You are the executive CEO of a successful owner operated enterprise in Northern Territory, 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 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.
When timing is right for leaders to trigger self coaching within their teams
Leaders should use their active listening skills to really get to the bottom of an employee's answers, and ask follow-up questions when necessary as well as learn more about their unique strengths. The key for true leaders is to encourage team members to share their honest feedback or input with the leader, and welcome them to ask the leading change questions as well. As a matter of fact, workplace coaching usually happens unscheduled outside of formal coaching sessions. At times it just happens in brief exchanges, for example when a managing leader in charge might respond to a request for guidance by posing a single question, such as “What do you already have in mind?” or “What could be the solution?”. A manager just cannot have all the right answers that might occur. When managers increasingly end up asking good questions in such kind of interactions, the team will notice that it is on the right track.
Leadership team building and coaching skills for managers and supervisors
It is cheaper to provide coaching/training than to constantly have to fill positions because people quit due to poor management. For achieving that managers and supervisors can become effective coaches of employees. Coaching is a mutually beneficial relationship with the purpose of developing a specific skill rather than just achieving a task; Typically it takes a year or even longer. Managing is nothing more than a professional relationship used to achieve operational results on demand. That relationship is normally indefinite in duration, depending on the organizational structure. The type of leadership relationship the manager has with a team member - whether coaching style or directing style - should be based on the results and objectives the company is looking to achieve.
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.
Leadership effectiveness within the team and with clients
Excellent coaching skills can come in handy in times of conflict. Suppose there is a conflict between two team members. The effective coaching skills of active, equal listening and emotional intelligence are deployed to reduce stress, anger, confrontation and ineffective, destructive communication. Allowing space for each side in times of conflict and to also co-create solutions helps to unify the team. Professional coaching involves partnering with team members and clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their real potential. Methods of objective assessment, active listening, asking the right questions in terms of reflective questioning encourage self-discovery of all parties.
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.
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.
Coaching in scenarios of crisis or conflict
A possible work scenario might be when a manager can navigate a team through a crisis thanks to his effective coaching skills. Regardless of the magnitude of the specific event, a skilled manager will approach the situation differently than a manager without leadership skills. Leadership coaching assists leaders with challenging employees and managing customers effectively. Coaches enable and train managers in role play scenarios to learn to deal with conflict and crisis. Such a training helps them in real world scenarios to deescalate situations before they become a real much bigger problem. Coaching is also about assisting to prevent career derailment or to reduce friction and stress or other emotional factors that might get in the way of effective performance and solutions. It might also involve extinguishing conflicts between team members or resolving company politics related issues.
The importance of having coaching frameworks
Each manager or coach has a unique approach to coaching subordinates. It's important for the manager to develop his / her own framework to use when coaching each employee. The manager's framework should guide the conversations the manager has with a team member. But independent from whatever those frameworks might look like, When those team members come up with their own solutions, they are more committed, and the fixes are more likely to be implemented. Furthermore, this issue-solving experience helps team members develop the self-confidence to solve similar issues on their own in the future so that the manager's coaching framework has less significance in the current situation.
Coaching your team to higher performance and responsibility
Great leaders implicitly have internalized the transferability of emotions. This process is also known as emotional contagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1993). Great coaching managers are careful with their reactions in times of crisis or emergencies. They wait for better opportunities to generate empowerment, inspiration and excitement when a new momentum is needed within the team and become proactive in avoiding fires they have become used to put out themselves. Ongoing crisis management cannot be an effective leadership style. A better approach to work is to delegate authority using cooperative leadership style and put trust into the team and let the team members learn to handle complicated situations themselves.
Which coaching skills for managers can help them transform into leaders
Improving managers' leadership coaching skills is an iterative loop, depending on the feedback which will provide the team leaders with valuable insights into areas where they can improve. Instructor feedback form serve to get valuable information from the team members, with which the leaders can develop their skills. Great leaders assist minimize the “noise” and distractions that tend to get in the way of a team member's ability to figure out what’s going on and how to react. Great leaders know how and when to ask the right question at the right time, when to give feedback, when to advise, how to get the person to focus on one thing only, and how to gain dedication and commitment. Managers can do this, but they have to let go of a few limiting beliefs and implement a few mindsets and skill sets.
How to replace bad leadership qualities with good ones
More professionals sense the need to coach their teams in order to get the best performance of their team members. Like in any relationship, coaching is built on mutual respect and trust. The employee must trust the manager to guide him/her though a strategic mental process. That thinking process becomes more beneficial when information is shared openly. Studies have shown that nine out of 10 executives have the intent to assist their direct report improve performance. On the other hand role-plays simulating a coaching situation demonstrated much room for improvement. Cooperative Coaching leadership style involves listening and asking opposed to authoritative leadership style consisting of just selling and telling. But that coaching approach is contrary to the manager's instincts because deep down the managers have already made up their minds about the solution to a specific issue well before the managers even begin looking at the problem together with the employee. So often those coaching efforts get quickly reduced to just trying to get agreement on what the manager had already in mind and decided. This cannot be construed as real coaching and therefore the outcomes are no better than when authoritative leadership is deployed.
In most companies executive coaching goals are not achieved
According to the self-awareness of many managers about their coaching skills, most of them assume that they are good at it. But actually the contrary is reality. A recent study in which 3,761 executives assessed their own coaching skills has shown the discrepancy with how those skills were perceived by their direct subordinates. The results did not align at all. 24 percent of the executives significantly overestimated their coaching skills, rating themselves as above average while their team members ranked them in the bottom third of the group. That is a significant divergence. The authors of the study concluded that if managers think they do well at coaching but actually they are not, this poll suggests that those managers might be worse at coaching as they imagined.
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