Coaching

Dr. Marko Rillo is a certified executive coach, member of International Coaching Federation. Marko has completed coaching assignments with a number of CxO level managers from Fortune 500 companies, international organisations (European Commission, World Bank, United Nations) and government agencies. The profile of people he has coached range from 1-15 years of managerial experience, including some people who have demonstrated management potential.

Who is a typical coachee of Marko?

  • Those who want to learn what it takes to become a great leader.
  • Talented management who are candidates in succession planning but deficient in their leadership and communication skills.
  • Technically proficient peple who lack the political will or savvy to both promote and gain acceptance for their ideas.
  • People who want to break the glass ceiling by learning the invisible rules of the game.
  • Inexperienced managers whose development is paramount to organizational success.
  • Established leaders who are approaching burnout and need assistance in balancing work/life or handling aged-related personal crisis.
  • Long-term employees who resist or who have not kept up with organizational change.
  • Strategic thinkers who want to plot new initiatives for their department or organization.

Coaching?

Why coaching

  • Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is, primarily, helping them to learn rather than telling them or teaching them.
  • Coaching is essentially a conversation – a dialogue between a coach and a coachee within a results-oriented context.
  • Coaching is about learning – yet a coach is not a teacher and does not necessarily know how to do things better than the coachee.
  • Coaching is more about asking the right questions than providing answers.

Coaching definition

… a leadership and management activity
… a personal learning experience
… a relationship of trust and partnership
… a dialogue that promotes self-discovery
… guiding the coachee to discover the best way of doing something
… helping the coachee to help him/herself
… enabling the coachee’s learning rather than teaching him/her
… assisting the coachee to confront the opportunities/challenges he/she faces
… raising the coachee’s awareness of the situation
… increasing the coachee’s responsibility for performance and performance improvement

Coaching approach

Marko’s approach to coaching relies on a number of important principles.

Great coaches believe in human potential. Coaches treat you with the respect you deserve as fully functioning human being capable of many and great things. They respect your intelligence, creativity and intuition. Their expectation of you is that you will succeed and their belief in your capability probably exceeds your own. Should you fail in a task, they do not judge you.

Great coaches focus on learning, Organisations require results to survive. However, great coaches are more concerned for your learning than for your results. Very few people are in positions in which one mistake can cause the demise of the organisation, but if the vast majority of the staff stops learning then the organisation will surely collapse.

Great coaches, let the coaches do the work. Coaches are interested in your good ideas and creativity and in your solutions to your problems. They do not dump their good ideas and solutions to you; rather, their listening and questioning allows you to explore a topic and make your own mind up, and then to progress in your own way. They leave responsibility with you.

Great coaches listen. Coaches listen to you because they believe in your potential. They know that you are a unique human being with a unique contribution to make and that, in order to understand what that contribution might be, they need to understand you. (Myles Downey: Effective Coaching)