#8 Linking – A coaching superpower for leading teams

Hi, we’re Helen Zink and Dr Cathryn Lloyd. As coaches who work alongside leaders and teams, we understand the challenges leaders face in today’s complex and fast-changing environment. To support you, we’re sharing a series of 10 coaching superpowers that can help you grow as a leader and make a lasting impact on your team and organisation.

We’ve divided the superpowers into two categories:

Mindset superpowers (1-5): How you think and approach challenges.

Behavioural superpowers (6-10): What you do and how you take action.

These superpowers often overlap, but each one plays a unique role in shaping effective leadership.

⭐ Superpower 8: linking

Great leaders link - building relationships and collaboration across teams. In today’s world, connection is more than maintaining good relationships. It’s about noticing and linking the dots, understanding the context and systems, embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging innovation, and helping people understand and adapt to change. Linking leaders help their teams navigate uncertainty, value collective intelligence, and create pathways that help others connect to a shared purpose and outcomes.

When leaders focus on links, and encourage others to link, the two help create a culture for collaboration and creative problem-solving, along with an environment where ideas flow freely, and everyone feels included in the process.

A few ways to strengthen links in your organisation:

💡 Knowledge sharing: organise presentations or informal exchanges to spread ideas.

💡 Diversity: build diverse teams and encourage varied perspectives.

💡 Cross-functional collaboration: set up inter-departmental projects or brainstorming sessions.

💡 Use technology: leverage collaboration platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

📌 Practical tip – link lab

When tackling a challenge, try a link lab by inviting people from different teams and departments to link up and brainstorm together. Ensure everyone has an equal voice, all ideas are valid, and there are no “bad” questions. Reflect on ideas that link people, challenges and topics, in new and different ways, to ultimately make better choices. 

This simple approach can strengthen links and uncover new ideas and connections.

We’d love to hear how you are experimenting and applying these ideas? 

Share your thoughts with us or get in touch we’d love to hear from you!

Image: Cathryn Lloyd

#7 Learning – A coaching superpower for leading teams

Hi, we’re Helen and Cathryn. We work closely with leaders and teams, and we know that leaders face an array of challenges. We’re sharing a series of 10 coaching superpowers for leaders to experiment with. 

We’ve broken them down into two categories:

# 1 - 5 Mindset superpowers: How you think and show up.

# 6 - 10 Behavioural superpowers: What you do, your actions.

These superpowers often blend together.

⭐ Superpower 7: learning

Active learning is a collective process. Leaders who encourage reflection, feedback loops, and knowledge-sharing help their teams evolve in real-time, rather than getting stuck in old ways of working and business as usual thinking. It also means normalising failure. When mistakes become stepping stones instead of stumbling blocks, teams build resilience and agility and make far greater progress.

A few ways to encourage learning in your team and organisation:

💡 Be curious: value questions and options rather than the right answers (see superpower #2)

💡 Make mistakes learning moments: cultivate a no blame culture and ask what can we learn from this?

💡 Learning labs: schedule time to share insights and future thinking.

💡 Experiment: treat new approaches as tests and feedback loops.

💡 Unlearning and relearning: Futurist Alvin Toffler believed the key to thriving is the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn. Question assumptions, let go of outdated ideas, and continuously embrace new knowledge.

📌 Practical tip - leverage technology

The next time your team is discussing options, create space for shared knowledge and input. If online, use a collaborative platform (Whiteboard, Miro, Mural etc) to brainstorm, capture ideas and insights. Identify new ideas and actions.

Create a team library of collaborative thinking process and ideas to refer back to. 

Consider habits, current thinking and assumptions. What could you unlearn and relearn that would make a positive difference.

Interventions like this help you and your team become more aware of your environment. 

Stay tuned as we share more coaching superpowers. 

We’d love to hear how you are experimenting and applying these ideas.

Image: Cathryn Lloyd

Which version of you is real?

We often talk about “acting” in different situations, but I prefer to think of it as “shining” a 🔦- highlighting different aspects of us in different circumstances. We can be authentic, true to our values, and adapt ourselves, all at the same time. For example: shifting tone in a conversation, adjusting energy, or balancing confidence with humility. Sometimes we need to be direct and decisive, other times warm and empathetic. We can be curious and listen, take a back seat, or step forward and lead. It's still us - even if we are "acting".

Experiencing Olafur Eliasson’s interactive art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki recently highlighted this for me – literally!  Light shining from different angles revealing multiple variations of the same thing - all of them were the real. All of them were me!

In every situation we have a choice - which parts of us need to shine🔦 !