Leadership coaching accelerates the learning curve for high-potential employees who take on new responsibilities. This enables them to align personal career aspirations with the organization’s strategic objectives.
Leaders also become more aware of the areas where they excel. This allows them to better leverage their strengths. For example, participants in this study reported that their coaching experience facilitated an exploration of their relationship to conflict.
1. Learning to Self-Regulate
Self-regulation is a skill that allows people to control their emotions and behaviors, leading them to make more appropriate choices. In other words, leadership coaching in such domain helps them to act in accordance with their deeply held values and social conscience.
Without good self-regulation skills, a leader can easily become overwhelmed by negative emotions such as anger or frustration. Consequently, they may not be able to think clearly and will likely make bad decisions as a result. To help their clients become better self-regulated, leadership coaches can encourage them to reflect on their feelings and try to find a more constructive way to express them.
Additionally, they can encourage leaders to set goals and use their self-regulation skills to monitor and improve their progress. For example, they can ask them to create a plan of action before engaging in a learning activity. They can also instruct them to consider how long a task might take and set a time management goal accordingly.
Another important aspect of self-regulation is the ability to adapt to different situations. Leadership coaching can help leaders learn to do this by encouraging them to adopt a growth mindset. A growth mindset is an outlook that believes intelligence, talents, and skills can be improved through hard work and perseverance. This mindset can help leaders to overcome roadblocks that might otherwise hinder their success and allow them to achieve their goals.
2. Targeting Coaching to a Leader’s Problem Area
Leadership coaching is a valuable tool that can help leaders identify where their strengths lie and how to leverage those skills. However, it can be challenging for some leaders to see their own weaknesses. A coach can hold a mirror up to them and show them areas where they need improvement. This could include things like active listening, offering constructive feedback, or changing nonverbal cues.
A positive leader is willing to admit their weaknesses and is able to take steps to correct them. This doesn’t mean that a leader avoids the issue or puts a Band-Aid on it, but rather seeks help from others and works to improve on these issues. This leadership style is called coaching leadership and focuses on building the individual while addressing the problems they are experiencing.
This type of leadership also helps to foster a culture of coaching within an organization. When leaders are coached and then use the coaching leadership style with their team, this results in a more effective organization. The coaching leadership model is typically less directive than the command and control management styles that previously pervaded the business/organizational world and is designed to maximize organizational resources in pursuit of goals that are set by leaders/teams themselves.
3. Communication Skills
Whether writing, conversing or presenting, leaders need to excel at each of these communication modes in order to meet their teams’ and individuals’ needs. Leadership coaching elevates a leader’s communication skills by providing personalised feedback and encouraging open dialogues.
Throughout these sessions, coaches help leaders become more proficient at communicating in various formats, including email, phone or video chat. They also help them to develop maximum clarity in their messaging and identify areas where they can improve. Non-verbal cues are also a key component of effective communication, so coaching leaders to recognise these can improve the effectiveness of their overall communication abilities.
Leaders who are great communicators are able to connect with their teams and convey information in ways that align with the goals, aspirations and desired outcomes of their people, industry or organisation. They are able to inspire others and encourage them to consider new perspectives, beliefs and actions. They can facilitate discussions and collaborations that allow for critical thinking to take place and help to achieve sustainable change within organisations.
It’s important to note that no one is a good communicator by default, so it’s essential to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your own communication style. As such, there’s always room for improvement – even among the most skilled of leaders! Once you have a clear understanding of your communication strengths, it’s time to put your new skills into action.
4. Empathy
For many leaders, the ability to empathise with their colleagues is a critical leadership skill. It allows them to understand their colleagues’ perspectives and the emotions evoked from different situations, which helps build common ground that makes most relationships thrive. Empathetic leaders are conscious listeners and can adjust their approach to best suit a colleague’s needs. They also demonstrate high levels of motivation to help colleagues feel valued, recognised and respected. This helps to create a positive workplace culture, strong internal communications and improved worker retention.
The lines between personal and work life are increasingly blurred, and empathetic leaders can recognise when their team members need to take a step back from their workload to address a personal issue. They know to keep communication channels open and encourage transparency in the face of any crisis, which is an essential component of a psychologically safe work environment.
Leaders who struggle with empathy can cause employees to doubt their leadership capability, which will inevitably impact the workplace. Without empathetic leadership, it will be impossible for management to balance raising the bar of performance and ensuring that workers’ overall well-being is catered to. In addition, a lack of empathy will result in poor employee retention that contributes to the loss of critical institutional knowledge and an increase in the cost of hiring replacements.
