The Leading with Insight Model

Although the Leading with Insight model has been presented in a

linear fashion, clients tend to move through the quadrants in a more

circuitous manner. They may be working in more than one quadrant

at a time, just as Clare had to expand her abilities to engage in

meaningful one-on-one conversations with her peers as she worked

on her Quadrant 3 goal of getting her team to approve her earlier

proposal. Sometimes clients set more challenging goals for themselves

and need to shore up their work in earlier quadrants to

support this new level of achievement. This often happens when a

client is promoted. The new position will most likely create more

pressures and may involve having more difficult conversations or

working with a much larger network of people. Clients may choose

to deepen their facility with the earlier touchstones in order to step

successfully into these new challenges.

The Leading with Insight model describes the web of development

that underlies the vast array of outcomes that coaching can

deliver. The development that is described is sometimes handled

overtly in coaching conversations, but it is more often integrated

into the context of the coaching work.

It is important to bring this model into our awareness now to

ensure that the essence of what makes coaching so powerful is not

lost as more structure, focus, and discipline are applied to this

complex process. The opportunity before us now is to harness the

power of coaching to transform people and organizations in strategically

significant ways. The challenge is not to lose the power of

coaching in the process.