Everyday Coaching: Using Conversation to Strengthen Your Culture

Unleash Hidden Potential With Coaching Conversations.

Coaching is not just for coaches. When everybody within an organization learns and develops coaching skills, its culture begins to change. The exchange of meaningful and actionable feedback becomes the norm and not something that only occurs during annual performance appraisals. The willingness to share insights and ideas becomes accepted and expected at all levels—up, down, and across.

Virginia Bianco-Mathis and Lisa Nabors believe everyone in an organization can master a new language—dialogue—and use it in the service of excellence and continuous learning. Everyday Coaching endorses the idea that by improving coaching dialogue skills, people will show up, every day, knowing that what they say and do makes a difference.

Through practical tips and examples, Everyday Coaching demonstrates the difference between conversations and true dialogue: the power of using the language of coaching to achieve expectations, personal growth, and overall strategic success. With an easy-to-use coaching model, you can practice formally or informally giving feedback, making agreements, and guiding behavior.

In this book, you’ll learn to:

• Use coaching to create a culture of collaboration.
• Inspire meetings and agendas with more purposeful conversations.
• Embody coaching as a normal way of going about continuous improvement.

Not everyone is a professional coach. But with Everyday Coaching everyone can take the best of what coaching has to offer—the dialogue, tools, and mindset—and leverage it to transform themselves and their organization.

About the Authors

Virginia Bianco-Mathis

Virginia Bianco-Mathis is a professor and chairperson at Marymount University School of Business Administration, and co-founder and partner of Strategic Performance Group. She earned a master's degree from Johns Hopkins and a doctorate in human and organization development from George Washington University. She has held leadership positions with companies in the aerospace, financial real estate, and telecommunications fields.

Virginia possesses expertise in strategy, organization change, performance management, leadership, and executive coaching. Her passion is identifying issues and opportunities through organizational diagnosis and assisting leaders in moving their organizations through the implementation of change and attainment of bottom-line success. She has been labeled a "silver bullet," being able to zero in on the exact combination of factors needed to achieve an envisioned future. Her practical, direct approach is based on dialogue, observable behaviors, and building infrastructures to support measurable results.

Presently, Virginia is involved in major projects with Haystax Technology, Seyfarth Shaw, and Fannie Mae. She sits on the Board of Phillips Corporation and has published widely in the fields of coaching, team development, and leadership. In particular, she guest lectures for Leadership Arlington in Northern Virginia, writes a monthly blog (http://learn.marymount.edu/hrmblog), and delivers worldwide presentations. Having co-authored several international books and courses on coaching, including The Dialogue Deck, she encourages leaders to paint a picture and consider the consequences of doing nothing. She lives in Annandale, Virginia, with her husband and three children, who tend to move in and out of the main homestead.

Lisa Nabors

Lisa Nabors is a co-founder and partner of Strategic Performance Group and is recognized by the International Coach Federation as a professional certified coach. Lisa is a sought-after speaker and keynote, presenting on the topic of coaching to industry and professional groups. She began coaching while pursuing a 16-year stint as a senior-level human resource and training and development professional in private industry. Her passion is in optimizing individual, team, and organization performance across a diverse spectrum of professional environments. Her coaching clients include managers, executives, and teams in organizations such as AARP, American Institute of Architects, Council of Better Business Bureaus, Public Interest Registry, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Lisa's expertise includes gathering and optimizing data to cut to the core issues, help clients consider choices, and create action plans designed to achieve specific, measurable results.

Nabors is a certified user of all Center for Creative Leadership 360-degree feedback instruments, the EQ-i 2.0 and EQ 360, Leadership Practices Inventory, the Team Emotional Social Intelligence Survey, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, FIRO-B, and many other customized instruments. She earned bachelor of arts and master of education degrees from the University of Maryland, where she also completed doctoral-level coursework on leadership effectiveness.

In 2007, Lisa served as subject matter expert and editor for the Association for Talent Development Coaching Certificate Program and co-authored its redesign in 2013. She has facilitated the program nationally and internationally and helped create the online version. She is an adjunct faculty member for Marymount University and the co-author of The Dialogue Deck, Leading From the Inside Out: A Coaching Model, and Organizational Coaching: Building Relationships and Programs That Drive Results. Lisa is passionate about removing but, although, and however from conversation and communicating directly with care. She lives in Herndon, Virginia, with her husband; her pit bull terrier, Dillon; and an ever-expanding garden and blackberry patch.