Leadership Coaching is needed today more than ever as a critical tool for organizational change. Change is essential for organizations to grow and adapt to today’s rapidly shifting marketplace, yet people and organizations are naturally resistant to change. Leadership Coaching can facilitate productive change in persons, teams, and systems by enabling leaders, managers, and employees to uncover potential that might otherwise go untapped.
At the same time, many organizations realize that the traditional hierarchical model of leading and influencing is no longer optimal to succeed in today’s complex and dynamic marketplace. To adopt more relational, collaborative, and consultative models for leading and influencing, businesses are evolving to build coaching cultures that encourage organizational learning and adaptability. And leadership coaching has emerged as the best way to help individuals learn to think and work together more effectively.
The ability to coach leaders is a core competency for those helping organizations to develop. Through coaching, leaders learn how to optimize the value of teams and organizations. Leadership Coaching helps clarify vision, beliefs, and values, and stretches the capacity to lead and influence. Leaders then become catalysts for change within their organizations.
Leadership Coaching delivers three major benefits.
First, it takes a comprehensive approach to coaching so that coaching not only improves individual performance but impacts the entire organization. It ensures that the leader’s interpersonal, leadership and strategic skills are aligned with the organization’s desired leadership brand. The leaders who emerge from multi-coaching engagements share a new sense of common purpose and direction.
Second, Leadership Coaching ties coaching outcomes to organizational strategy. Coaching is often tactical in orientation. Leaders tend to develop generic capabilities identified as “gaps” separate from the leader’s unique context. A next generation approach to Leadership Coaching, by contrast, integrates coaching with organizational context and strategy. Leaders develop broad capabilities relevant to realizing the organization’s strategic objectives now and in the future.
Third, Leadership Coaching supports the development of an organization-wide coaching culture. Addressing the broader context in which the leader operates, it takes into full account the role of managers, colleagues, business strategy, culture and processes. Using the insight, tools and experience of seasoned management consultants, it works with the organization to create an environment conducive to the success of the newly coached leader and of the coaching of other leaders.
Leadership Coaching can open the floodgates of power and creativity with unexpected benefits. It might mean the difference between stagnation and explosive growth.
If you are looking to outpace your competition with leaders who are skilled strategists and excellent communicators, then look carefully to see if Leadership Coaching will give your organization that winning edge.
