You are the executive CEO of a successful owner operated enterprise in Delaware, 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 superior power of ongoing job performance coaching
Coaching provides an invaluable space for personal growth and leadership development. Managers are frequently confronted with employees struggling with low confidence and low performance. The traditional approach would be to send them to a training hoping that this would solve the issue. The employee learns new methods of communication which may improve confidence and performance short-term. Very ofteh though after a while the employee falls back into his thinking patterns and as a result in isolation these trainings rarely generate a sustainable yield in confidence and performance. Although external behavior may change for a while, for changes to manifest long term they need to be incantated. The goal of performance coaching is not to make the team member feel bad, nor is it done to show off how much the manager knows. The only objective of coaching is to collaborate with the team member to solve performance issues and to enhance the results of the employee, the team, and the organization. To achieve leading change ongoing coaching has proven to be most effective.
What are the top leadership skills to improve?
One of the best ways to improve a manager's nondirective coaching skill is to try conversing using the GROW model, devised in the 1980s by Sir John Whitmore and others. The GROW model seems easy to conceptualize, but it’s harder to execute than some managers might imagine, because it requires training to think outside the box about what the manager's role and value as a leader are. The foundation of nondirective coaching is listening, questioning, and withholding judgment. Coaching managers contribute to draw wisdom, insight, and trigger creativity out of their subordinates they’re coaching, with the intent and objective of guiding them learn to resolve problems and cope with complicated situations on their own. It is an approach that can be highly inspiring and empowering for those being coached, but it does not feel natural to most managers, who tend to be more comfortable with just their authoritative “telling” leadership style.
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 ensure a new manager transforms into a brilliant leader
Each time a brilliant employee gets promoted to the next level within an organization without the coaching support and leadership training he / she needs, the organization makes a huge mistake by leaving the new manager's performance and success up to chance. They have a 50% chance that not only will the new manager fail, but having missed out on leadership coaching this will cost their organization a little fortune to press play and repeat until a new manager randomly really outperforms with his / her team. Effective coaching skills do not only serve the new manager but also each and every level of employment. Increasing empathy and compassion in every function reduces friction and stress and replaces both with growth potential within the team. Tough decisions in tough situations with normally tough conversations become easier to maneuver when coaching skills are in place and well implemented and performed.
What are the top leadership skills to improve?
One of the best ways to improve a manager's nondirective coaching skill is to try conversing using the GROW model, devised in the 1980s by Sir John Whitmore and others. The GROW model seems easy to conceptualize, but it’s harder to execute than some managers might imagine, because it requires training to think outside the box about what the manager's role and value as a leader are. The foundation of nondirective coaching is listening, questioning, and withholding judgment. Coaching managers contribute to draw wisdom, insight, and trigger creativity out of their subordinates they’re coaching, with the intent and objective of guiding them learn to resolve problems and cope with complicated situations on their own. It is an approach that can be highly inspiring and empowering for those being coached, but it does not feel natural to most managers, who tend to be more comfortable with just their authoritative “telling” leadership style.
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.
True leaders deploy employee engagement to nip fear in the bud
Managers shoud do their best to destroy fear in the workplace. According to Edmondson, 2002, managers that assist team members develop purpose in their function within the team do not experience fear among their team members. When a cohesive, vision-focused taskforce collaborates and deploys team members’ strengths toward common objectives and targets, the accomplishment gets accelerated. According to Nelson et al., 2002, employees improve performance when they sense purpose, recognition, morale, significance and overall job satisfaction. Managers should practice improving effective communication skills in every interaction daily. Modeling these skills, as a manager or leader, will set the expectation for the entire organization and reduce fear within the team. According to Jonsdottir & Fridriksdottir, 2020, practicing active listening, in particular, will help communicate respect and attentiveness to team members and their needs giving no grounds to any fear to develop among the employees.
How managers can trigger a coach within every employee and unleash hidden potentials
Great leaders tap into the potential coach within every manager and team member. Hidden within many employees is a source of information and knowledge waiting to be conserved and shared with the broader team. A great leader can encourage his own team members to become coaches and trainers themselves by enabling them to hold their own mini-seminars on an important topic or skill. If the company offers a virtual platform or chatroom then this represents means of leverage where team members can create and share their own learning content, guidance, insights, stories, and tips for where to access the best training to get the job done. Great leaders should ask themselves whether the team member has the capacity to accomplish the objectives and get the job done. Four common bottle necks are time, skill set, tools, and personality. Great leaders determine how to remove these bottle necks and whether or not the team member needs the leader's help to remove the barriers. This is key in the role of a coaching manager.
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.
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.
The role of coaching in performance management
A research on the effectiveness of leadership coaching in organizations made by Jones, Woods, & Guillaume, 2016, has shown that leadership coaching has a positive effect on overall organizational outcomes (e.g. EBIT) and more specific outcomes such as leaders’ skill set evolution, leadership development, personal growth and emotional status. Coaching makes leaders remove mental and emotional barriers from their management style. This helps coaching managers see a clear route to success of the mission. This helps them to think more strategicly and make better and more effective decisions. As a consequence the orgranization generates better results.
How to improve leadership qualities
The coaching manager outperforms the directing manager because leaders can schedule a one-on-one conversation with team members to hone into their concerns and struggles. This setting enables the coaching manager work on solving those struggles and concerns without interfering with team members' progress. When a coaching manager is open to making mistakes, it also gives the subordinates to push themselves to the next level and learn the lessons from their own mistakes. It is crucial as a coaching manager to provide constructive feedback so that subordinates know how to refine what they should keep doing. It is clever to begin a critique by describing what a team member did well. When a coaching manager starts a conversation on a positive note, it opens the senses and guides the transition into constructive criticism. Each team member already has enough ups and downs in their lives without a director that adds on. Great leaders are consistent in their communication, nature and character, messaging, availability and mission. Just like advertising, an ongoing continuous, cumulative approach is highly effective at establishing and leading change and improvement.
Why coaching is an important management skill not only for managers
Great leaders help minimize the “noise” and distractions that are getting in the way of someone’s capability to analyse what is happening and which action to take to solve the issue. Great leaders know how and when to ask the right question at the moment, when to give feedback, when to advise, how to get the person to focus, and how to gain dedication. Managers can do this, but they have to waive of a few limiting beliefs and implement a few mindsets and skills. Effective coaching skills serve every level of employment. Enhanced compassion and empathy in each operation reduces friction points and replaces those with human growth potential. Difficult situations and tough conversations become easier to digest when coaching skills are well implemented and regularly executed. Nowadays employees have and need a lot more autonomy. But just as a coach helped the employee set objectives that gave the employee a purpose and shared timely feedback with him/her and recognition to encourage the employee, so should the manager.
How managers can trigger a coach within every employee and unleash hidden potentials
Great leaders tap into the potential coach within every manager and team member. Hidden within many employees is a source of information and knowledge waiting to be conserved and shared with the broader team. A great leader can encourage his own team members to become coaches and trainers themselves by enabling them to hold their own mini-seminars on an important topic or skill. If the company offers a virtual platform or chatroom then this represents means of leverage where team members can create and share their own learning content, guidance, insights, stories, and tips for where to access the best training to get the job done. Great leaders should ask themselves whether the team member has the capacity to accomplish the objectives and get the job done. Four common bottle necks are time, skill set, tools, and personality. Great leaders determine how to remove these bottle necks and whether or not the team member needs the leader's help to remove the barriers. This is key in the role of a coaching manager.
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