Business
	Singapore, Singapore
	50,000 words
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Synopsis

As it is with physical fitness, building core skills helps us build capability required for the far more strenuous challenges.  These challenges abound in our organizations and in the world today. What is clear is that we need to work with and through people while doing things we often haven’t done before.  

In Manage Like a Coach: , Dr. Robyn Wilson reflects on the state of leadership and gives readers well chosen tools to develop and strengthen the core and cornerstone skills needed when managing and leading people.  

These are the skills we tend to think we are competent at but when under pressure, they tend fail us. Curiously, these skills are ones that good coaches rely on all the time, and become fundamental for supporting long term team peak performance and sustainability.

Dr. Robyn Wilson's bold management and leadership insights emerge from coaching processes and experience to get back to basics. Or use what she calls cornerstone skills: listening, connecting and giving feedback, to name a few.

Coaching conversations are not about coaches in any sense, and yet still become very intimate and trusting. The only vested interest is in the coachee's personal success, which results in tremendous change in how they gain clarity around focus, becoming more confident, growing in their sense of their capabilities, improving relationships at work, and most importantly, achieving higher results while being able to navigate uncertain challenges in the workplace.   

Imagine for a second, if managers in organizations embraced these coach skills in a way which would not be counter-intuitive to their sense of responsibilities as a manager. Putting focus back on the people to build skills that work for their success in their jobs. Business as usual would become more strategic, more practical, and more trusting--basic values in the changing state of leadership today.

Outline

The Push and Pull; the manager’s challenge in today’s world
Connecting with others
The Simple Basics

• Listening, simple questions, noticing, describing and responding

Deepening the Connection with others

Cornerstone Skills

• Giving direction, holding accountabilities, giving feedback, providing stretch & support, caring

Understanding Process 

Putting it into Practice

• Situational examples & tasks (with workshop sheets)

Useful Language Tips

Self Work (oxygen to self before oxygen to others)

• Self awareness (critical)
  
• Emotional awareness
  
• Values, aspiration and mindset (enabling and barriers)

The Real Work

• Having conversations that matter, fears, being uncomfortable, practicing courage, reflecting & having a positive future focus
  
• Application to facilitating Systems Thinking processes
  
• Coping with the narcissists & toxic workplaces

The Push and Pull; integrating, dealing with paradoxes and finding the edge.

Appendices

• Tools
  
• References
  

End of each skill chapter:

• Ways of assessing and at deepening levels of expertise
• How to develop, strengthen & monitor
• Reflection and double loop learning

Audience

Target audience would be managers/leaders who have some experience and are aware that they need to work on how they manage people (not at manager 101 level).  They have most probably been to some leadership programs, but may still feel stuck or not as effective as they want to be. Old enough to realise some self-awareness may work for them, and that a bigger cause/purpose/focus is important - rather than just be focused, only, on achieving their own goals.  
Senior and middle management.

It’s a good time now because managers and leaders are getting overwhelmed with  complex and ambiguous world they operate in along with the multiple generations and cultures they work with, and in many cases, feeling helpless.  Giving them do-able toe-holds where they can build a foundational and important/critical skills and see an impact would be a great encouragement.

Author

Robyn has more than 30 years of experience in the corporate, university and entrepreneurial worlds demonstrating a unique blend of senior leadership roles combined with deep experience as business facilitator, consultant, executive coach, educator and researcher.

With a strong academic background in Mathematics, IT / IS and Engineering, a decade of hands-on management, Robyn has spent nearly two decades in Asia and the Middle East working extensively with senior leaders, their teams and organisations, across most industries, cultures, countries and with all facing very different types of challenges as they manage and grow their respective organisations.

Providing facilitation support while business leaders, themselves, work on their issues and challenges plays to a fundamental philosophical approach Robyn has to her consulting work. She works with organizations and individuals across a range of issues which can include strategy execution, leadership and team / organisational capability building, innovation, cultural awareness as well as global / regional readiness and the customer / stakeholder experience.

Complex environments, challenging topics, cross cultural elements all play to Robyn’s strengths, which also include being inclusive, open, empathic and caring while not letting the hard issues escape.

Robyn has worked closely with multi-national corporations, Asian investment holding companies, government ministries & agencies, commercialising state-owned enterprises, Government Linked Companies, MNCs, SMEs and Asia-grown companies across the Asia Pacific region, and startups.

Additionally to broader facilitation Robyn coaches executives across diverse organisational functions – from CEOs, C-suite and board members, to senior management such as regional, country and global functional heads, their teams and high-potentials.

Robyn founded Praxis Management Consulting in Singapore in 2001. She has a PhD (National University of Singapore), Masters of Engineering (University of Western Australia), and a Bachelor of Science (University of Queensland).  

Promotion

Current social media presence:
LinkedIn: 1340+ (with people I know)
Facebook: 600+ (with people I know)
Twitter: 470+ followers (@RobynEWilson) 

Have hired an assistant (who knows me and my work and has helped me before) for a few weeks to help lineup content to build up my Company mailing list, as well as for me to identify who in my network I had count on for crowdsourcing campaign.  Can also use this to ramp up twitter followers.

• Writing some blogs
  
• Articles for sharing
  
• Graphics with quotes
  

Have access to various relevant networks who can help boost presence and circulate crowdsourcing, when needed.

• Will have articles ready to accompany this

Competition

• The Coaching Habit  By Michael Bungay Stanier
  

• Coaching for Performance : The Principles and Practices of Coaching and Leadership by  John Whitmore
  

• Books by Marshall Goldsmith
  

• Multipliers, Revised and Updated : How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter  By (author) Greg McKeown , By (author)  Liz Wiseman
  

• Daniel Goldman’s books; Unlocking Potential: 7 Coaching Skills That Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations (Michael Simpson & Dr Marshall Goldsmith)

I am focusing on a number of critical, foundational coach skills. Other books are either more narrowly focused (like “Insight” by Tasha Eurich) or cover "how to coach".  In some of the books above, there is need to give the basics enough attention to help leaders really become capable in them in order to support the focus of the book's theories and/or frameworks/models.  These books also present some of these basic coach-skills, but not all are in one book.