You are the executive CEO of a successful owner operated enterprise in Paramus, 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.
Do you want to hire a leadership coach?
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.
Insights from professional executive coaching
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 is the ROI of executive coaching?
The fine line between situational leadership and executive coaching
Situational coaching represents the otimum zone to be in in the context of a manager as a coach. All managers should pursue to become expert at situational coaching. Situational coaching involves balancing between authoritive and cooperative leadership style depending on what the current situation requires. Managers as coaches should first focus on and become really good at non-directive coaching, until it becomes almost an instinct, and only then start to mix that newly strengthened capability with the implementation of management by objectives and directive coaching.
Great coaching for performers
How to measure transformational leadership
Managers can deploy performance coaching to assist team members who are effective contributors already to up their game, improve their skills, increase their ability to contribute to the team's and company's success and become even more effective employees. Performance evaluation is a vital part in managerial coaching. Evaluating the effectiveness of coaching can be done by looking at what things are measured and how they are rewarded. Managers ought be held accountable for their coaching activities through this evaluation process.
What are the benefits of coaching for leadership?
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.
The best executive business coaches revealed
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.
How to select an executive coach
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.
The best executive business coaches revealed
How to motivate a team at workplace
For true leaders it is important to place intention on building individual competencies and responsibilities that arise from collaboration with team members. They lay the foundation for goal achievement with each member of the team. According to Tackx & Verdin, 2014, including team members in decision-making, goal-setting, and strategy development will lead to the sensation of ownership over processes that will motivate even beyond the regular. Leaders that develop effective coaching skills help their team members achieve personal or professional goals. In a managerial or leadership function, effective coaching skills tend to support sustainable change in behaviors and thinking patterns while enhancing skill sets and facilitating personal growth, education and development.
Specialised executive coaching for startups
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.
Are you looking for professional coaching services?
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.
What are the effects of leadership coaching?
What is coaching in leadership?
Effective coaching skills serve every level of employment and there are two sides to the meaning of leadership coaching: The first meaning refers to working with the leaders of a company to assist them maximize their abilities and lead their team members well. The second meaning refers to a leadership style that executives use when working with their teams. Increasing empathy and compassion in every position reduces friction, stress and replaces it with human growth potential. Tough situations and difficult conversations become easier to maneuver when coaching skills are well deployed and executed. There are many variations of managerial coaching, which entail different types of skills. Those variations relevant to a consideration of leaders and managers include team coaching and hierarchical coaching.
What results coaching can do for you
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.
How much is coaching for leaders?
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.
Who is the best leadership development coach?
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.
