Having worked with thousands of leaders from various industries and organizations, we understand that an important role of people leaders is coaching team members to increase effectiveness, broaden thinking, identify strengths and development needs, as well as set and achieve challenging goals.
When leaders coach, they help their employee learn how to grow in their day-to-day work. And yet, in our experience, some of the wonderful characteristics that make leaders great, can work against them when coaching employees.
For example, experienced leaders increase their responsibilities in part due to their ability to work through problems and get to a good outcome. In coaching, however, there is benefit to having your employee do the thinking required to solve the problem. Jumping to the solution shortchanges the employees’ learning.
When we focus leaders’ attention on asking high-gain coaching questions and listening they end up encouraging the achievement of the outcome versus driving it.
Coaching employees is a complex skill-set that takes time to develop and requires great self-awareness. Leaders jumping to a solution is only one example of many regarding the duality of natural behavioural styles. Being aware of the manager’s own biases and natural approaches will help her/him become agile and adaptable in the coaching moment.
The great news is that our Leadership for Success program was designed to learn, practice, apply, and reinforce critical leadership habits (like coaching) that drive business results and personal effectiveness.
Participants in the Leadership for Success program report an increase of 20% in their confidence to meet the expectations of their role and, their own managers’ report a 24% increase in the demonstration of the competencies of highly effective leaders developed in the program! You can read about the experience of program participants in this Ottawa Business Journal article “Molding the Leaders of Ottawa’s Business Community” .
We run our Leadership for Success program several times throughout the year, don’t miss out on your chance to build the needed competencies for your role and transfer them to your workplace.
This article was published more than 1 year ago. Some information may no longer be current.