Our main objective here at the National Coach Academy is to enable aspiring coaches to reach their full professional potential. One of the most effective ways to educate students about the world of coaching is by offering them a window into the world of real, practicing coaches and showing them all the different ways coaches make a difference in the lives of their clients.
We hope today’s interview adds another insightful glimpse into the dynamic world of coaching.
Today we are interviewing Dianna Anderson, MCC. Dianna is the co-founder and CEO of Cylient. Cylient’s programs teach professionals to take a coaching approach to day-to-day interactions, deliver coaching and developmental feedback from a place of service to others, and to create Change-Able® coaching cultures.
NCA: Can you describe your coaching practice and the kinds of clients you typically work with?
Dianna: Our sole focus at Cylient is instilling coaching as a culture in organizations. We do that through workshops that I developed years ago — a workshop called Coaching in the Moment and one called Feedback in the Moment. We typically deliver this work to companies that are pretty large. We have some Fortune 100 companies as well as some smaller organizations.
This work grew out of my individual coaching work at the beginning of my career, way back in the early 1990s. It’s been an interesting career trajectory.
NCA: What initially got you interested in this career path and what kind of degree or certifications did you need to complete, if any?
Dianna: It’s still vivid for me because my career initially was in Change Management — large-scale change management consulting. I did my MBA up in Canada and then got hired by an American consulting firm and was doing really large-scale work. Then I got married, had kids, and was looking for what I was going to do next. This was in the early ‘90s.
I happened to open a newspaper in Houston, Texas and read what I believe to be probably one of the very first articles that was written about coaching as we would know it today. It featured Thomas Leonard who is the founder of Coach University. I signed up and started Coach University pretty quickly after that. I’m like the 30th or something graduate from Coach U. [laughing] Really, really began in the beginning.
There was no certification. It didn’t exist. The ICF didn’t even exist. The ICF came out of Coach University. Thomas Leonard founded it and everyone who belonged to Coach U at the time was made an ICF member. That’s how I got started. It was very, very new.
Our work at Cylient is providing managers, leaders, or anyone in the organization with in the moment coaching skills so they can just weave coaching into day-to-day conversations with anybody about anything. No implied relationship there. You don’t even have to really know the person. Ignite insight by using a coaching approach in a conversation and have someone see something from a different perspective and be changed by it.
NCA: What would you say is the most rewarding part of your career and on the flip side of that, what is the most challenging aspect of the work that you do?
Dianna: For sure, the most rewarding part is just watching how people really truly grow and develop and make significant — sometimes huge — life changes as a result of coaching. I can remember actually speaking to Thomas Leonard and saying, “Hey! Thanks for creating this work.” It’s amazing to get to do it and see the kind of difference that really good coaching can make.
Initially, the most rewarding was individually watching people make this kind of change. Way back in the early 2000s I saw the potential for coaching to be a leadership style and a way of life. I’ve worked very diligently to take the essence of what makes coaching work and make it scalable across thousands of people. For me, what’s really rewarding is to watch the work that Cylient does — transform not just individuals but entire organizations. That’s pretty cool.
NCA: What would you say are the unique benefits of coaching that distinguish it from other related fields (therapy, consulting, social work, etc)? How do you approach this topic with somebody who may have heard of coaching but they don’t quite know what the difference is?
Dianna: To be honest, that question was really, really big in the early 2000s. My former husband and I wrote a book called Coaching that Counts that was based on some of the first ROI work that was done on full coaching engagements. We looked through the ROI lens and said, “How does coaching make a difference?”
What we saw was that it makes a profound difference. You can measure tangible results that come as a result of really good coaching, particularly if it’s connected to a business. You can look at metrics like sales, efficiencies, and all kinds of things. On the softer side, you can ask people to describe changes in relationships or their ability to transition into new expressions of themselves professionally. You can get people to describe pretty accurately the ways that really solid coaching impact their lives.
My experience with impact has been, “Who’s asking the question and what is it that they most value having changed and how do you find a way of expressing that that feels true, accurate, and genuine?” Often in life coaching, you can get your clients to speak about what’s different in their lives and invite them to reflect upon and capture those changes and share them.
At Cylient, we define coaching as being the translation of insight — an A-ha! experience into meaningful action that is doing something differently in order to realize potential. Our focus is not just on correcting something but it is on inviting the person that we’re working with to step out being more of who and what they are.
Coaching can be offered in many, many different formats. I think it’s a leadership style. It can be woven into a conversation. It can be expressed through committed coaching engagement between a coach and a person receiving coaching. I think how that relationship gets defined is really important and I think that’s where we look to some of the ethical guidelines we get from the ICF or other professional organizations.
Our work at Cylient is providing managers, leaders, or anyone in the organization with in the moment coaching skills so they can just weave coaching into day-to-day conversations with anybody about anything. No implied relationship there. You don’t even have to really know the person. Ignite insight by using a coaching approach in a conversation and have someone see something from a different perspective and be changed by it and never see them again. We hold it as a way of life.
If you’re serious about coaching, you have to be serious about pushing the edge on your own learning and your own insight as a coach and that comes from finding the people that will challenge you wherever they may be. I think really great coaches work with really great coaches.
NCA: Can you think of a mentor who was the most vital to your success as a coach and in what ways did this mentor help you thrive in your career?
Dianna: Cheryl Richardson was really the person that taught me what coaching was all about. I consider that to be a fantastic gift. She is an amazing coach and really laid a fantastic foundation for me.
Throughout my career, every time I wanted to take myself to the next level — whether it was moving out of life coaching to be a leadership and executive coach or whether it was exploring a different expression of coaching — I always sought out the most skilled person that I could find to work with and hired them to be my coach. While I was actively coaching a lot of clients, I pretty much always had a coach of some description, whether someone was teaching me how to get into a new area or whether I was just associated with a network of coaches who I had the deepest respect for, who served as peer coaches for me and I for them.
If you’re serious about coaching, you have to be serious about pushing the edge on your own learning and your own insight as a coach and that comes from finding the people that will challenge you wherever they may be. I think really great coaches work with really great coaches.
NCA: What is one piece of advice that you would give to somebody who is just starting out in their coaching career?
Dianna: You have to think of this as a business. You really have to consider whatever you offer is going to generate revenue consistently for you, so you really have to give that some thought. I’ve seen just way, way, way too many coaches through the years who started with really good intentions but not good plans on how they were going to get started and struggled. There’s lots of different ways in doing that and I think lots of good advice out there on how to form your business. That’s the one piece of it. That’s the hard piece.
The more encouraging and heartfelt piece is let your intention or your focus find you. Don’t make such a hard decision that you’re going to do this but not do that in the beginning and instead accept the opportunities that come towards you. Take a coaching approach to reflect upon what seems to speak to you and why and who’s showing up to work with you and what they seem to be taking from that experience and build upon that. I think that’s how each of us find our own unique gift and I think that’s how really resilient and impactful coaching practices are founded.
