Leadership Coaching Benefits

People tend to learn better and thus adopt new, improved leadership habits more easily, when they are actively engaged in the learning process.

Just sitting, listening to someone talking about leadership theory or practice is passive. You may be itching to try something the trainer has just recommended but by the time the lecture ends and you have returned to your workplace, you may have forgotten what they said or lost your enthusiasm for the idea.

With leadership coaching the coachee is in their workplace and actively engaged in work activities as the coaching takes place. The moment one of the short sessions ends they can immediately implement a new practice.

Also, the process is entirely devoted to the coachee. The coaching time is solely about their issues and the attainment of new behaviour goals.

Methods of Leadership Coaching

There are two basic methods of leadership coaching: either one-to-one or in small participative leadership groups.

A colleague with whom I work at The University of Surrey Leadership Academy, has achieved considerable success with group work. He sits the group around a table and moderates discussions about how they might manage a given situation.

These Action Learning Sets work well when group decisions need to be made.

As an example, this colleague recently moderated a group trying to decide the most effective management structure for a business they were about to transform from an in-house department into an independent company.

Personally I do most of my work one-to-one with senior and middle managers.

I ask the organisation to appoint at least two stakeholders for the manager to be coached. Then I ask the stakeholders to set goals for the coaching. These are typically improvements or new working practices that they would like to see the coachee adopt.

Once these objectives are agreed by the coachee we then discuss what new behaviours the coachee needs to adopt in order to achieve the objectives.

The Advantages of NLP in Leadership Coaching

As good leadership is largely a matter of dynamic behaviours and because NLP is a powerful method of helping people change behaviours, I have found that it is of great benefit to me as a leadership coach and, of course, to my clients.

The important point is not to get one’s clients interested in NLP techniques, which can absorb their attention. The NLP is simply a tool to enable the coachee to make changes more easily and to make those changes become part of their habitual behaviour.

Good Leadership is About Good Habits

One of the hallmarks of a good leader is consistent behaviour. Nothing upsets people more than inconsistency. It often manifests itself in “unfair” practices.

Consistency is a matter of having good habits.

Of course the leaders habits must cover a multitude of disciplines including: creating charismatic visions, developing strategies for the attainment of those visions, being an inspiring communicator, actively seeking feedback, listening to that feedback and learning from it.

Practice Makes Perfect

The great point about leadership coaching is that it takes place over an extended period of time. The coachee is constantly being challenged and encouraged to work on the issues that need improvement.

By constantly doing better the coachee is practicing good habits and the more he or she practices the more natural it becomes to automatically behave like a really effective leader.

Would You Benefit From Leadership Coaching?

As you may know one of the main techniques that good coaches use is to ask questions that are designed to make the coachee think and to involve them in their own improvement process.

With that in mind I ask you to think about these questions to help you decide whether you would benefit from the services of a leadership coach:

1. Do you really want to improve as a leader?

2. Do you believe that you can improve your leadership performance?

3. Have you thought about the areas in which you need to improve your behaviour to become a better leader?

4. Have you held any discussions with a leadership coach or anyone who has benefitted from leadership coaching to assess whether this is an activity in which you would like to engage?

5. Are you prepared to change some of your behaviours?

6. Are you prepared to devote time to changing your behaviours?

If you formed a positive opinion from answering these questions you might, as a next step, like to consider contacting me to discuss how you might proceed. You can do this either my using the contact form on my helpline or by telephoning my freephone number 0800 195 1989