Leadership Coaching

Trends
 
Google “coaching” and you get 132,000,000 responses! Life, career, sports, action, success, sex, executive, personal, leadership, results, chess, retirement, dissertation… choose a theme, and you can find a coach for it.
 
One thing this demonstrates is the increasing acceptability of coaching, both at work and in your personal life. Coaching is no longer seen as being about addressing a weakness, but as an essential tool to help you make sense of the increasing complexity of life in the 21st century. As one very successful Chief Executive told me recently, he now wants to know why his top team members haven’t got a coach, rather than interrogating them on why they need one! In some sectors, flaunting your coach has almost become a status symbol associated with having arrived.
 
Coaching and Leadership
 
So, why has coaching become mainstream in business? From our experience, there are a variety of drivers. Firstly, it’s very lonely at the top. You have few peers, and there are many issues which you just don’t want to discuss with people in your business. Outside of work, one of the casualties of success is often the absence of a supportive professional network outside your own business and family. An executive coach can plug this gap, as well as help you develop strategies for building your network.
 
Secondly, the challenges of business in the 21st century: pace of change, globalisation, environmental and political complexity – combined with the challenges of leadership, providing strategic direction, keeping shareholders and other stakeholders happy, and developing a strong executive team – means that leaders have to manage a huge degree of uncertainty, ambiguity and paradox. They need to rethink their approach continually, and value their coach as an objective and independent sounding board.
 
Thirdly, leadership programmes can be great for inspiration, leading edge thinking and new ideas – but often you return from them all fired up and enthused, but very unclear about the implications for your personal leadership practice, how to apply the insights in your workplace, and where to start. There are so many theories about what makes a good leader, many of which are contradictory - or only found in Superman, gods and prophets - emotionally intelligent, authoritative, supportive, strategic, synergistic, proactive, visionary, empowering, etc. If you tried to do all these things at work, the word would soon be out that you are suffering from a severe personality disorder! So, coaching can be a very effective way of helping you make personal sense of leadership programmes and theories, and develop strategies for implementation, tailored to your personality and personal situation.
 
Finally, in a tough new role you need to make an impact quickly – to reassure the believers that hired you that you are the right person to deal with the challenges, and that their investment in you has paid off. All too often, highly talented and able people derail themselves in the first few months by not making an impact quickly, not appreciating the subtleties of the new work culture, the intricacies of the office grapevine, or harping on too much about how things were done in their old company. Coaching can help you through the minefields of the first few months to develop strategies and action plans which make a difference to the business, and ensure your personal success.
 
 
Leadership coaching
 
So, what’s involved in Leadership Coaching? First, you need to find the right coach - one who you believe can help you. Our first meeting about coaching is always free – to check that the chemistry between us is right and that we can work collaboratively to address your issues. Our next step is to get you to complete some psychometric profiles, to understand how you see yourself, and your possible strengths and weaknesses. With your permission, this may include getting feedback from colleagues, either through a 360° feedback survey, or by interview. In the actual coaching meeting, we use a four-step approach:

• Identify and agree coaching goals, both for the whole coaching process and each meeting
• Explore the situation in depth – people, business realities, constraints, perceptions
  
• Generate a range of options and evaluate for impact
  
• Build an action plan, including how to minimise risk and locate leverage points
  

Typical coaching sessions last about two hours, with their frequency depending on your issues and timeframe. Face-to-face meetings are supplemented by email and telephone support, so if you need an immediate sounding board, we’re there to help.
 
 
Two Final Trends
 
Two noteworthy trends we’ve seen recently are: increased requests for coaching for the whole top team, and the need for leaders to act as coaches within their businesses.
 
Top team coaching is growing in popularity, as many businesses recognise that effective performance requires more than great individuals doing their own thing. With team coaching, we start by diagnosing what’s really going on, the hot issues and the risk factors, by interviewing all team members and key stakeholders, and observing you in action as a team (shades of The Apprentice!). In addition, we can sculpt a psychometric profile for the whole team, showing potential strengths and danger points. Next, we set up a series of team meetings to feed back the issues, agree priorities and goals, develop strategies and create action plans. A key success factor is creating a coaching environment in which team members feel they can give and receive really open and honest feedback. The team sessions are often complimented by individual coaching for each person, to help them make personal sense of this and address any issues which they are unable to raise within the team.
 
Finally, coaching your top team is now seen as a vital and major component of many senior roles. Last year, one of my coaching assignments involved coaching a Chief Executive to coach his top team, following a downsizing which increased the scope of team members’ roles. Increasingly, our clients are seeking help in setting up internal coaching and mentoring schemes, including training leaders and managers for these roles.
 
Some Final Thoughts:
 
‘If a man coaches himself, then he has only himself to blame when he is beaten.” Sir Roger Bannister
 
"A good coach will make his players see what they can be, rather than what they are." Ara Parasheghian
 
“You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.” Galileo Galilei