Print edition: 
One of the pioneers in professional development coaching is in Wichita this week, helping a Kansas-based leadership organization fine-tune its own coaching skills.
Wichita native Pat Williams, founder of Coaching the Global Village in Palm Coast, Fla., will spend this week as a guest faculty member at the Kansas Leadership Center, 300 N. Main, motivating a team of leadership coaches whose goal is to strengthen civic leadership in the state.
Williams will work with the KLC's coaching team, headed by Julia Fabris McBride, the center's director of coaching and alumni engagement.
Williams said his job is to help leadership coaches fill a gap with their clients — primarily businesspeople and civic leaders — to help put leadership theories to work.
"In the leadership or executive coaching arena, it's how do I manage more effectively?" Williams said. "It's a work-life balance, but the manager as coach is an overarching philosophy now.
"Micromanagement and command-and-control leadership don't work well with the new generation coming forward." '
At the KLC, Williams is coaching the coaches, helping the group advance its core goal of developing civic leaders.
The leadership center is one of the few in its nation with a statewide reach and an emphasis on growing civic leadership, officials said.
It's leadership that requires a mentor — a human sounding board — to develop, McBride said. Otherwise, the implementation of leadership training can be difficult.
In the business world, the obstacle is a reluctance to change, she said.
Williams compares his role to the approach John Wooden used coaching UCLA basketball to 10 national championships.
"The best coaches are known for what they do during the game," he said. "They're no longer teaching, but they're trying to bring out the best ability and performance at each moment from that player.
"John Wooden was known for taking a player out and sitting next to them asking, 'What could you have done better? You really did this well.' He's not watching the game, but he's coaching the person."
The art of leadership coaching has been around since the 1970s in the executive business arena, although it's fairly new to the public and civic arena. Today, there are 18,000 members in the International Coach Federation in 104 countries.
"People come to me mostly to talk about their work," Williams said.
"What opens the door to coaching is generally something work-related, but the larger conversation is how this fits into your overall life.
"You're a human being, not a human doing, and we get that confused sometimes."
