Leadership Coaching

I am currently offering coaching by phone and Zoom. We can also make use of Mural, a powerful and easy to use tool for visual collaboration.

Because sometimes you need some support.

Being a director or manager at a nonprofit or other community-focused organization or agency asks for your best. It asks you to bring all your dedication, skills, compassion, intelligence and heart to your work. It gives you opportunities to grow and learn, and to be of service in ways that really matter. It challenges you to keep figuring out ways to make what you do more effective.

It is in the nature of community-focused leadership, at any level, that you always have more on your plate than you can really do. You sometimes feel isolated and unsupported; you know you are not always doing the ideal job, that you need more skills, and you sometimes wish you had help sorting out a challenge or figuring out how to approach something new.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed and to doubt your own abilities when things aren’t going as well as you’d like (or as well as you think others are expecting them to go). Sometimes even when you know you could figure out how to do things better, you just don’t have the space to sit down and focus on it. And then there are those times when you just get stuck and can’t figure out what to do no matter how many hours you spend in the shower and the car and when you are supposed to be asleep thinking about it.

Are you seeing these strains in your self? In the leaders and managers on your staff? In your teams?

Do you or your staff need help to take it to the next level?

I was an executive director twice, for a total of 14 years, and I’ve experienced all of those challenges at one time or another. I’ve also worked with enough other EDs and managers — as a colleague, board member, facilitator, consultant, or coach — to know these are widespread needs. Coaching can provide the support to make your job easier and help you or your staff continue to grow as managers and as leaders.

Coaching provides:

• A sounding board and an outside perspective; someone who is not themselves invested in the issue or situation you are facing, to listen, to ask questions you don’t think to ask, to offer a new way of looking at something;
• Space for you to focus on your development as leader;
• Structures to help you be accountable to what you intend;
• An array of tools and practices that can strengthen your skills and give you new approaches to your work and to your own growth.

Coaching is different from training, because it supports you in focusing on the needs, opportunities and challenges facing you in the moment. It’s about helping you discover what is holding you back and how to move through that. It will help you identify your triggers and learn to release and/or manage them, see your own strengths and abilities more clearly and build on them, hone your skills, make better decisions more quickly and easily, and feel good about the decisions you make. It will also give you new tools to use with other people, be they supervisors, team members, people you supervise, or people you serve.

Coaching is different from supervision because coaches are not evaluating your performance, nor do they have specific goals of their own for you to meet. You define the goals of the work (sometimes in consultation with your supervisor), and your coach supports you in meeting them.

How It Works

Coaching with Individuals

Coaching with individuals is done by contract, for a three to twelve month period. (Continued coaching beyond the initial contract can be arranged if desired.) A discovery session lays the groundwork and sets goals and parameters for the coaching relationship. What takes place in the coaching sessions is confidential; I don’t share it with anyone. Accountability for specific results is negotiated between the person being coached and the entity paying for the coaching, usually with me facilitating. Because of confidentiality requirements, reports to the supervisor/board on results and session content are provided by the person being coached. I can, while maintaining confidentiality, discuss how coaching fits in the larger goals of the organization or process and report on whether the sessions appear to be useful. Got questions?

Coaching with Teams

Coaching with teams can be done for a particular period of time, or for the duration of a particular task, project or process. Team coaching focuses on what the team needs in order to be successful. This includes attention to what individuals on the team may need to be part of that success, but the process focuses on values, goals, and dynamics of the team rather than those of any individual.

I bring a variety of tools and perspectives that can help teams see where they are getting stuck, find new perspectives and approaches, build their communication, decision-making and problem-solving skills, access their creativity, and identify their strengths as individuals and as a group and build on them while reducing the negative effects of weaknesses within the team or specific challenges the team faces. Want more information on what this could look like?

Coaching as Part of a Larger Organizational Development Package

Coaching can be extremely effective as part of a larger process of leadership development, strategic planning, facilitation and/or training. The coaching component can take many forms. Some of the most common are:

• Coaching a team as it moves into plan/process implementation;
• Coaching a director or manager to support them in integrating or implementing new approaches or stepping into new leadership roles;
• Coaching individuals or groups of directors/managers as part of a highly structured, performance-focused leadership development process;
• Doing a single coaching session with an individual needing support to work through a specific issue; and,
• Individual coaching as part of a succession planning process.

The form coaching takes in your organization is something we design together, to ensure it meets your needs. Call or email me if you have questions or want to explore what this might look like in your organization. My phone is 503-788-2333.

Cost

Individual Coaching done as a stand-alone is $225* per month. A month is two hours of coaching sessions divided into two, three or four sessions depending on the needs and preferences of the person being coached, plus limited email correspondence and up to two short check-in calls between sessions per month. The coaching relationship starts with a two-hour discovery session, which costs $135. The minimum commitment for a stand-alone coaching relationship is three months. Once that groundwork has been laid with an individual, any further coaching desired can happen by the month, or by the individual session. Individual sessions are billed at $115/hour.*

Team Coaching is billed by the hour, at $115/hour.* All contact and preparation hours (including short check-in calls and emails) are billed.

* These prices presume most or all coaching is being done by phone or at my home office, or that I am able to batch coaching sessions for an organization to minimize travel time.

Coaching as part of a larger organizational development process is billed in a package. Please contact me to discuss what your organizational needs are and what that would cost.

The Coach

I’m Tasha Harmon, and I’m a certified professional co-active coach, trained by the Coaches Training Institute. I have been involved in the nonprofit and community-development worlds for all of my professional life (over 25 years now), as a staff person, manager, executive director, board member, volunteer, consultant, facilitator, and coach. In the last seven years I’ve been able to take my work to a new level by integrating the skills and approach of co-active coaching with all those years of experience to support the critical work of nonprofits, schools and other community-focused organizations/agencies in new ways. Please contact me if you want to explore how coaching can support you or others in your organization.

Intrigued but not sure if coaching is worth the investment?

The best way to know if coaching with me is a good match for you or others in your organization is to try it. Call me to set up a free consultation — we’ll talk about your needs and goals, and do a short coaching session so you can see what it’s like.

You can also try out a couple of coaching tools for yourself. You’ll find some of the tools I bring to organizations in the Tools for Getting Unstuck section of the Resources page. They work best with a short introductory training (in a group — see Workshops — or in individual coaching), but I suspect you’ll get a feel for how powerful they can be by trying them out on your own.