Celebrating your coaching buttons

We launched Coaching Buttons a year ago as an open resource to help anyone on their leadership journey. And we are thankful to have an engaged community of leaders, both sharing articles and reading them.

Opening the community

The website had been in the planning stages since early May 2023 as a "client community" website, where we would invite our current and previous clients to share their leadership viewpoints as a weekly guest essay.

But around that time, the Enterprisers Project and Opensource.com websites effectively shut down. The Enterprisers Project was a valuable resource for IT leaders, sharing insightful essays on leadership, and Opensource.com hosted articles about the Open Organization approach to open leadership. With the loss of those community resources, we decided to open up the community at Coaching Buttons.

We officially launched Coaching Buttons in July 2023 as an open community focused on leadership at all levels within and across the organization. And we remain committed to that vision. It doesn't matter what your role is in an organization; everyone leads both across and within an organization. You don't need to have a title like "Manager" or "Director" to benefit from Coaching Buttons. At Coaching Buttons, we want to share articles that help everyone on their leadership journey.

For the last year, we have published weekly leadership essays, every Monday. But as we continue to grow our community, we want to provide more opportunities for you to share your story. Starting this week, we're experimenting with increasing our schedule to twice per week, every Monday and Wednesday.

Share your story

Coaching Buttons is an open community about Leadership. We invite you to share your leadership story with us at Coaching Buttons. If you're not sure how to get started with your first article, here are a few suggestions:

What's your leadership approach? Everyone has a different perspective on leadership, or leads in a unique way. Your insights on leadership will help others to build new leadership skills. Someone else wants to read how you approach leadership in your organization.

Share your leadership lessons. Anyone can lead from within and across the organization, from CIOs to IT Directors, managers and supervisors, and line staff. You don't need to have a traditional "leader" title to contribute to Coaching Buttons. Share your story about the lessons you learned as you forged a path and led the way.

Your leadership community. A popular article style is the "roundup" where you ask colleagues about their approach to a common problem, and share their comments as an article. For example, you might poll the leadership community you're plugged into about how AI is reshaping their strategy, or what strategic challenges they are facing right now.

Share your leadership journey. Because everyone can lead from within and across the organization, and you don't have to have a classic "leadership" title to lead others, everyone will have a unique journey to their leadership role. Tell your own story about how you became a leader, at whatever level you are within your organization.

Interview someone about their style. If you don't feel comfortable sharing your leadership perspective, ask someone else about theirs. Reach out to someone you know and ask them five or six questions about leadership. What challenges do they face? What was their leadership journey to their current role? What experiences prepared them for leadership? What mentor or coach helped them transition into a leadership role?

Look to the future. Every leader needs to consider the future landscape and build plans to respond to that future. Share an article about one upcoming challenge and discuss how you're addressing it.

We welcome anyone to share their story about how they lead. If you'd like to share your leadership perspective, contact our editor at jim@hallmentum.com.