You are the executive CEO of a successful owner operated enterprise in Belfast, your business generates over $500K EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes), you feel like there is potential for more and you intend to take your company to the next level? If this is you schedule a call with one of our executive coaches to estimate the ROI of executive coaching for your business.
The benefits of leadership team building and coaching skills
Great leaders deploy peer-to-peer coaching. Coaching offers some of the most effective and most valuable learning in an organization. Coaching managers tend to use their regular staff meetings as a collaborative problem solving session. This builds cohesion among their team members, and inspires them to think together about how to solve urgent organizational situations and challenges. It is also a very effective and rational way for the leader to coach multiple team members in one setting simultaneously, thus maximizing efficiency.
How to keep a sales team motivated when sales are slow and low
You can assist your sales staff enhance their current performance, or in the case of already well performing sales team members, help them excel even more. Performance coaching is a powerful method when leaders deploy it for the benefit of the entire sales team. At times getting the performance coaching right can be challenging for even the most experienced managers. When an employee is not on track to target a manager comes to a point where he / she must decide wheter to fire or hang in there with a direct report. Often an alternation between ignorance and micromanagement by the manager have contributed significantly to the situation and lead up to this point. Before a problem grows, the manager should already touch base along the way and ask staff members about their ideas how to correct the issue, prevent it from becoming bigger and from happening again. In case of a high performing employee the manager should trigger constant and never ending improvement by asking questions in that regard.
Coaching skills all managers need
As a coach, it is crucial not to assume you should have a solution to any issue. Instead, collaborating with the employee to find the best solution. The managing coach should empower team members to solve their problems, showing that the managing coach appreciates their abilities and trust their judgment. The managing coach should show confidence in the team-member's ability and willingness to solve the issue. Also he / she should ask the employee for assistance in solving the issue or enhancing their performance. The managing coach may join in with the employee with the objective of increasing the employees' effectiveness as a contributor to the entire organization. Good managing coaches should feel comfortable delegating challenging work to team-members. According to Beattie, 2002, by doing so it has the positive effect of communicating trust in the employee's capabilities, while also facilitating their learning. Every leader should do some effort to improve his / her coaching skills, and there are leaders in or outside the workplace. Active listening, empowerment, motivation, communication, building trust and purpose, relationships, and accountability are all important skills for any leader that will benefit every side.
How to motivate a team at work
Great leaders ask each team member what they intend to achieve and what their definition of success is. Great leaders set clear goals for the team and break those targets down to each team member so that they get to develop a general outline for how to meet that objective and hit the target for the team. Great leaders participate and work together with the team to establish practical milestones to achieve these objectives. Great leaders determine when there is a need for a critical feedback path, so that the leader knows how the team member is progressing. Great leaders offer positive empowerment and inspiration and give purpose to the mission. Great leaders express confidence in the subordinate's ability to increase results. Great leaders make the team member recognize that the only person who is in charge of their results is the team member him-/herself. As much as as manager tries and wants to help for the sake of a quicker achievement, the team member is the one who is ultimately in charge of his / her outcomes, growth and ongoing improvement.
Why developping strategic leadership skills is important
Managers should seek ongoing training. If the leader wants his team members to engage in constant ongoing improvement of skills, then the manager is going to have to lead by example and educate him- / herself first. The manager should consider seeking out training to improve his / her leadership skills, whether it’s one class, a leadership certification program, or completing a more formal executive education or coaching program. Nowadays the manager has various options to get higher education be it through an online or a presential program or a combination of both. Getting more educated leads to better qualification and once these fresh new skills are implemented and shared with the team the effects will be noticed.
The right questions indicate best leadership quality
Managers need the space and time to actually manage. Managing people is tough, really, really tough. Employees ask for the managers' trust and compassion, so managers need to be able take the time to establish trust, starting conversations off with questions like, “How are things going?” and, “How can I help?” Such open questions potentially trigger a diverse and remarkable dialogue on various subjects, including but not limited to progress, improvement engagement, culture, productivity and performance. And, probably most important, they help identify the fires before we’re at high emergency alarm status.”. Reality-focused questions to ask are for example “What are the key things we need to know?”. The leaders should hone into what their team members have as a reply. Are the leaders missing something important? Are the managers talking about operational problems but missing out on the human side of things? Or the other way round? When coaching managers get their subordinates to slow down and think this way, they often lose themselves in contemplation and then an idea comes along, and off they go, engaging with the issue on their own with new inspiration, fresh energy and a new perspective. This step is crucial, because it stops team members from overlooking pertinent moving parts and leaping to conclusions. The manager's job at this point is just to ask the right questions and then get out of the way.
Has coaching become the sixth management function?
