Resourcing – 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 9: resourcing

Great leaders go beyond providing tools and budgets, they shape an environment where teams can thrive. Resourcing is about recognising potential, advocating for your team, clearing obstacles, and tapping into networks to create opportunities.

Leaders who excel in this don’t just fix problems; they equip their teams with the skills to navigate challenges independently and innovate with confidence. Leadership isn’t about being the primary problem solver. The shift from providing resources to facilitating access encourages self-sufficiency, resilience, and shared ownership. Without adequate resources, frustration builds, bottlenecks emerge, and opportunities are lost. When teams are resourced, they engage more deeply, think creatively, and manage uncertainty with confidence.

Resourcing connects closely with superpower 6: sensing and superpower 8: linking. Effective leaders identify patterns and dynamics (sensing) and create meaningful connections between people, ideas, and opportunities (linking).

Ways to strengthen your resourcing superpower

💡 Build relationships: strengthen networks inside and outside your organisation.

💡 Negotiate effectively: identify needs and create mutually beneficial solutions.

💡 Influence strategically: develop compelling business cases to secure resources.

💡 Simplify processes: remove unnecessary barriers and complicated procedures that slow progress.

💡 Encourage open dialogue: create space for team discussions about support and resource needs.

📌 Practical tip – resource mapping

When facing a challenge, use a resource map to visualise available and needed resources.

1. Write the challenge in the center of a whiteboard (physical or virtual).

2. Draw three concentric circles around it, labeling them: within our team, within our organisation, and outside our organisation.

3. Brainstorm and categorise available resources. Ensure all voices are heard and ideas valued.

4. Identify how to access or strengthen key resources.

This approach helps teams gain clarity on what’s available and where to focus efforts.

We’d love to hear how you’re applying these ideas. Share your thoughts with us or get in touch—we’d love to continue the conversation!

Image: Cathryn Lloyd

#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