Leadership Coaching and Fundraising

What's the Connection?

Earlier this month, I reached a milestone six-months in the making and I am now a Certified Leadership Coach. When I started coach training, I embraced the opportunity to improve my facilitation skills with a coaching approach. Along the way, I found those skills and so much more.

Coaching is professional development in its most empowering sense. It's different from training, different from mentoring and different from therapy. Coaching is a partnership between a coach and coachee to examine goals, opportunities, barriers and to plan for what's next.

A Harvard Business Review article shares as a coach, "You’re not there to tell anyone what to do. You’re there to ask good questions and listen intently.... Your job is to assist someone else with making a change."

Ok, so we know what coaching is. What about training? I recently enjoyed the opportunity to host a webinar on grant writing. My mantra was "grant writing is not difficult, it's a process", and I shared the training tools I use to evaluate a grant opportunity and the importance in gathering information before writing. Of the many who attended that session, will it create lasting change and build success in grant writing for smaller charitable organizations? I certainly hope so! And yet, there is another opportunity for leaders to support personal development and change within your organization - leadership coaching.

Learning new skills is a must for professional development. Leaders should consider adding coaching to ensure these training opportunities last beyond the learning.

My mantra for grant writing is clear: "grant writing is not difficult; it's a process". And, now I can add a mantra for coaching: "Coaching is not difficult; it's conversations to support change."