Leadership

Coach Profile

Dr Anna Clark (PhD): Leadership Coach

Dr Anna Clark is a leadership consultant and coach designing and delivering leadership programs and individual coaching for a range of leadership roles, creating customised designs to support the development needs of individuals, teams, and organisations.  Anna has over 12 years’ experience coaching a range of emerging, middle, and senior leaders from both private and public sector organisations including health and education. Anna specialises in supporting individuals to identify meaningful and realistic development goals, and to then create and enact personal action plans to support their development in a practical and sustainable way. Anna also writes regularly for AMA Victoria, publishing on leadership topics highly relevant to the complex care and collaborative leadership required in healthcare settings. Anna holds a Bachelor of Behavioural Science (Psych, with Hons) and PhD in social psychology and held academic positions in psychology and organisational behaviour departments in the Netherlands, France, and Australia. 

Coaching is a structured and guided conversation. It is designed to provide the person seeking the coaching with the opportunity to explore something they want to learn more about, or develop in themselves or others. The coach uses the coaching process to support the person to set the agenda and to create an action plan that is aligned to their goals, while also being realistic and actionable in the immediate and short term. 

Leadership coaching is specifically about exploring a person’s leadership role and about improving their effectiveness in this area by increasing their knowledge, skills, and practices at work. 

Leadership becomes important as we gain experience and proficiency in our core professional work. As this happens our work moves more and more to include the work of understanding and leading interpersonal, team and organisational structures and processes. We are in meetings, making decisions, negotiating, trying to influence and create change. These areas of work usually demand skills beyond what we learnt in our technical training. And being proficient in these skills demands a strong and positive sense of who we are, what we stand for, and what are our strengths and weaknesses in various areas and tasks.  

Once you have selected a program, you can enrol by clicking on the booking button and selecting a time for your first 1-hour consultation.  Future consultations will be booked directly with you at the end of each consultation.

If you are unsure which program is best suited to your needs you can call us on (03) 9280 8722 or email careers@amavic.com.au to discuss this with our team. It may also be possible to change programs during your first session.

Once you have enrolled, you will be asked to complete a short form where you share your reasons for undertaking leadership coaching, and your current thinking as to the development areas you are most interested in.  While a comprehensive leadership development plan will be discussed and created within the program, this initial statement provides a useful starting point for your first session.  Your coach will have read this statement prior to your first consult, and therefore has some background to you and your current thinking around leadership development.

Who am I as leader?

What does it mean to lead within this role? How can I take up this role and make it my own, so I can be strong in my leadership and feel authentic? 
 

Leading with others and leading teams

How do I lead with others and co-create the best solutions and improvement collaboratively? How can I work to create effective collaborative teams and a climate of psychological safety? 
 

Managing difficulty and navigating roadblocks.

How can I lead and manage difficult people and situations most effectively, so we do not get distracted and lose focus? 
 

Leading change and culture.

How can I communicate our strategic priorities and directions most effectively and bring people with me?

There are many reasons people work with a leadership coach:  

• Engage in your own personal development to further your leadership capabilities and practices.
• You may want to grow your understanding and skills in leading and developing others – to ensure you are working and leading in a way that enables and empowers others to do their best work.
• You may be curious about how to lead larger organisations and systemic structures and processes – to step into leadership roles and lead effective change.
• You may want to make a space in your professional life to engage in conversations that support your wellbeing and understanding of what’s happening around you in order to better respond to your own and others’ needs. This may be especially relevant during and after this COVID-19 pandemic, as so much of what we do has been shaken up. 
   

