Leadership and Coaching | Three Years at Boo
Leadership and Coaching | Three Years at Boo
Three Years with Boo: A Journey of Learning, Growth and Flourishing
Three years ago, I joined Boo Coaching and Consulting. Three years. It feels like both yesterday and a lifetime ago.
When I first joined Boo, I knew I was joining an organisation that cared deeply about people, learning, coaching and creating healthier, happier workplaces. What I perhaps didn’t fully appreciate was just how much I would learn, how much I would be challenged and how much I would grow along the way. Most importantly, I didn’t realise quite how much I would enjoy the journey.
Finding my place at Boo
One of the things that has made my time with Team Boo so rewarding is the opportunity to bring together so many of the things I care about: coaching, leadership, wellbeing, relational practice, learning and culture.
My work has taken me into conversations with people across healthcare and other organisations, supporting leaders, managers and teams to think differently about how they work and how they create environments where people can flourish.
Sometimes that has meant coaching someone through a difficult challenge. Sometimes it has meant facilitating a conversation that needed to happen or designing a new programme from scratch. It has, of course, always involved creating fabulous flipcharts! And sometimes it has simply meant creating a space where people feel safe enough to pause, reflect and think about what they might do differently.
Three years of learning
If there is one thing I have learned during my time at Boo, it is that great facilitation creates the conditions for change.
It isn’t about having all the answers or being the person in the room who knows the most. Instead, it is about creating the conditions where people feel safe to contribute, confident to challenge, curious to learn and motivated to take action. That philosophy has shaped the way I approach coaching, facilitation and learning.
A few years ago, I wrote a published paper about embedding psychological safety within teams. Through my time at Boo, I’m grateful that the topics that pique my interest show up in so much of the work I do. I’ve been able to build on that learning, and I love that my knowledge continues to grow.
I’ve learned much more about psychological safety, compassionate leadership, organisational culture, team coaching, wellbeing and the complexity of leading change. I’ve also learned that the best learning often happens when we are prepared to be curious, ask better questions and admit that we don’t always know.
One of my favourite pieces of feedback was, Cath is really knowledgeable and also confident to shrug her shoulders and say, ‘I don’t know, it depends.’” I rather like that. We can be curious together and explore what is possible.
From delivering programmes to creating them
One of the highlights of the last three years has been the opportunity to develop new programmes and content, alongside moving into my new role as Director of Culture and Leadership.
I’ve moved beyond delivering established sessions to designing learning experiences around the needs of different organisations, leaders and teams. That might involve taking a blank piece of paper and asking: What do these people actually need? What will be useful to them? What will make them think? How can people feel the impact? What will help them have a different conversation when they return to work tomorrow? And, perhaps most importantly, how can we make learning engaging, practical and memorable?
There is something incredibly satisfying about seeing an idea that started as a scribble on a piece of paper become a conversation, a programme, a beautifully designed flipchart and, ultimately, something that helps people make a difference.
The people make it
Of course, three years isn’t really about programmes, qualifications or projects. It’s about people.
It’s about the colleagues who have challenged me, supported me, encouraged me and made me laugh. The clients who have trusted me with their stories and challenges. The leaders who have been willing to stop, reflect and consider a different way of doing things. And the groups who have surprised themselves with what they can achieve when given the right space to think together.
The people I’ve coached have also reminded me, time and time again, that sometimes the most powerful thing we can offer someone isn’t advice. It’s our curiosity, attention, deep listening and belief in their ability to find their own way forward.
What does the next chapter look like?
Three years in, I’m still learning. There are still new questions to explore, new programmes to develop and new conversations to have.
I’m particularly excited about continuing to explore the relationship between coaching, leadership, wellbeing and culture, and how we can help organisations create conditions where people don’t simply survive busy and challenging working environments but have genuine opportunities to flourish.
Because ultimately, that’s what continues to draw me to Boo: the belief that work can be a place where people are healthy, happy, connected, supported and able to do their best work.
There are lots of places you can work, but there aren’t lots of places where you can turn up, have a serious conversation about organisational culture, spend an afternoon talking about psychological safety, create a beautifully designed flipchart and have frivolous fun with fabulous folk. And somehow, at Boo, all of that makes perfect sense.