Everybody involved in management should know about the five management functions. French mining engineer Henri Fayol defined the role of a manager as consisting of five functions of management: planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating and controlling. Another theorist, Luther Gulick, chunked commanding and controlling into one function being directing and added staffing, reporting, and budgeting, also known as POSDCORB, which is still used nowadays in management. So, how does coaching and leading fit into all of this? Leadership is one of the most vital management functions completely overlooked by these theorists. For the realisation of a mission an effective leader has to provide clarity, guidance and purpose. Without it any mission is set for failure. This can be accomplished best by switching from commanding and directing to a non directive leadership style.
Why do managers need coaching skills?
Superior coaching skills can come in as a valuable resource in times of conflict. Let's assume there is a conflict between two employees. The manager with effective coaching skills of active, equal listening and emotional intelligence at his disposal can minimize anger, stress, and ineffective communication. By doing so the manager creates an allowance for space for each party where the conflict can be heard and the conditions are in place to co-create solutions which help unify the team.
When using coaching as a leadership development tool
Coaching managers should perceive coaching as something broader than just the efforts of exterior coaches who are hired to help executives build their personal and professional skills. That work is important and sometimes vital, but it’s temporary and executed by outsiders. The kind of coaching managers should implement is the one that establishes a real learning organization with ongoing coaching that is executed by people inside the organization. It is an activity that all managers should participate in with all their subordinates on an ongoing basis, in such a manner that helps define the organization’s culture and its mission. An effective coaching manager as a leader asks questions instead of providing answers, supports team members instead of judging them, facilitates their growth and leadership instead of dictating what has to be done, asks for ideas from all team members on how to solve the situation instead of just relying on own attempts to solve it individually. A coaching manager with cooperative leadership style can approach any obstacle with a calm, objective and clear focus. A deeper understanding of issues and solution-focused fact finding creates the blueprints for resolutions.
When developping leadership skills becomes more important with new responsibilities
Most people begin successful careers by developing expertise in a technical, functional, transactional or professional domain. In most instances coming up with the right answers means everything. For the purpose of rising up the career ladder proving yourself that way has been sufficient in most cases. But once the employee moves into people management the tables turn and at that point the manager has to ensure that his / her subordinates have the same or even better quality in their answers. However, managers differ in their style to leading employees and generating results. At times some managers tend to just oversee employees and the work they fulfill and to solve issues on behalf of their employees. Managers who have implemented coaching leadership strive to empower and inspire employees to take their skills to another level and resolve issues on their own.
How to develop leadership qualities that provide leverage
Managers need to be are equipped with coaching skills that enable them to respond when team members ask for guidance with huge, messy, confusing sometimes badly defined and poorly described issues that often extend far beyond the company's initial briefing. With such coaching skills in place, managers now have become better at recognizing complicated challenging situations in which they don’t have to provide the answers. They know that in such cases, they are able to offer more value just by listening attentively, asking the right questions, and supporting team members as it is their responsibility to come up with the best solution. Great leaders just know how to dig out the right answer and providing space for the team members to think for themselves.
How managers can transform into effective coaches of employees
Managers are called to employ a strengths-based approach to developing their staff. When team members know their strengths and can consistently build on their work from those strengths, leaders and their teams can forge better-functioning work-environments. Coaching employees focuses on revealing and developing each team member's unique strengths. Enhancing each employee's capabilities may assist establishing an even more talented workforce. Furthermore, employees who feel energized and motivated by their leader may feel more driven to do their job very well. Coaching is an effective management tool for managers to implement in their efforts to assist employees generate results, and especially help employees improve their skills and their potential opportunities for promotion to next upper level kind of positions.
How to build management leadership competencies
It’s easier said than done to become a coaching manager because a completely different mindset is required to pull it off as an everyday pattern throughout all management levels of a company. At most firms, a big gap still yawns between aspiration and implementation. Bridging that gap is key. Great leadership does not happen from one day to the other. Instead great leaders are made through dedication, commitment, and execution. By taking the initiative and proactively working to become a better coaching manager, the manager will not only elevate his own performance, but more importantly the one of his team members, and by extension, his organization. Even though it is easier and faster to just do telling and commanding taking the coaching route is really worth the effort. In the beginning coaching tends to be slower because it requires some patience and time to begin with, and it takes deliberate exercise in terms of learning by doing to get really good at it. It is an investment in human resources that has a higher return than any other management skill. Team members learn, grow, develop, improve performance and results, subordinates gain more recognition, and organizations increase their bottom line. Entities that choose to take that route should first focus on how to develop coaching as an individual managerial capacity, and then on how to turn it into a company wide one.
Why developping strategic leadership skills is important
Managers should seek ongoing training. If the leader wants his team members to engage in constant ongoing improvement of skills, then the manager is going to have to lead by example and educate him- / herself first. The manager should consider seeking out training to improve his / her leadership skills, whether it’s one class, a leadership certification program, or completing a more formal executive education or coaching program. Nowadays the manager has various options to get higher education be it through an online or a presential program or a combination of both. Getting more educated leads to better qualification and once these fresh new skills are implemented and shared with the team the effects will be noticed.
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