In the business world, the concept of leadership coaching and the overall idea of what an effective leader looks like have experienced a major shift in recent years. Rigid and punishingly hierarchical workplace structures are gradually being phased out in favor of more collaborative relationships, placing teamwork, individual contribution, and individual value at the top of the priority list.
Alongside the rise of the open-plan office and the ubiquity of workplace Slack threads, a new concept of leadership has begun to emerge:
The Effective and Conscious Leader that Leads Through Their Influence Rather than Their Position Within the Company!
These leaders nurture collaboration and creative teamwork rather than simply implementing top-down orders.
For the new leader, empowering the team from within is the name of the game. What an unprecedented opportunity for women leaders on the rise!
Responsibility, meaning, and purpose are given to every aspect of the work at hand. Today’s leaders have become increasingly more concerned with the wellbeing and work satisfaction of their team as a means to drive happiness, productivity, and collaborative discussion — all resulting in a more agile and creative workplace and in a leadership model that’s more people-oriented than task-oriented.
When put together, these changes are not only the perfect recipe for a smarter, more collaborative work environment but also crucial for any long-term career success and personal growth. The new leader can lead anything with confidence and organize her team members with empathy and open-mindedness at the forefront of her leadership style, gaining precious soft leadership skills in the process. This new, self-assured leader can succeed in every role set in her future career path — but how can she get to this point?
Leadership coaching has proven to be the key.
What is leadership coaching?
So, let’s see exactly what leadership coaching is and why it has become so crucial for forward-thinking higher-ups looking to improve their leadership skills, boost their career development, and establish themselves as true pioneers for their role.
At its very core, leadership coaching is a collaborative relationship between an expert leadership coach and a mentee, which can be an experienced outside consultant, team leader, a business owner, a manager, or a director.
This Relationship Takes the Form of a Tailor-Made Leadership Development Program Set to Identify What Organizational Goals the Leader Wants to Achieve and What Skills She Needs to Work on to Achieve Them.
A leadership coaching program is 100% bespoke and tailored to the individual character and career objectives of the mentee, a far cry from the highly structured, highly formulaic leadership training seminars you might have taken before.
The goal of leadership coaching is to help you change behavior and establish habits that achieve your unique vision and business objectives with an understanding coach as your trusted mentor and ally. In fact, a coach’s primary goal is seeing your unlimited potential to implement effective changes and removing any obstacle along the way through a combination of deep listening and extensive, targeted questioning (which, at first glance, is not unlike a traditional therapy session!).
On top of this ongoing listening, guidance, and support, a leadership coach will provide leaders with the necessary tools and resources (think helpful reading materials or problem-solving strategies) to get out of the leadership slump and closer to their goals.
The strength of this one-on-one process lies in the environment of trust and the collaborative relationship established between the coach and the mentee, with true objectivity setting leadership coaching apart from the classic leadership training: Your coach doesn’t have any stakes in your business or business outcomes, only in your individual growth and success.
On the road to that individual and professional success, emotional obstacles like a fear of failure or lack of confidence can be just as detrimental to your overall happiness and satisfaction as a leader as mental hurdles like work anxiety and habit-breaking issues. The job of a coach will be to help you identify and address these issues so that you can work through them at your own pace, free of judgment or deadlines. The end goal of leadership coaching is to help you find a solution to these problems yourself and prevent similar obstacles from appearing again in both your home life and work.
Why leaders should consider working with a leadership
coach
At this point, you might be thinking that leadership coaching is not for you.
After all, you’re a hardworking leader with years of management experience in your sector, you keep up to date with the latest in leadership development and business training, and you pride yourself on being an attentive leader who’s comfortable with change, feedback, and innovation. However, if you’ve been trying to implement organizational changes that aren’t really sticking with the team or have been trying to boost your workplace’s performance with tried-and-tested techniques and seeing no improvement worthy of note, working with a leadership coach might just be the answer to your troubles.
Leadership coaching is not a process for clueless, ineffective leaders. On the contrary, it is a training model designed to give you the self-confidence and awareness necessary to boost your existing leadership skills and take the business to new heights.
Leaders who seek out expert leadership coaches are going the extra mile to ensure they are doing right by their team, customers, and clients by optimizing their performance for a new era of work — one where determining roles and responsibilities is only the beginning.
Directors and heads of major companies are waking up to the more collaborative and creative reality of the modern workplace, and they are now keen to implement leadership coaching programs and incentivize their workers to get in touch with coaches themselves.
If they don’t do this, the consequences will be felt across the board: recent leadership development figures show that a whopping 71% of companies don’t think that their current leader will be able to carry the organization into the future and truly thrive in a dynamic marketplace. In addition to that, only 18% of organizations feel like their leaders are effective at meeting the company’s business goals, and
A tiny 19% of organizations have admitted to actually being effective at developing leaders
Yet, more money and resources are spent on leadership development than any other sector of corporate training!
What this means is that teams have to work harder and smarter to reach their organizational goals and develop effective leadership, with a big part of the process being trusting creative leadership coaches to bring a breath of fresh air to the way their leaders think, communicate, and act.
The biggest benefits of leadership coaching
Leadership coaching can have both long-term and immediate benefits for individual leaders and teams alike, promoting an atmosphere of growth and innovation on all levels.
