We’ve reached a milestone at Padraig: This is our 250th blog post!
As milestones go, hitting 250 seems to be a pretty auspicious occasion. After all, the celebrations for a centennial are big, but for a “sestercentennial” even more audacious 😉.
The first blog post was written by Patrick O’Reilly, President and CEO of Padraig, on September 13, 2013.
Patrick founded Padraig in 2012 to provide one-to-one leadership coaching after leaving the leadership team at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. Patrick was a senior executive at just 28 years of age and the CEO of a Crown corporation in charge of a large team in his early thirties.
In the inaugural blog, he pledged that the blog would, “offer some suggestions, some tips, some tools that you can use in your daily management life, and that we use here at Padraig.”
Back then, it was an era of highlighting only the wins on social media, and curating our lives to look perfect. It’s important to know that those first few years we didn’t post on a regular basis, and we didn’t have confidence people wanted to read what we had to share. Plus, blogging often took a backseat as our then tiny company struggled to do everything that needed to be done to serve our clients.
As the Padraig team has grown, clients continue to book one-to-one coaching with our leadership and executive coaches—each of whom has earned a Graduate Certificate in Executive Coaching and certification from the International Coach Federation (ICF).
“I’m proud that we’ve remained a client-focused boutique leadership firm as we’ve grown,” says Patrick. The Padraig team is now able to create customized programs for large clients and provide à la carte leadership programs for smaller clients.
Twelve years in, clients also come to Padraig for:
- programs to build more cohesive leadership teams.
- coach-led leadership peer programs (The Partnership for experienced leaders who want to boost their success and The Network for new and aspiring managers).
- live online – one seat a time – Padraig leadership and courses offered by our partner Eclectic Communications on Odality, a one-stop-site for public registration courses.
We’re excited to share that we’re soon launching self-paced leadership training, with a library of courses that are all designed based on our years of coaching managers and leaders. “My Leadership Tools” will launch in the next few weeks with affordable options for individual leaders and for organizational clients who want to provide high-quality, self-paced, leadership learning to all of their staff.
Over the years, we have managed to build a cadence of publishing blogs every second Tuesday. And by the way, Patrick walks the talk: In 2014, recognizing where his skills weren’t serving the company well, he hired a writer to write the Padraig blogs—delegating effectively so that he could focus on running and growing the business.
“Like many leaders, I was worried about delegating a function that was important to the company, but needed the help,” says Patrick. “Karen has been great at capturing my voice and in adapting her style to suit our readers.”
Padraig blog topics are timely, often subjects that our executive coaches and other team members suggest would be meaningful for our clients in the moment.
This grassroots approach to deciding blog topics has worked. Our clients and other managers read what we write, subscribe and share the blogs with others. We often hear back from readers with comments like, “today’s blog was just what I needed to read right now,” and “I shared this week’s blog with our entire management team—what a timely reminder for us.” Patrick has even been asked for permission for Padraig blogs to be used for educational materials.
Some of our most popular blog posts have included:
- What to do when you have Imposter Syndrome
- How to take a vacation from work (and really unplug!)
- Ways to conquer the loneliness of leadership
- Finding the emotional courage to make mistakes (and learn from them)
- It’s time for women leaders to bring out hidden powers written by Padraig Coach, Eve Gaudet
- When high flyers don’t play nice with others
- How to turn difficult conversations into essential conversations
- Regaining control amid the busyness of life
- How to get buy-in on big ideas
In the spring of 2019, Padraig had grown to seven coaches and a support staff member working with Patrick on the Padraig team. The team gathered from across the country for the grand opening of office space in Winnipeg and hosted clients at an open house.
Everyone had been working from home and it was exciting to move into a new phase with a bricks-and-mortar office—and then the pandemic swept across the globe in the spring of 2020 and companies had to shift to working from home.
Padraig was proud to support leaders through this challenging time of fear, worry and lock-downs by curating topics that would help leaders navigate the pandemic. There were many, but a few of the most popular included:
- Managing grief and anxiety in uncertain times
- How to lead an exhausted team when you feel the same
- What it takes to be a company of the future
Then, before we knew it, there was a blog about another one of life’s milestones: celebrating Padraig’s 10th anniversary of providing leadership development.
The Padraig team gathered for a team summit in Winnipeg in February 2023 (yes, Padraig staff wanted to gather in Winnipeg in winter!) and the Padraig client appreciation and tenth anniversary celebration event held at The Leaf, an incredible new horticultural attraction at Assiniboine Park.
At the event, the inaugural Padraig Leadership Award was presented to Margaret Redmond, the recently retired CEO of Assiniboine Park Conservancy.
The team summit was inspiring for the coaches and support staff, and led to another popular blog post titled, Our Coaches on Leadership: What leadership means to them.
We are so grateful to all of our loyal readers and supporters, and those who have contributed ideas for us to use for blog posts. If you don’t already subscribe to our blog, we encourage you to sign-up for our newsletter (scroll to the button of the blog page).
Celebrating milestones is better with friends and family, so we invite you to share this post—or your other favourite posts—with the people in your life. You’ll also find our Padraig posts on LinkedIN; engaging with our posts by liking them, commenting on them or sharing them is a great way to expand our reach.
And please keep your suggestions for future blog posts coming! We invite you to share your thoughts and ideas with us.
Here’s to reaching milestones, especially hitting the 250th blog post! We are so happy with the Padraig journey so far because every day we see the leadership impact you are making with a little bit of help from us. Thank you for your support and engagement with us through the blog, dear readers.
Coach’s Questions: What milestones are you most proud of? What milestone are you striving to reach? How will you celebrate when you achieve it?
