Coaching
With Compassion and Clarity, I support values-grounded clients in their personal and professional growth.
Dr. Robin brings compassionate clarity to her coaching.
Compassionate because of her deep understanding from her own life experience, her strong soft skills and her commitment to inclusion.
Clarity from her education and training grounded in the relational skills she teaches that result in effectiveness and engagement.
Decoding and Strategically Using Assessments
As a certified user of many psychological assessments designed to help you be and do your best, Dr. Robin is able to help you decode the feedback from these assessments, confidentially, with awareness of unconscious biases that may creep into the interpretation of the results. Because of her familiarity with these assessments’ strengths and limitations, and her deep knowledge of Diversity-Equity-Inclusion issues, she helps you use the information and stay your authentic self.
- The Birkman Method | Articulating your needs, motivating interests, and stressors so that you manage your relationships with others at work and at home.
- StrengthsFinders | Naming, Claiming and Aiming your strengths so that you use your energy effectively.
- MBTI | Understanding your cognitive decision-making style and communication patterns. Dr. Robin no longer authorizes MBTIs. Rather, as a certified user, if you’ve already taken the MBTI Step II, she integrates insights from your MBTI into your coaching conversations.
- Lominger VOICES 360 Feedback | Measuring your competencies so you can contribute using your confirmed strengths, develop your hidden strengths, avoiding career derailment from your stumbling blocks and reduce blind spots … all while making a valued contribution to your organization.
Tips, Tools and Techniques Dr. Robin Developed
Tips and tools for re-inventing, re-focusing, and re-balancing work-life that help you find the career activities that blend your personality, strengths, skills, and values.
- The Career by Design Matrix focuses attention on activities that contribute to professional-personal goals.
- The Career by Design Mission Statement coaching session help you clarify your top values and craft a statement that guides your key life decisions — including how to prioritize and manage your time.
- The Career by Design oriented job analysis connects your Birkman insights to the Career by Design grid to help you choose the career path that’s most effective for you.
Gain insight into your cultural intelligence, understand inter-cultural communication styles, and explore effective strategies for interacting with others. This is particularly helpful when you feel culturally clueless at times.
Dr. Robin also does targeted consultations with coaches who wish to gain familiarity with social identity / diversity issues that may be impacting their coaching interventions with ‘diverse’ clients.
It is helpful to read about Dr. Robin’s approach to Cultural Competence and take the Cultural Competence Questionnaire (CCQ) Survey HERE if you are interested in doing this kind of coaching with her.
ACT! Authority, Competence and Trust!
This is coaching in how to give appropriate decision-rights (authority), achieve goals without burnout (competence) and build respectful relationships with others (trust). Dr. Robin operationalized these three factors of empowerment from her doctoral research. The behaviors-based Leadership Trait Questionnaire she designed helps you assess your propensity to seek position power, do work well and relate respectfully with others.
Three key issues get addressed in this type of coaching with Dr. Robin:
- Authority power and the associated decision-making biases — plus their consequences. Both the awareness of, and strategies for, mitigating bias appeal to Dr. Robin’s clients.
- Differentiating between achievement and perfectionism — and understanding the deadly consequences of perfectionism for you and your relationships.
- Operationalizing Trust (especially in cross-diversity relationships). You will learn behaviors for building trust. Dealing with trust issues, especially if you have felt betrayed or harmed historically (based on either personal or social / demographic issues), can be challenging.
Dr. Robin works with you to choose strategically those behaviors that increase trust. Dr. Robin’s approach to being discerningly trust-full makes life more fulfilling.
If you think you would like to do this kind of coaching with Dr. Robin, be sure to take the Leadership Trait Questionnaire (LTQ) HERE or purchase and read her Empowered Leadership book available through Amazon HERE or workbook available for purchase on this website HERE.
As a business school faculty member and executive educator, Dr. Robin has helped a number of her colleagues in the education, training and development fields to be more inclusive facilitators and educators. If you would like support from someone who has familiarity with business topic content and verified skills in coaching faculty to include and respond inclusively to students and participants in the classroom, contact Dr. Robin for a coaching / consultation in Inclusive Instruction HERE.
This session can address any issue you would like to discuss with Dr. Robin as a thought-partner and belief-mapper. She will use the range of science-based, experiential and intuitive tools at her disposal to assist you.
VIDEO
Introduction to The Work Video
Six Secret Soft S.K.I.L.L.S. (Effective Leaders Use)
S.K.I.L.L.S. is an acronym for what you will learn and why these are the secret to leadership success:
Solution-Seeking | Kudos | Inclusive Behaviors | Listening | Learning | S.M.A.R.T.E.R. Goals
Soft-skills development coaching sessions are particularly helpful if you’re trying to build an effective multi-dimensional team — yet experiencing some conflict or hesitation from people who do not want change. Sometimes we must exercise influence to get things done, even when we don’t have enough authority power to make that happen.
These soft-skills can get you there. Dr. Robin will suggest you use the Six Secret Soft S.K.I.L.L.S. Workbook (available HERE) or complete the Six Secret Soft S.K.I.L.L.S. eLearning program (see eLearning tab on Six Secret Soft S.K.I.L.L.S. page HERE), should you decide to do soft-skills coaching with her.
Using the Work-Life Balance assessment you will begin to deepen your understanding of the interconnected nature of all areas in your life and envision / enact a fulfilling, purpose-oriented experience.
A Message from Dr. Robin
Coaching Expectations
People who have met me know that I am known for my compassionate clarity. What that means in practice is that I am likely to share information with you that other people may hesitate to share — not because I am trying to be hard on you, but rather because I believe you come to work with me when you are ready to change; when you are ready to look at those beliefs and habits that are getting in the way of you being the talented, unique, powerful YOU that you can be.
Nonetheless, you have to do the work. In every coaching conversation, I will expect you to have thought about what you want to get out of that conversation, be willing to share honestly about what you see as options and barriers, to have your full attention focused on the session so that new ideas to solve your issues can surface and you can access them, and for you to follow-up on any next steps you commit to doing. If, as we most likely will, you have some homework between sessions, we will schedule another session until you have completed that homework or whatever next steps you agreed to do.
I work best with clients who are mature; who have had some exposure to the world of work and how the world works, some degree of success on their own without help, who have survived failure without rescue … and learned from the event, who have learned to persist and get over it, and are willing to accept responsibility for their own needs. While these clients may have some current issue, or feel they do not fit in their current role or position, in general they have been successful in their lives and work. Are you that kind of person?
In the past, I have had contracts for executive coaching with companies with key managers. I am open to those arrangements with the caveat that my relationship is directly with you — the person I am coaching. So, I do not prepare, share, or send progress reports back to your company about you. You are free to do so — and I am willing to help you design development plans for your manager. However, that agreement to provide that plan is between you and your company.
I use assessments because they help me to come up with science-based coaching questions. I can also tailor my conversations with you so that our interactions are more likely to be effective given some insights into your personality and style. It is an efficient way to get to know you — saving time and money for you, too.
All of my coaching is done using video-conferencing or telephone. I no longer do in-person sessions. We may also be in touch between sessions via email. If we are not using video-conferencing, I do ask you for a photo so I have your face in front of me when we talk. Sessions are one hour or less.
