Understanding leadership coaching
Let’s ensure we are on the same page about what leadership coaching is, before we dive into the discussion. Leadership coaching is a developmental process where a leader receives tailored guidance and support to enhance their leadership skills. Unlike traditional training programs, coaching is extremely personalised and focuses on the leader’s unique strengths, weaknesses, and goals. It involves a collaborative partnership between the coach and the leader, aimed at fostering self-awareness, improving decision-making, and enhancing overall leadership effectiveness. Coaching processes are led by the coachee, as a coach, I always describe the sessions as a safe space for the coachee to bring all of themselves, share, reflect, and get some external perspective and support. Sounds amazing right?
How leadership coaching is growing in popularity and importance
When I started my career, coaching was often seen as punitive, and not developmental. I was in a corporate role working in the space of strategic and leadership development, and if we wanted to suggest coaching to support a leader in their role, either because it was a new role, or because we felt that it would be great for them in working on their goals, we had to approach the topic very strategically. The leaders who were on coaching processes never spoke about it with colleagues or subordinates for fear of being judged as “needed help”. I guess coaching was (and sometimes still is) viewed in the way that therapy is still often viewed in. Sadly, this has meant that many leaders have missed out on the incredible value that leadership coaching provides.
The transformative power of leadership coaching
At Contract, we approach coaching from a coachee led perspective, and work with the coachee on what they need, their goals and aspirations, and on developing stronger approaches to creating and trusting personal solutions to challenges. We consider the coachee in all their life roles, not just their leadership role. All communication is kept at an eye-to-eye level.
Let’s dive into some of the value that leadership coaching provides, we have identified seven key benefits that leadership coaching provides:
1. Enhanced self-awareness: One of the main benefits of leadership coaching is increased self-awareness. Coaches help leaders identify strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots. This can be done through personality profiling tools, such as Insights Discovery, Enneagram, Lumina Spark and many more. Other methods could be unpacking organisational feedback processes such as 360-degree feedback tools, or through the coaching process reflections. The coach would monitor the trends in the discussions, reflect these back to the coachee, and share observations and insights.
2. Improved decision-making: Leadership coaching equips leaders with the tools and techniques to make better decisions. By fostering critical thinking and reflective practices, coaches help leaders analyse situations more effectively and consider multiple perspectives before making decisions. This is often unbelievably valuable for leaders, just a safe space to think through options, outcomes, consequences, and impact of decisions. The coach would support the leader through the thinking by asking critical questions, sharing tools, but the leader would formulate the solution.
3. Better communication skills: Surprisingly, communication is a huge challenge at all levels in an organisation and having support with developing better communication approaches is incredible. Communication is at the heart of successful leadership. Leaders are challenged with the balance between transparency and confidentiality
4. Increased wellbeing and emotional intelligence: Leaders are facing more challenges for themselves and their people than ever before, and their employees look to them to be an example and a secure support system. Coaching can provide a safe space for the leader to work through some of these challenges, to find inspiration to do better and to create more safety for their team members. In a recent coaching conversation with a business leader, we explored the challenge in their team with overload and the feeling of constant time pressures. This leader noticed the pressure the team was under, but she was also under significant pressure and felt she could not hand anything over to the team to create more space for her to focus on some key strategic elements. This was negatively impacting the business. We explored methods to collectively find solutions within the team, to accept the things the team may not get to (that are not urgent), and to support the team in prioritising the key topics.
5. Cultivating curiosity: In my view curiosity is one of the most important leadership traits for leading today. Working with a coach helps leaders to open up to varied perspectives, to explore different outcomes and possibilities. This translates to healthier responses within the workplace and to creating more human approaches.
6. Empowerment and accountability: The coaching process creates empowerment for the leader, but also a method of accountability to goals, development steps and actions. While the coach does not act as a teacher – scoring you on your actions, the coach will support you in reflecting on what may have led to not achieveing certain goals. This method enables greater ability to take more informed action going forward.
7. Humane and inclusive leadership: Our purpose at Contract is to “Inspire a humane economy” – this is an economy that priorities more than just financial goals, but also the impact that the organisation has on the people within the system, as well as the communities and environment around the system. Coaching leaders can challenge them to think bigger, act more responsibly and priorities the culture they create in their team and in the organisation.
Conclusion
Of course, by my strong advocation for coaching I strongly believe that leadership coaching is a powerful tool that can transform leadership, and organisations. Coaching should not be done in isolation, but the personal one-on-one approach is one of the greatest ways to get leaders to focus on THEIR impact. When coaching is offered to all leaders, there is a higher likelihood that transformation within the organisation can occur, that leaders will be more open to create new/ better/ different ways of working, talking to each other, and running the business.
We are offering some of our top sellers at a discounted rate currently, including some leadership coaching. I would love to chat more to you about our top three offers, please click here for more information. Feel free to contact me directly at az.oc.as-tcartnoc@yrrah.latiahc.
