Nasim Smadi (Founder of Edara. com)

To cultivate a positive relationship with your boss: - Understand your boss's communication style and adapt your communication approach accordingly. - Prioritize your tasks based on your plans and objectives, as well as your boss’s deadlines. Demonstrate your ability to balance acts and deliver results. - Maintain a positive attitude and focus on solutions, not problems. Avoid being overly critical. - Proactively communicate with your boss, provide updates, and seek feedback. This builds trust and transparency. - Align your personal goals with your boss's priorities. Look for ways to contribute what benefits both you and your organization.

The last executive I coached was a skeptical public manager. Government directors are usually harder to coach, because they don’t adhere to the coaching process easily. Before our 2nd coaching session, I learned a simple process after reading “Reinventing Coaching” book. here are the simple lessons I learned and applied: - Be humble and listen intuitively. - Don’t rush, prove your competence, show integrity, and deliver. - Use the Appreciative Inquiry approach. Instead of focusing on problems, find strengths and focus on Positiveness. - Showcase similar previous Successes you achieved with other executives, but never boast or compare. - Be ready to go a long way to win trust and confidence. Behavior change doesn’t happen overnight.

In 2010, I read Kenneth Blanchard’s book: “The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey” مدير الدقيقة الواحدة يقابل القرد to shift from manager to coach. Managers assign separate tasks, coaches delegate jobs and hold their teams responsible. The difference between task assignment and job delegation is - to quote Mark Twain – “as different as lightning from a lightning bug." Instead on handing out tasks, I started by announcing the plan and specifying goals, delegating defined work to a job owner, empowering her/him to accomplish the job with an acceptable percentage of mistakes, and seek help from the team before coming back to me. I even replaced the process of feedback with process of “Feedforward”, means: Show more results than reports.

With psychometric solutions becoming commonplace, individualizing, and maintaining team spirit became an easier task than before. As an editor-in-chief, I used a particular personality assessment test to differentiate between translators who incline to translate short texts creatively, and those who possess resilience and stamina to handle lengthy texts, and big translating projects. After training the all team members on perfecting their writings, I empowered the first team to translate the difficult paragraphs within the long texts translated by the second team. This way, the members of the first team became self-driven and motivated in helping the second team take responsibility for complex and writing projects.

Self-awareness is the foundation of Emotional Intelligence. It starts with observing your inner self and those around you as a leader. When you're unaware of your emotions and how they affect others, you become subject to them. Emotional Intelligence involves not just understanding yourself, but also your team members - their strengths, weaknesses, motives, and values. Individualizing your approach is critical to getting the best out of different personality types within your team. Ultimately, self-awareness and understanding your team members are key to effective leadership.

The key factors in making strategic decisions in executive coaching should initially and not exclusively include: - Clarifying the organization's vision and executive roles - Seeing the big picture and long-term goals - Analysing external environment to recognize competitive advantages - Specifying strengths/weaknesses of the enterprise - Having a foresight and adapting to change - Developing critical thinking and problem-solving - Empowering executives and teams to drive innovation - Embracing strategic thinking and continuous learning