Coaching - essential missional leadership skill

Coaching is a useful way of developing people's skills and abilities and of boosting the morale, involvement and the mission of the local church. It can also help deal with issues and challenges before they become major problems.

A coaching session will typically take place as a conversation between the coach and the coachee and it focuses on helping the coachee discover answers for themselves - people are much more likely to engage with solutions that they themselves have come up with.

All learning and development requires feedback. Coaching provides the opportunity to recognize good performance and manage poor performance. Ongoing feedback on both the good and the bad helps ministry relationships to flourish. Typically, a ratio of 5:1 of positives to negatives is needed to provide balance.

Coaching also provides time out of the day-to-day frenzy of activity to focus on the big picture; achieving meaningful goals. This is much more satisfying for you and your staff as well as being important for the church. It also provides the opportunity to work on the parish not in it.

Rev Megan Harvey writes;

The leadership course with John Eatwell was one of the most helpful things I have done since becoming a priest. His information and research was very rich and inspiring. This was so much more than how to handle complaints or the traditional models of leadership. The fact that he keeps up to date in numerous areas is a plus. It was a good reminder that to be a good leader you need to be in a good place, and he had lots of suggestions about that. Ministry changing for me.

Bridie Boyd loved the training and wrote;

I found the training superb and will be recommending it highly to my employer and to other members of my parish. I found the deep dive into the biomechanics of self care to be incredible. I found the psychology behind effective teams to be really interesting and I am already applying it both at work and in my discipling/mentoring roles. Overall I want to commend the Diocese for organizing such a valuable training - sometimes the secular world can offer great wisdom and this training was one of those times. A thanks to Megs as well for providing lunch - it was really nice to get to know everyone a bit better over some kai!