DR ANDREA KILPATRICK
Executive/Leadership Coach, Coach Supervisor.
Andrea Kilpatrick is an accredited Master Coach who specialises in helping senior leaders navigate leadership transitions, strengthen confidence and develop their leadership identity through evidence-based, psychologically informed coaching. She works with senior individuals across all sectors, with particular experience in professional services and financial services.
Prior to becoming a coach in 2006, she spent ten years in Executive Search. She then worked at London Business School as an in-house coach for Executive MBA students from 2007-2011 and has run her own coaching practice since 2012.
Andrea has a particular interest in confidence and has a Doctorate in Coaching with the topic of the experiences of challenges to confidence in the transition to senior leadership and the support of coaching.
She cares passionately about maintaining high standards in coaching as well as contributing to and supporting evidence-based coaching research. She is a trained Coaching Supervisor and supervises coaches individually and in groups. She is an editor for the IJEBCM (International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring), mentors coaches pro bono for the Association for Coaching and is an academic supervisor on the Cambridge Master’s in Coaching programme.
Andrea holds a Doctorate in Coaching from the International Centre of Coaching and Mentoring Studies at Oxford Brookes; an MSc in Career Management, Coaching and Organisational Behaviour from Birkbeck, University of London and an MA in Modern Languages from the University of Cambridge.
Interview with Andrea
Andrea: I think I believed that I needed to be so fully prepared on everything, including really understanding their role and industry. Now I still do my prep but more to help me think about what might be going through their mind and how they might be arriving in the room, rather than details to show that I know about their working world.
The concept of experimenting. It really liberates the client if you help them to think about experimenting with something they want to change and using coaching as the place they can come back to safely to report back. I see them relax when we talk about it i.e. it doesn’t need to be a big change yet, an experiment just frees them up from doing something permanent or significant but gives them the freedom to try it differently (a conversation, an approach, managing a meeting differently, pushing back etc etc) then to be able to reflect on it with me.
This is hard! I’m not really sure now. Maybe realising that the door handle moment i.e. that moment just as the client is about to leave (especially a new client or in a chemistry meeting) is when the client feels most relaxed to be able to say something they felt they couldn’t say earlier. So leaving a bit more time and space at the end of the meeting for this.
I really want people to feel that they want to go and explore what I have introduced further. I want to plant some ideas, grounded in research and depth of thinking, but not “own” it or “control” it for them. I also want them to feel supported in the discussion and safe enough to explore with me and to ask questions and introduce their own thoughts.
I know from supervising new coaches that most of them find it really difficult to put their finger on something that’s right there in front of them with the client or to address something directly, including how they are feeling when the client says something. This could be as simple as “when you tell me this, I feel a real sense of xxx “ and then exploring this with the client. This takes time and courage.
I was flattered to be asked – I like sharing my research and thinking about my topic but don’t always have the opportunity to do so as my portfolio is so full of 1:1 coaching and I don’t have as much time as I’d like for teaching/sharing/thought leadership. I respect Dr Lowe and know that this will be a good programme. I also want to be able to learn from the learners on the programme.
I’ve been doing it for 20 years so it’s harder and harder to remember! But I worked in executive search for nearly 10 years prior to this and found it really dissatisfying as it was really about getting bums on seats and there was no time to really understand the person in front of me or to help them think more broadly about their career direction. So I realised that I wanted to help people 1:1 initially as a career coach, which led them to leadership coaching. It’s a privilege to give people the space and to hear their innermost thoughts/fears/worries/plans and to help them to be able to move forward in some way.
I think it’s helped me to push my assumptions aside about people and to really take each person and each moment as it comes. It has also helped me to really explore and go deep with people – perhaps this is too much in my daily life sometimes and I need to remember to keep it surface level a bit more when I am not coaching!
I’m not sure if there is an individual really. Often, when I see someone who is successful but so very busy with fingers in so many pies I think I’d like to give them the space that they probably really need to sit down and work out if what they’re doing is sustainable and to help them think about how they could do it differently. I often have this thought in particular with musicians – I support a lot of musicians/arts organisations – and they make money by taking everything that comes their way without at some point thinking about what they really want/what their differentiator is to other people and how they can build on this to stand out from the crowd.