Coaching the Golden Circle

Many people have heard of what Simon Sinek calls the “Golden circle”. Here we will look at how it was used as part of coaching session to help build an executive presentation.

The challenge: A time-limited presentation to the CEO to get his approval for a new investment.

The initial approach: a 32 slide presentation describing the project, its needs and detailed financial breakdown.

The result: approval based upon 5 slides structured on WHY HOW & WHAT

The approach: Using an OSCAR model as the platform for discussion we redefined the objective of the meeting, from presenting the situation, towards what the Coaching client’s objective was..ie achieving approval…ie his WHY.

We then looked at the realistic attention span the CEO would be likely to commit to the topic, and established that it would be no more than 15 minutes…32 slides, forget it!…so now we had a maximum 5, so no time for WHAT slides…

So we needed to focus on WHY..he should approve it, and HOW will the Coaching client’s team deliver it.

We re-ran the WHY statement at least 10 times until it became more coherent and easy to articulate.WHY did it make business sense, and WHY it was important for future growth.

Once the WHY statement was coherent, the selection of what to include in the HOW slides became relatively simple as they had to support the WHY!.

After an hour’s coaching we ended up with 5 slides, but more importantly, the realization on the part of the Coaching client that he did not in fact need ANY slides to make his case!

It can be argued that the Golden Circle can be used as a very useful coaching tool to help focus conversation on what really matters when preparing for a meeting or presentation.

If you are interested in applying this coaching approach, contact me via the contact link.