Coaching Skills for Leaders

Many of the challenges leaders tackle today are completely uncharted, leaving you with what can feel like limited resources to overcome those challenges. Pick up almost any book about leadership from the last century, and many of the theories and strategies feel outdated at best and downright abusive at worst.

Not only are leaders asked to solve new problems because of changes in technology, but they also need to be more inclusive, collaborative, democratic, and compassionate to reflect the evolving world.

The key to effective leadership today is understanding that leaders don’t have all the answers. Instead, the solutions to overcome the challenges we face reside in the people we lead. It’s our job as leaders to cultivate and develop those solutions through coaching leadership.

Coaching skills are a way to bring new ideas to the table that achieve results for your organization and develop leaders around you. Although a coaching leadership style is a significant shift in mainstream leadership philosophy, it is built on lessons learned from past experience and the evolving values of our new era.

What is Coaching Leadership?

In the past, leadership has always been associated with management positions. You were a leader because you were the manager and the relationship was one of control. Leaders told their reports what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. Leaders knew the answers because they had done it before, and success was easily replicable by following the same model.

Since mainstream leadership philosophy centered around this kind of relationship for so long, many of our ideas about what makes a great leader come from authoritarian style management and ultimatums about performance. 

It’s almost impossible for a leader to know all the answers today. Information moves faster than ever, and conditions change rapidly to the point where what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Instead, discovering solutions to problems requires collaboration from many different people with varied backgrounds and experiences.

The truth is being a great leader has very little to do with your position and much more to do with your ability to inspire, motivate, and empower others. Everyone is a leader, including interns, junior team members, executive assistants, and janitorial staff.

Coaching leadership is instead characterized by inviting engagement, building empathy, and using encouragement to improve performance. Shifting how we approach leadership towards a coaching style also shifts several old established ideas of what leadership is, moving from:

• Autocratic to Democratic

• Directive to Collaborative

• Competitive to Co-Creating

• Masculine Dominance to Gender Neutral

• White, Western Culture to Inclusive Culture

• Linear to Compassionate Systems for Problem Solving

Coaching moves away from top-down control-centered practices towards collaboration and empowerment by cultivating an individual's resourcefulness and strengths to apply them where best utilized. Coaching is important in leadership because it allows us to find better solutions to modern challenges and develop our teams more effectively.

How to Be a Coaching Leader

So how do we make the switch from manager to coach? What skills do you need to be a good coach? When it comes to leadership development and coaching, there are four main elements that you can begin to cultivate in yourself to be a more effective leader. 

DEVELOP A COACH PRESENCE

Executive presence of the past was all about establishing power structures. The goal was to distance yourself from your reports and make all the decisions without getting knowledge or experience inputs from everyone on the team.

To develop a modern leadership presence, you need to change your mindset by unlearning these old habits of executive presence and remember that we are humans first. You need to be present with those you’re leading and be observant, adaptive, and open to learning from others.

Part of transitioning to a coaching presence is that it takes more planning than a top-down authoritative approach. You’ll need to prepare more for negotiations, review notes from previous interactions, have a plan to manage conversations, and know how to give difficult feedback in an effective way that invites learning and development. 

During interactions, you can create a coaching presence by:

• Remaining calm, even in frustrating moments

• Maintaining an open posture and focus on your coachee

• Staying curious and open to new possibilities

• Check your assumptions before leaping to conclusions

The easiest way to develop a coaching presence is to keep in mind that learning is an experiential process that requires patience and time. Your team picks up on energy shifts and notices if you respond negatively, become angry, or get distracted. You’ll have to keep your frustrations in check and sort through anger and doubt privately to allow your team members the opportunity and room to grow.

BUILD TRUSTING RELATIONSHIPS

Learning requires the space to fail, so it’s part of your role as a leader to give your team members that security. Successful coaching and development require a level of trust between you and team members so they feel empowered to take risks, face fears, and propose new ideas. 

