The Strategic Coach

 

The OLC Strategic Coach

 

Two books in one volume — for the coach who is ready to move beyond the coaching encounter

 

There comes a point in a coach's development when the one-to-one conversation, however skilled, is no longer the whole of the work. The client sitting across from you is carrying something larger than themselves — a division that has lost its direction, a board demanding a plan, a market that has quietly stopped rewarding what the organization is good at. You can coach that leader beautifully and still watch the organization drift, because the leader was never the only thing that needed to move.

 

The OLC Strategic Coach is written for the coach who has reached that point and wants to go further — not by abandoning coaching, but by extending it into the territory where organizations actually set direction, align themselves, and survive disruption.

 

WHO THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN FOR

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1   The coach ready to embrace leaders and organizations in strategy

You want to work at the level where vision is set and futures are chosen — helping leaders and their organizations pursue vision-aligned futures and move through the threats of disruption rather than merely reacting to them. This volume gives you the frameworks, the language, and the facilitation discipline to hold that conversation credibly.

 

2   The coach with sound methodology, seeking a larger application

You already understand coaching methodology — presence, listening, powerful questions, evoking awareness. What you have not yet had is a structured way to apply that competence to leaders who must lead and align whole organizations. This book shows you how to walk alongside such a leader through the entire arc, from private uncertainty to public commitment.

 

3   The coach becoming a strategist

You are ready to help organizations carve out progressive visions, missions, and values — and then move them into a disruptive future while maintaining business advantage. Not as a consultant who delivers a document, but as a strategist-coach who builds the client's own capacity to think, decide, and act.

 

The coaching encounter is where clarity begins. It is not where strategy ends.

 

WHY TWO BOOKS IN ONE VOLUME

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We debated publishing these as separate titles and concluded it would have been a disservice. The work of coaching a leader toward strategic clarity and the work of guiding an organization through a strategic planning process are not two disciplines. They are two applications of the same discipline, drawing on substantially the same tools, the same frameworks, and the same facilitative stance — applied first to one person, and then to a room.

 

The dual architecture of The OLC Strategic Coach.

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Separating them would have forced you to buy the same toolkit twice, and worse, it would have obscured the connection that makes a strategist-coach effective: the leader you coached in Book One is the leader who must stand in front of the team in Book Two. We put them under one cover because that is how the work actually unfolds.

 

BUILT AS A COURSE, NOT MERELY A BOOK

 

This volume was designed from the outset to teach. Every major tool is presented with its purpose, its development steps, its product, and its place in the strategy plan — followed by facilitation notes from live practice and reflection questions for the coach's own development. It serves equally as self-directed study, as a cohort text, and as the spine of the OLC Institute's strategy curriculum.

 

WHAT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO DO

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• Coach the leader who must decide — hold an executive through the ambiguity that precedes every real strategic commitment, without rescuing them from it.

• Facilitate an intact leadership team — a fundamentally different skill from coaching an individual, and one most coaches have never been taught.

• Read disruption before it arrives — environmental scanning, threat analysis, and the discipline of testing an organization's assumptions about its own advantage.

• Build vision, mission, and values that hold — not wall art, but statements a workforce can act on when the leader is not in the room.

• Run a full planning process end to end — including the Seven Management and Planning Tools, taught in sequence, with the facilitation guidance that makes each one work.

• Convert a plan into accountability — owners, priorities, contingencies, sequence, and the review rhythm that keeps a strategy alive past its first quarter.

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A consultant is paid to produce the plan. A strategist-coach is engaged to build the capacity that produces the next one.

 

Move beyond the encounter.

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The OLC Strategic Coach — available now from Organizational Leadership Coaching®, LLC  www.olcinstitute.com  ·  San Antonio, Texas

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(210) 710-0998

 

Gary Charles Patterson, M.Div., Th.M., D.D., CCUCG, MCC, ESIA

Founder and Chief Vision Officer, Organizational Leadership Coaching®, LLC and the OLC Institute

 

 

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