountable for delivering results
• Better communication
• …and so on

Then we create five columns on a piece of paper or in a spreadsheet and we label them Q1 (for Quarter 1) through Q4 (Quarter 4): Q1-Q4. And then in each one of those cells in the matrix, we identify one or two activities or measures of success by quarter for each one of those 3-5 coaching goals. The idea here is to keep it very simple, very high level. This doesn’t have to be a detailed plan.

Then once we have the plan, we set up a scheduled meeting with ourselves, a recurring meeting, for once every month for somewhere around 30 minutes. A critical success factor is to enter it into our calendar at the time that we are creating the plan.

Once we’ve done that, we then start executing the plan, and each month when we have our meeting, we take a look at whether or not we have, in fact, made progress against each one of those goals. It’s important to have the meeting once a month, because in the first month, you’re one-third of the way into the first quarter. And if you’re not making the necessary progress, that still gives you two months to take corrective action.

In the second meeting of the quarter, if you still haven’t been successful, you still have 30 days left to identify what’s getting in the way and to figure out what change you need to make in order to achieve the objective.

By working through these objectives month by month, quarter by quarter, you stand a very good chance of successfully executing the leadership development objectives as put into your annual self-coaching plan.

As part of continuing my relationship with my coaching clients, I invite them to call me any time that they have trouble getting a wayward objective back on track.

Please consider using an approach and tool like this self coaching plan to accelerate your own leadership development, with or without the related coaching. I assure you it will make a huge difference.

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