You are the executive CEO of a successful owner operated enterprise in Vancouver B.C., 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.
Where to find good business coaches for entrepreneurs
Today's role of coaching in organizational development
With fast, continuous and disruptive change being the biggest constant in business, a great leader just cannot build exclusively on what worked in the past because with new parameters due to change there is just no guarantee that this will still work these days. Managers simply cannot and should not expect to have all the right answers and must adapt to new conditions and collaborate with specialised teams. To cope with this new reality, enterprises are ditching traditional command-and-control practices and replace those with a model in which managers give support and guidance rather than instructions, and subordinates adapt to constantly changing environments in ways that unleash fresh empowerment, identification with the mission, energy, motivation, innovation, dedication and commitment. Studies have shown a nice side effect being that coaching managers found themselves learning themselves throughout the process of coaching in collaboration with their staff. A dyadic relationship with subordinates is key for the coaching manager to perform effectively his leadership.
Which are the best coaching companies?
How to improve leadership abilities
Coaching is better than repair. Providing positive feedback and honest suggestions for improvement early and often yields higher results, better outcomes, and stronger bonds and better relationships than any retroactive action or progressive rule ever will. Managers generally get this, so getting them to buy into this is not a rocket science. However making them implement how to document coaching conversations can be challenging. Managers should continuously look out for new opportunities to coach team members. They shoould benefit from the opportunities to inspire and motivate employees or educate them further and enable them with new skill sets. On the other hand managers should make it a habit to connect and ask for feedback from team members to assess situations and create solutions. Managers should invoke conversations with team members by asking guiding, open-ended questions, that are not closed yes and no questions. As a result such questions will encourage team members to provide honest, thoughtful answers about their view on things. Such conversations and feedback loops will enable the manager to establish beneficial relationships with the the team member.
Great coaching for performers
The benefits of mishap coaching in workplace
Successful managers are aware of the importance and significance of careful planning and preparation. Both play a central role in their success. At times however they don’t emphasize it enough at the team level, which means that they don’t set an expectation that the team members who report to them should spend an equal amount of time on planning and preparation as they do for the operations. A side effect that comes in handy of this approach to managing mistakes is that it will build trust between leaders and subordinates. According to Edmondson, 2002 that will create the sense of psychological safety net which is required to admit openly one’s mistakes and ask for help and forgiveness and mitigate the temptation to sweep errors under the rug.
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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.
What are the benefits of coaching for leadership?
The implications of shadow coaching style of leadership
Typically managers think they are already coaching when in reality what they are doing is a lot of telling, instructing, directing, teaching, advising, and in the worst case, micromanaging. They use the phrase 'coaching' to describe just about any conversation they have with a team member although it does not really apply. First managers need to learn the definition of coaching. Here is the secret of coaching: Allow people to perform on their own and give them space for doing so. Like this managers give team members permission to do their jobs and do them well. People will rise to the expectations the management has of them.
How to motivate a sales team
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.
Who provides the best coaching in the world?
How to motivate your team as a leader instead of a commanding and controling manager
Successful executives must increasingly complement their sector specific knowledge and functional methodology with a general readiness and willingness for continuous learning and they must reflect that capacity in the people they supervise. No longer can managers simply rely on telling and control. Simply rewarding team members mainly for executing flawlessly on things they already knew is not enough any more. Instead, with full headquarter support, they need to reinvent themselves as coaches whose mission it is to trigger energy, creativity, and learning from the team members.
How to motivate a losing team
The overlooked coach potential in leadership
For team leaders who are used to tackling performance issues by directing and instructing employees what to do, a coaching approach often feels too slow and time consuming. Furthermore, in their perception coaching can make them psychologically vulnerable, because it deprives them of deploying their authority approach they are so used to and very comfortable with. So they resist the implementation of coaching and don't even try it. Common excuses are “I’m too busy now,” or they will find other excuses like “This isn’t the best use of my time,” or “these employees aren’t coachable.”. According to Daniel Goleman’s study of leadership styles, leaders ranked coaching as their least-favorite leadership style, justifying it with the excuse that they simply would not have time for the slow and tedious work of coaching people and assisting them grow from within.
How to motivate a team after a bad loss
Why coaching is an important leadership skill
Management should support daily learning and development activities. Typically employees regularly claim they don’t engage in learning activities because they don’t believe their managers would support them and qualify them as a waste of valuable time. It’s up to the management to change this perception by creating an environment where it is not only acceptable, but highly encouraged to use office time to engage in learning activities. Managers should suggest that their team members absorb small bites of content regularly when it suits best their schedules and their daily operational tasks, or look for creative and engaging ways that the manager can bring learning and development into daily activities for their teams.
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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.
What is the ROI of executive coaching?
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.
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The major benefits of coaching to an organisation
Studies have shown that non-directive leadership and coaching skills improve the coachees’ confidence, engagement, communication, and teamwork. Those skills facilitate a faster induction to the organization and - according to Hamlin et al., 2006 - and help reduce reported feelings of stress. Managers should encourage and expect their direct reports to engage and participate, not only because it will become easier for the manager to focus more on the big picture, but also because it’s a best practice and an essential skill that motivates everyone on the team to identify and troubleshoot issues as they arise.
Who are the best leadership coaches?
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.
Insights from professional executive coaching
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.
