24 Jul 5 PRACTICAL BENEFITS OF BEING A COACHING LEADER
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Wondering whether you should be adding coaching to your leadership repertoire?
Or building coaching as a leadership capability in your team?
Or perhaps maturing the level of coaching already happening in your organisation?
Coaching is one of the greatest ways to unlock potential in your people. Yet, in my observation, vastly underutilised in most organisations. An often-missed opportunity.
Coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.
Timothy Gallwey
So, is using a coaching approach worthwhile?
There is a lot of research that says yes. With clear commercial benefits, and positive outcomes for teams and individuals. In one leadership coaching program, my client in the banking sector saw an ROI in under 3 months. Before the program was even completed.
Today, though, I want to look at some of the everyday practical upsides for those leaders who leverage a coaching approach.
Here are a few of the benefits for a leader adopting a coaching approach with their team and the people around them:
1. You don’t need to do everything yourself
There are a lot of leaders who feel like they need to muck in and do everything, and that’s simply not the case.
2. You don’t need to be the expert in everything
You don’t need to know the answer to everything. You are coaching others to find their answers.
You don’t need to be the expert in everything. This is not your job as a leader. Your job as a leader is to lead, and by using a coaching approach that is exactly what you are doing.
3. Have confidence that your team and team members are focused on the right things
Using a coaching approach builds their accountability and commitment to the right priorities. Then you can know with confidence what your people are committed to doing and trust they are going to do it.
4. Provide support to your team, yet differently
You can provide the support, create the space for the conversation but you do not have to answer all the questions, or solve all the problems.
5. Manage interruptions
In normal circumstances, from the start of an interruption, it can take on average up to 25 minutes for you to get back to the same place in your own work.
However, if you tackle those interruptions using a coaching approach, you are going to:
a) shorten the conversation by asking very specific targeted questions, and
b) avoid becoming responsible for solving the problem or challenge they came to you with. Because they solve, not you, and take the problem and solution away to implement.
Remember coaching and mentoring are different. One relies on your expertise. On you, the leader, providing the answer, or guidance.
The other is about tapping into the strengths, ideas, expertise, and experience of the people around you. While creating everyday moments to grow accountability and capability.
What difference would it make if you and your leaders were using a coaching approach more often?
I’d love to know your thoughts.
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