To build trust with your team members, you have to first create a safe space by setting up an agreement, boundaries, and parameters about how you communicate and give feedback that feels comfortable for everyone.

As a coach, you must exercise compassion and engage with ideas and dreams through active listening, meaningful conversation, and other effective communication strategies. Summarizing, paraphrasing, and mirroring will be your best tools to confirm you understand them clearly.

Taking the following steps can help you establish a relationship of trust with your team:

• Establish clarity on roles, goals, accountability, and values

• Be clear on confidentiality and creating a space for growth

• Set priorities and goals for growth together

• Engage in active listening and don’t interrupt

• Help your team see limiting beliefs, biases, or patterns

• Watch for changes in energy levels and emotions

A large part of building trust in a coaching relationship comes from allowing time for the person to think and speak. Your role is to focus on what they are saying and not saying to understand their needs and values. 

CREATE OPPORTUNITIES FOR INCREASED AWARENESS

Great coach leaders listen with openness and curiosity when coachees share their feelings, ideas, habits, or changes in energy. These are open opportunities to build on the coachee’s perspective and encourage growth through awareness rather than dictate solutions. 

Part of being a great leader is creating awareness that allows your team to explore new solutions and discover new pathways. Because coaching leaders don’t pretend to have all the answers, awareness is a pivotal part of finding solutions together in our rapidly changing world.

As a coach, your role is to build a space where open-ended questions lead to conversations and where conversations lead to awareness and discovery. Staying curious is part of understanding your coachee and allows them to create discovery and clarity. 

You can elevate awareness in your interactions by:

• Using open-ended questions to uncover strengths, beliefs, assumptions, and insights

• Guiding conversations to reveal information needed to explore new pathways

• Using clear comments, intuitions, observations, and reflections to help reframe information and brainstorm new ideas

Another crucial part of creating awareness in your coachees is to simply remain aware yourself. Maintain awareness of their strengths, areas of improvement, and goals. 

Observe the differences between trivial and significant issues and the differences between situational and recurring behaviors. Part of your role is helping them realize these things through open-ended questions and observations.

DESIGN ACTIONS FOR EXPERIMENTATION

A large part of being a coach means creating a plan of action for your coachee to succeed. But great coaches remember that the outcomes of action are to explore, discover, and develop new solutions, not just to get to an ultimate goal. 

Experimentation is scary, and your role is to invite your coachee to try new ideas and skills without fear of failure. The awareness you create in your coaching relationships is the motivation for your coachee to explore new realizations and possibilities. Your trusting relationship gives them a secure space where they can learn through failure. 

Your role is not to dictate what plan of action needs to be done or fix your coachee but instead help them stay on track by drawing attention to what is important to them and maintaining accountability. 

Ask questions that help guide your coachee towards executing new ideas:

• What is their commitment level to their stated action? 

• What support or resources might they need?

• What are the possible barriers to taking action?

Seize opportunities for your coachee to practice, apply, and deepen lessons that they’ve learned. Help them think through actions that will most effectively lead to agreed-upon coaching results. 

Inquire about any actions you heard throughout the session to invite the coachee to experiment with new pathways and skills. Throughout the process of designing actions, you should manage their progress and keep them accountable by revisiting your coaching agreement periodically.  

Start Developing Your Coaching Skills as a Leader

Learning leadership coaching styles is a very different approach to leadership and management than what you may have been taught before or may have believed about what it means to be a great leader. 

A large part of becoming a great leader is unlearning the habits and letting go of outdated ideas of what effective leadership is. Developing a leadership development plan should include learning coaching skills to overcome the unique challenges of being a leader today.

Working with a leadership coach to help you reframe your leadership style can help you start learning how to be a more effective coach to your team. If you’re tasked with facing the new challenges of our modern world, working towards developing these kinds of leadership skills is essential to your success and your team's success. 

Let’s talk about developing your coaching skills and becoming a better leader.