Organizations Invest in Coaching to Help Leaders Succeed
Leaders often get all the credit for positive team or organizational results. Likewise, leaders face scrutiny or are deemed the reason for failure when poor or unacceptable results happen. Leaders rise or fall based on team or enterprise results.
I was in a coaching conversation recently with a leader who stated, “results are as strong as the team.” I questioned his statement by asking, “have you ever seen a new leader arrive and get significantly better results from the same team?” He said that he had, and I told him that I’ve witnessed such occurrences many times, too.
I challenged him to flip the script with the concept that the leader is only as strong as the team. He contemplated this for a beat, then acknowledged that the leader is often the differentiator.
Leaders are expected to bring clarity and alignment regarding team objectives, while fostering innovation and addressing or challenging resource constraints. They have to make decisions on individual and team capability while ensuring timelines are met, risks are mitigated, and team members are committed to their individual and shared accountabilities for goal achievement.
Leaders are hired, promoted or placed into positions to get positive team and enterprise results. Many organizations partner leaders with an experienced executive coach to achieve better results faster. This is especially true on leadership teams, on mission-critical projects, or when the leader is new to the organization. It’s viewed as an investment for the leader’s success and growth.
How Coaching Helps Individual Leaders Grow and Develop
For the leader being coached, there are six primary benefits of coaching:
- Self-Discovery: Coaching and the techniques used in coaching help leaders see themselves as others see them. The coaching process creates moments of personal insight that can result in new ways of motivating performance in oneself and others. Most people have at least one or two weaknesses that are blind spots as well as one or two unrealized strengths. Coaching can help leaders understand what areas to minimize and maximize to reach their potential.
- Proactive Engagement: Great coaches encourage their clients to seek higher levels of performance before problems arise. Coaching helps executives avoid complacency by continually seeking growth opportunities. Leadership requires more than maintaining good performance. Leaders who are not continually moving forward will be passed up by those who are.
- Innovation: Coaching helps leaders continually examine their vision and then challenge themselves to seek new breakthrough thinking versus settling for old models and processes. As the saying goes—the thinking that solved yesterday’s problems is not the same as the thinking needed to solve tomorrow’s problems.
- Problem Solving: Coaching helps leaders take ownership and address problems with new thinking and positive engagement. Procrastination is called out as executives are challenged to bring their best thinking to problem solving. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is fond of saying, “Problems don’t age well.” A great coach can challenge a client to stop waiting for a problem to resolve itself and start exploring ways to overcome it.
- Accountability: Coaching helps leaders to own and be accountable for their personal action plans.Coaches work to ask deep, probing questions, but generally do not provide advice or solutions. When coaching clients come up with their own solutions versus an expert’s suggestions, they tend to hold themselves more accountable for their actions.
- Strength-Based Leadership Development: Coaching is first and foremost a strength activating exercise. Leaders become better at leading people when they bring their talents forward in a more focused and strategic manner. Coaching helps leaders focus their best talents on their goals and objectives. Focusing on strengths has an added benefit of minimizing weaknesses or at least making them less noticeable.
Coaching provides a personalized and dynamic plan-act-review cycle with accountability that few other leadership development interventions can match. Most importantly, the very nature of the coaching relationship is one of self-discovery and self-creation, which helps leaders find personal motivation to permanently change and improve their performance.
How can executive coaching help you and your organization achieve team and organizational goals while developing your leadership talent?
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Lance Hazzard, PCC, CPCC, is a Master Certified Executive Coach and Executive Team Coach helping people and organizations achieve success. Lance and Eric T. Hicks, Ph.D., co-authored Accelerating Leadership, published in June 2019. This post includes material from Accelerating Leadership. Lance is Executive Coach and President at Oppnå® Executive & Achievement Coaching. More information on the book, Lance and Oppnå® Coaching can be found at the links below: