Every business needs a leader who can manage teams and guide them through ordinary and exceptional circumstances effectively. Great leaders are the vehicle for achieving business objectives and creating an inclusive, positive environment. Of course, even leaders themselves require guidance. Leadership coaching is a one-of-a-kind tool that enables high-performance executives to motivate and inspire their teams.
The purpose of this individualised coaching is to build the leader’s ability to accomplish long- and short-term business objectives. Whether you’re a senior manager, board member, or entrepreneur, leadership coaching is the best way to build a solid knowledge base, enhance your skills, and identify ways to become a more effective leader.
This blog post will outline what leadership coaching entails, what the essential principles of coaching leadership are, and how you can use professional development courses and leadership coaching courses to develop future leaders within your organisation.
In the most basic form, leadership coaching is a specialised type of coaching that teaches leaders — existing or aspiring — how to enhance their skills and abilities so they can steer the business towards meeting its objectives.
Individualised leadership coaching improves the leader’s understanding of necessary processes, such as creating a vision and setting attainable and realistic goals, as well as helping them interact better with colleagues or clients each day.
Leadership coaching courses are an excellent way to stay abreast of current thought leadership in coaching practices. These courses help leaders identify and coach employees with diverse strengths and unique capabilities, creating a cohesive environment of empowered, effective leaders.
Fundamental principles of leadership coaching
The essential principles of leadership apply to both the coach and the coachee (the person receiving the coaching). The coach must lead the programme with a clear objective in mind, whereas the coachee is tested, challenged, engaged, and supported to ensure they’re following the course and applying what they’ve learned.
Create an environment that enables growth
This means creating a safe space, free of fear or judgement, that provides measured challenges which allow the coachee to develop their decision-making and risk-taking capabilities.
As a coach, you must develop an understanding with the coachee that you’ll not use any vulnerabilities or challenges they reveal during the programme against them in their normal course of work. This allows the coachee to communicate more openly and enables you, the coach, to understand their challenges on a professional and personal level better.
The key to creating this environment is to remain objective, non-judgmental, and empathetic — all while setting challenges that help the coachee realise their ability to overcome obstacles.
Lead through facilitation and collaboration
To achieve this, we suggest you ask open-ended questions, without imparting your own direction on how the coachee should answer or respond.
By focussing clearly on the needs of the business, the coachee’s professional development needs, and the desired outcome of the coaching, you’ll learn how to structure potential challenges and questions so that the coachee can respond from a place of learning and application, rather than from one of using your suggested response as their own. Be the facilitator for engaging conversations and strategic thinking, not the source of resolution.
Encourage learning through action
Anyone can attend a leadership coaching course and document a few key takeaways, but the coachee must take action to apply the knowledge and new skills they’ve acquired to future situations fully. As the coach, it’s your responsibility to help the coachee analyse previous challenges and circumstances, and assess how they’d do things differently with their newfound knowledge and insight.
Let them explore what went wrong during those situations, what went right, and how they’d approach that same situation with fresh skills and experience. By encouraging this way of thinking, you’ll be equipping the coachee with yet another skill: allowing them to think freely.
Set boundaries
Good leadership coaching creates the most formidable next generation of leaders. Even though it’s important to challenge the coachee during coaching, you also have to set some boundaries.
This includes sticking to the coaching agenda and understanding that certain modules may need more attention than others. Everyone is different, so it’s vital to follow the modules to completion but allow for variation in time spent on each section so that the coachee(s) can reap the most value from their coaching.
How leadership coaching develops future leaders
It’s crucial to realise that leadership skills are built on gaining experience through action, over the course of many years. These experiences form a knowledge bank which leaders can use to devise future strategies and tactics for leadership that has real impact.
However, the most successful leaders are those who understand the value of continuous professional development and make time to strengthen their professional skills outside of the time they spend performing the duties in their role.
Below is a look at the major real-world benefits that leadership coaching carries:
Fresh perspective
Perhaps the biggest benefit of leadership coaching is the new perspective coachees can develop, and sometimes even the coaches themselves. Honest, open dialogue enables new viewpoints to emerge and encourages fresher ways of thinking. The simple act of someone else evaluating your response provides immediate insight into ways you can improve — such as learning to respond instead of reacting.
Insight
Another notable merit of leadership coaching is the insight you gain on the goals you should be striving to achieve. Coaching will help you to establish steps, plans, and agendas so that you can move towards these goals more smoothly. This will make you (and/or other employees or other teams) more efficient, which increases productivity, and enables you to manage exceptional circumstances more easily.
Better people skills
Throughout your years of experience, you’ve likely developed certain nuances in the way in which you engage with people. You might communicate well with staff and clients, but you may also have picked up bad habits.
Leadership coaching will quickly identify any potential issues with the way you ordinarily engage with people so that you can enhance your people skills to a point that others look to you for practical advice on how to improve theirs. This is especially useful for entrepreneurs, who deal with different people every day.
Learning how to communicate better across all levels and more inclusively will serve you well when it comes to attracting new customers or finding better ways to communicate with staff.
Greater self-awareness
Enhanced self-awareness is a clear benefit linked to leadership coaching. On a leadership course, you’ll address and analyse your own strengths and weaknesses and learn how these affect the business and your performance.
This aspect of leadership coaching is often the most challenging because it forces the coachee to be completely honest about their shortcomings. Often, leaders may hesitate to appraise themselves and acknowledge their strengths, and this is a good way to verbalise and realise those strengths and find a way to amplify them.
Coaching and mentoring with In Professional Development
Leadership coaching is all about developing yourself professionally and personally. It aims to achieve different objectives, which vary from person to person. These objectives often include raising your awareness and understanding about aspects of yourself, your team, and the organisation, through to improving your operational abilities and ability to focus on the business’s objectives.
At In Professional Development, we’ve created courses to help you make the most of your skills, experience, and knowledge to propel you towards your professional development goals.
We understand that coaching is a partnership, not a transaction, and we avoid seeing it as the latter. We maintain the highest standards. In our view, our coaches are experts who have distinguished themselves through their ability to continually improve their own leadership attributes.
As well as the organisational benefits leadership coaching offers, you’ll gain a competitive advantage on your own career path. You’ll be more inclined to make full use of your talents and less inclined to avoid addressing your shortcomings.
Importantly, you’ll acquire the tools to become a much more efficient leader and make a significant, long-lasting impact. In the short term, you’ll establish yourself firmly as a leader, and in the long term, you’ll forge a formidable, reputable reputation.
If you’re ready to take full ownership of your career success and take some leadership coaching to improve your skills, we have a variety of options for you.
Book a place on our upcoming leadership coaching course, visit our virtual classroom for online courses, or find out more about our in-house training courses.
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