Example entry points for engaging a leadership coach 

• I am noticing that more and more of my work involves leading teams and leading across teams. I need more support in this area.
• I feel like I’m interested in leadership roles, I am just not sure what leadership approach I want to take and how to develop my skills.
• My current and potential future positions are requiring more leadership experience and expertise. What does this mean and how do I get it? 
• I’ve been in senior leadership roles for a while now, and I know there are things I need to work on, I’m just not sure how.
• Developing my interpersonal skills with patients is one thing, but I feel I need support in developing my skills in leadership to work with others in my team.
• Part of my role is to develop others and engage in performance conversations and evaluations. How can I do this better? 
• I know from feedback that I need to develop my leadership and interpersonal skills, how can I do this effectively? 
• I am not working well with some of my colleagues; what are some ways I can develop my leadership skills to improve this situation? 
• I am progressing in my career and I feel ready to move into more leadership and management roles – how can I prepare for this transition?
• I don’t feel I have the skills to deal with difficult conversations with colleagues, especially if there is conflict.

The leadership coaching service provides a pathway to begin the important work in responding to these development opportunities and challenges. Through this service, the resources provided and one-to-one conversations with a leadership coach you can create the goals and action plans for your development work that are right for you now. 
 

Our resources can provide ways for you to:

• Read and understand more about coaching – the methodology and practice and what makes it an effective development practice for you and your organisation.
• Read and understand more about leadership and effective leadership practice – both generally and in the health sector.
• Understand and examine your own interests and motivation for leadership development and what you would like to get out of leadership coaching.
• Begin to prepare to engage in a coaching session or set of sessions by making some notes on your goals, motivations, and areas of interest to give structure and guidance to the coaching conversations.

Coaching conversations can be powerful in unlocking and supporting effective leadership development. While one-off coaching sessions can be effective, and appropriate for certain needs and situations, more often, effective development emerges from a structured series of coaching sessions. For example, a series of 4, 6 or 8 one-hour sessions. Several high-performing business schools and leadership development providers around the world use a 4-session program, which can be extended if desired, as their base coaching offering.
 

Coaching programs

Coaching programs are a series of one-on-one sessions spaced out in time to allow people to have the time and space to think and reflect on the work they are doing, and to put into practice some of the thinking, skills and practices that come up as they work with the coach and design development plans. 
 

How a coaching program works – structure of sessions

Individual coaching works effectively when people have a structured way of working and the time to engage in relatively deep analysis of their current leadership capabilities and what they would like to achieve, and then have the time and space to implement new actions and behaviours, receive feedback and can discuss and reflect on their progress and challenges. Four or more sessions are a good structure for this as it allows a couple of sessions at least to be devoted to the different parts of this process. 

Coaching is a professional development tool often used to assist individuals by giving focussed attention to their areas relevant to their specific growth and development and to planning this process in a way that is meaningful and achievable for them. Coaching can also be designed to be aligned with organisational aims (and associated effective behaviours) and ongoing support in implementing their action plans – constantly monitoring and assessing, refining, and adjusting, and to getting through tough periods when they arise.
 

What coaching is not

Coaching sits next to a wide variety of professions and types of professional support that can be useful in professional and personal development. Such as:

• Psychology
• Psychiatry 
• Counselling 
• Training programs 
• Mentoring 
   

When issues arise that are outside the scope of leadership coaching

It is sometimes the case that conversations around leadership development can touch on personal issues that may be outside the scope of what leadership coaching sessions can effectively manage. Sometimes these may be related to current or past experiences of mental health issues or bring up negative feelings and emotions that may be suited to exploring with practitioners in psychology, psychiatry, or counselling. Pursuing deeper self-development and self-awareness means that issues in our personal lives will come up, and the leadership coaches are well equipped to help identify things that while outside the leadership coaching area, may be important to follow-up elsewhere and are trained to direct to relevant services and contact details. 

This is an acknowledgement that sometimes issues may come up that, while relevant to ongoing professional growth and development, may be outside the scope of leadership coaching at the time, and may be usefully supported by other methods. This can be very deep and personal work, and coachees may discover that they want to understand more of themselves, or past experiences, or personal and professional relationships or conflicts. This work is not for professional coaching, but for disciplines and experts in fields such as psychology, psychiatry and counselling. Sometimes, people also identify a need for a mentor, an advisor or a sponsor for their work and professional development, and these roles are also outside of coaching.