Let us walk you through the biggest proven benefits of working with a coach to achieve your goals as a leader.
It will expand your awareness of how you’re perceived as a leader
One thing that hard-working leaders need, yet often don’t get nearly enough of, is objective feedback… especially how they present themselves.
Of course, most employees working for an organization will usually benefit from scheduled performance reviews and informal feedback on their projects and daily tasks. Leaders, on the other hand, will have a hard time receiving any form of feedback from their teams, with the exception of the performance review that may be given by superiors. Still, even the feedback you might get from these reviews will be targeted towards business decisions and organizational matters, with little to no room for an honest conversation about your true strengths and weaknesses as a leader.
Working with a coach can help you identify your greatest strengths as a person and as someone in a leadership role so that you can play to them more efficiently, maximize them, and even take time to improve them. Basing your actions around your “genius zone” will make you more satisfied with your work and proud of the direction you’re going in, motivating and energizing your team as a result.
By the same token, leadership coaching can also help you recognize your weaknesses so you can address them and use resources provided by your coach to improve upon them.
In short, self-awareness is key to success, and leadership coaching can help you identify what areas you should improve on to drive real change for your organization.
You will figure out your leadership style
In a similar way, working with a coach can help you figure out where you stand when it comes to leadership styles.
Some leaders are more authoritarian than others, supervising all processes from top to bottom and always ensuring that the team never fails to carry out projects to the letter. Other leaders are more laissez-faire, giving their team full decision-making power, freedom to carry out tasks as they see fit, and letting things run their course as much as possible. More democratic leaders will actively consult their team when solving a problem or making decisions, guiding participative meetings, and valuing each insight before committing to a course of action.
There are pros and cons to each leadership style, and a big part of being a self-aware leader is recognizing which one you are already implementing so you can decide for yourself whether you want to make a change or not, depending on the results it has brought to the workplace so far. Your coach will share their insights on your leadership character as you share more of your day-to-day work interactions, and they will give you the tools to incorporate something new if you’re not satisfied with the impact it’s having on the business.
You will pick up new strategies for productivity
Improving productivity is often at the top of the list when it comes to leadership coaching goals. We want to maximize our potential to the fullest, but sometimes we lack the tools necessary to be more efficient on a daily basis.
Working with a coach can help you master your productivity by identifying where the problem lies, setting up better habits, and building new strategies to implement changes. Perhaps, the problem lies in poor time management, fatigue due to the lack of a healthy work/life balance, poor people management, poor communication skills that lead to time-consuming misunderstandings, or lack of organized goal-setting. Whatever the origin of the issue, leadership coaching will provide you with the awareness to identify the problem and the strategies to conquer it once and for all.
It will help you improve your influence, communication, and people skills
You’ve heard it all before: communication skills are essential to succeed in the workplace and in life. Those in a leadership position have to interact with members of their team and clients constantly, as well as participating in speaking engagements and presentations.
The exceptional leader realizes that their ability to disrupt and influence is directly related to their impact… and therefore seek specialized knowledge and skills of influence and persuasion that only an experienced leadership coach can provide.
The best form of influence is when others feel inspired to step out of their comfort zone and they don’t even know why
When your influence and communication skills are not up to speed with the responsibilities of leadership, it means trouble for the whole organization!
Leadership coaching can help you improve on all in-demand communication skills, from giving constructive feedback to active listening, public speaking, and conflict management skills. Your coach will guide you through different situations requiring outstanding communication and conflict resolution skills, so you can practice complex interactions and boost your confidence, acquiring communication strategies that will make your workplace more efficient, satisfied, and happier.
It will help boost creativity, problem-solving, and decision-making
The open conversations you will have with your coach can help you see things from an entirely different perspective, perhaps from the very first time since you’ve taken on your leadership role.
The lack of judgment and the objective, collaborative nature of leadership coaching allows leaders to gain new insights on everyday responsibilities, pushing them to reflect on frequent issues and discover deeper problems below the surface of their everyday actions. As the coach helps analyze routine reactions and behaviors presenting in the workplace, leaders can get a full objective picture of the processes hindering or helping them work, uncovering new ways of solving problems, and making decisions along the way.
Once these previously hidden behaviors have been analyzed thoroughly by both coach and coachee, you can come up with a concrete plan for preventing self-sabotaging acts from presenting again in the future. This process can turn even the most narrow-minded of people into creative, free-thinking, and proactive leaders, showing that a change in perspective should never be underestimated!
Unleash your leadership potential
Even the most self-assured of leaders need to reevaluate their day-to-day actions and habits — in fact, actively looking to improve upon your strengths and implement new creative strategies is the perfect example of what great leadership is all about.
Leadership coaching can empower you to achieve greatness in everything you do, succeed in your goals faster, and unlock your full potential, nurturing personal and professional growth in the process.
Our mission at BigImpactHQ™ is to empower exceptional female leaders to take leadership development to the next level, providing the tools and resources necessary to make a real difference in the workplace and be a part of a new idea of effective leadership, rooted in emotional intelligence, active communication, and inspiring influence. If you are ready to take the leap and join a growing community of forward-thinking female leaders, get in touch today to see how we can help you achieve your goals!
