Charmain Bogue

  Endings are data. I started paying attention to what they were telling me. The professional development content almost nobody writes is the ending. We write about starting coaching relationships, building trust, the early breakthroughs. We do not write much about the client who wraps up without getting where she intended, the engagement that ends before the change takes hold, or the leader who finishes the work and goes back to every habit she said she wanted to leave behind. I have had all of those. And I have learned more from them than from the ones that went well. The patterns I kept seeing Some endings are genuinely successful and complete. The leader set a goal, did the work, changed the behavior, and the coaching relationship served its purpose. Those are good endings and they feel like them. But there is a category of ending that looks like completion and is not. The client wraps up the engagement politely, says the right things about what she learned, and within a few m...

The plan was never the problem. The meeting after the plan was the problem. I have read a lot of strategic plans. I have helped write some of them. And the thing that strikes me every time is how much intellectual effort goes into producing a document that most of the people it is meant for will never read again after the launch presentation. This is not a document design problem. It is a behavioral problem, and it has a specific cause. What actually happens after the presentation The plan gets launched with some combination of ceremony: a leadership retreat, a slide deck, a message from the executive director. People nod. Some of them are genuinely energized. Then everyone goes back to their inboxes, and the daily work reasserts itself, and nobody has built a mechanism to connect the decisions being made every day to the priorities in the plan that took months to write. Three months later, the plan is in a shared drive. Six months later, nobody can remember what the four strategic pil...

Performed certainty is not leadership. It is a liability in disguise. There is a version of executive presence that I spent years trying to perform. It involves sounding certain when you are not, projecting calm when you are worried, and delivering answers before you have really thought through the question. I was told, at various points in my career, that this was what leaders were supposed to look like. I do not believe that anymore. And I think the version of confidence that gets taught in leadership programs does real damage. The cost of performed certainty When a leader performs certainty she does not have, she closes off the information she needs most. The people around her read the performance accurately, as a signal that there is no room for the honest read, for the person who has noticed something going wrong, for the question that would slow everything down. I have coached leaders who presided over genuine organizational failures while looking utterly composed. The composure ...

Protected thinking time is not a luxury. It is the work. The most common thing I hear from executives in their first coaching session is some version of the same sentence: I know what I need to do, I just cannot find the time to do it. The calendar is full. The inbox is full. The meetings end and more meetings appear. The thinking keeps getting deferred to a future week that never arrives. I used to spend the first part of those conversations trying to help people find the time. I have stopped doing that. The time does not get found. It has to be taken. The category error most leaders make The problem is a classification error. Most executives treat thinking as something that happens in the leftover space, the thirty minutes between calls, the flight they hope goes long, the weekend morning before the family wakes up. They schedule the work that produces visible output and leave the work that produces judgment to chance. But judgment is the job. A senior leader who does not have protec...