What do you get when you combine the experience of a university professor with the wisdom of an executive coach? You get leadership coaching, which helps bring out the best in your employees and team members through training, workshops, goal-setting, and mentoring.
The benefits of leadership coaching are immense, and if you’re running an organisation or looking to build your career skills, they could be exactly what you need to reach the next level.
Defining Leadership Coaching
Everyone knows what a coach does, right? A coach trains athletes for competition. A leader coaches his team to do well in their industry. It’s no coincidence that leaders of successful teams, like those in sports or business, are called coaches.
Just as a coach helps an athlete make his or her best plays consistently, leaders who want their organisations to perform at their best must provide support, challenge, communication, and inspiration to guide their people into consistent productivity.
Listening, Learning, and Growing
Coaching is more than providing answers. A good coach will listen to what’s really going on in a client’s business, look for patterns, discover what might be holding them back, and work with them to overcome those obstacles.
By getting to know their clients personally, they’re able to offer insight based on first-hand experience of similar situations. Coaches also have an innate ability to see things from different perspectives; they put themselves in their client’s shoes—figuratively speaking—and find creative ways of solving problems from different angles.
Plus, coaches are there for their clients throughout a project or problem rather than dropping out once it’s been solved; that means providing ongoing support for any issues which may arise further down the line (unlikely but not impossible).
Helps Being Compassionate
There are many skills a leader needs to develop to be effective, including high levels of emotional intelligence and people management. But there’s one skill all leaders need in order to succeed at those two things: compassion.
Leaders who are compassionate toward their team members are more likely to put their employees’ needs ahead of their own, which will ultimately make employees happier and more productive.
Being compassionate doesn’t mean being weak or allowing your team members to walk all over you; instead, it means having genuine empathy for others’ emotions as well as treating them with respect.
Leaders who do that tend to be successful because they’re able to increase employee retention rates while also increasing their team’s overall productivity.
Helps Building Trust
As a leader, trust can be one of your most valuable assets. People with high levels of trust earn respect from others; people with low levels of trust find it difficult to gain respect.
A leader who doesn’t earn that respect will have a difficult time motivating and inspiring his team. If you want to be an effective leader, then building trust should be one of your highest priorities.
The first step in building trust is to show everyone (including yourself) that you’re trustworthy. Be trustworthy—and consistent—in all aspects of your life, not just on the job.
Think about how much more confident people would feel if they knew exactly what they could expect from their leaders in both personal and professional situations.
Helps in Smooth Transition
Managing transition into your senior team may seem like an easy thing to do, but have you considered that each individual in your team has his or her own set of expectations? Leadership transitions can cause a great deal of tension between individuals with varying priorities.
Transitions are both challenging and exciting, especially when managing so many transitions at once. In order to manage these transitions successfully, take time to create structure and maintain communication within your organization.
If everyone understands their role in creating success, they will support one another’s efforts.
Helps Delegating Effectively
Delegating work is an important skill to have as a leader, but oftentimes leaders struggle to delegate effectively. Leadership coaching helps managers get better at delegating because they’re able to define their unique strengths and weaknesses, then match those up with certain tasks.
Leaders with poor delegation skills may be too micromanaging or simply unable to trust others with their tasks. With a coach’s help, they’ll learn where they shine as a manager (and what they need to focus on) so that other team members can take over everything else.
Develops Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is defined as the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions and manage interpersonal relationships judiciously.
Leadership coaches will focus on helping leaders develop emotional intelligence because they understand that a leader’s ability to connect with their employees (and team) will determine their ability to lead.
Your organisation will achieve more by helping the leaders in your organisation develop emotional intelligence. In other words, people won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Final Words
So, the ability to lead others or become a good leader takes time. You don’t just wake up one day ready to run a company of hundreds of employees or coach others.
It takes preparation, experience, knowledge, and skill. Good leaders are always looking for ways to better themselves as well as their employees. If you are looking for guidance on your career path in leadership roles or want to learn more about your abilities in order to better achieve your goals, then be sure to look into a leadership coach.
They will be able to help you turn your skills into tools that will allow you to lead effectively, both professionally and personally.
