Episode 1: Conversation with Georgia Boon, CEO Allsorts, who shares the lasting benefits of leadership coaching for herself and the charity with Jacqui Stearn.

When Georgia first sought coaching she had recently been appointed to her first chief executive role with the Gloucestershire Charity, Allsorts. The charity supports children and young adults with additional needs and their families and has grown from 40 families to 350 over ten years. The conversation with Jacqui took place two years after the coaching, enabling Georgia to reflect on the medium term impacts of the coaching relationship.

“The first session was hugely impactful because of Imposter Syndrome, that feeling of ‘what am I doing here and why me and surely there’s someone else who could do this better’. I definitely came into the (new CEO) role with that feeling. You invited me to reflect on my career to date, something I’d never done. I’d looked at roles. I’d looked at specific tasks and specific projects to understand my preferences and my impact, but I hadn’t looked at that career arc as a whole. The encouragement to do that really made me look differently at the chief exec role, made me very conscious of where my strengths were and where I would need to work. That was enormously helpful and has stayed with me.”

The conversation also touched on the impact of a systemic constellation that was organised to look at a wider organizational issue.

“One of the things that the constellation uncovered was that there was a wider organizational issue that was historic that I had been essentially turning a bit of a blind eye to – that didn’t happen on my watch. You know we’ve moved on, we’re a different organisation now. But it showed that people really needed me to be interested. So immediately after the constellation when people started to delve back into this issue I would open them up on it and really listen and really try and understand where they were on it. That moved us on from a place where things had felt quite difficult.

“And I really realized in that constellation that the organisation wanted me to get involved in the difficult spaces and in the contentious and unclear things. So it was really interesting.”<o:p></o:p>

A future episode of the Coaching Conversations podcast is with Jane James which will explain about systemic constellations for organisations.

Since we recorded this podcast, Georgia has taken up a new role as the Director of Partnerships at the Barnwood Trust in Gloucestershire.

Allsorts website: http://allsortsglos.org.uk<o:p></o:p>

Barnwood Trust, Gloucestershire: https://www.barnwoodtrust.org/

Coaching with Intent http://www.coachingwithintent.co.uk