When I started working in IT, back in 2000, I thought I didn’t like people. I worked hard to get as far away from them as possible. I worked on back end systems, and spent years learning everything but people. Then I got into management... I did not do well.

I felt like an impostor that didn’t belong. I didn’t feel confident telling my manager, so I did what a lot of us do. I faked it. I pretended I knew what I was doing, and I hid my feelings of inadequacy from the people around me.

As part of faking it, I read a lot online about what I should be doing. I copied what popular people at the time were doing. Annual reviews, performance management, one-to-ones, etc. I did everything you were supposed to do. And I got pretty good at it. But not good enough. I still felt like a fraud, and my teams could feel it.

It wasn’t until I had 2 lucky conversations that things started to change.

The first introduced me to the psychology of motivation. The second introduced me to the interconnected nature of work environments and organisations - systems thinking. And I loved it.

I went on to study psychology and systems thinking, and their surrounding disciplines, over the next few years. And they reshaped my view of the world.

Things started to fit better. My feelings of inadequacy went away. And I got really, really good, at being myself. At leading my way, working my way, and helping others.

Over time, I started coaching other leaders, and doing consulting, for organisations that were on similar journeys to mine. For 10 years, I helped organisations adopt better engineering practices, think about management differently, and question their assumptions about what they had to do. I was pretty good at it, too.

But it wasn't enough.

The problem wasn’t that the change program I created didn’t work, it was that its ability to create change wasn’t dependent on the program; it was dependent on the coachability of the leaders.

Coachable leaders? Successful program. Uncoachable leaders? Unsuccessful program.

When I worked with coachable leaders, I regularly got to watch them have epiphanies and see the world in new ways. And let me tell you, I’ve never found anything so professionally rewarding. So, with the support of people I’d helped, and my family, I started working as a coach.

I have distilled the core of what I learned in the last 25 years, so I can share it with you.