What is Leadership Coaching?
As a leader, you may find asking for support challenging. The pressure is on, people are often looking to you for answers or guidance. Leadership means showing up with courage and integrity and setting examples for the people around you. Even the world’s most successful people have someone to turn to for support.
Leadership coaching and development can play an important role in your journey of becoming a better leader. A leadership coach can help you tap into your potential and develop a leadership mindset from the inside out.
Great leaders realize their own needs, both for developing their skills as coaches as well as the benefits a third-party perspective can bring. Leadership coaching is an excellent way to develop your leadership skills with the support of a coach and get the perspective of an outsider who can reveal more about your leadership style and development.
What Exactly is Leadership Coaching?
When most people think of coaching, they imagine a coach running practice drills on the field, giving motivational speeches to the team in the locker room, or defending a team’s interests with referees during a game.
Really great coaches train their team to perform better by identifying their strengths, providing guidance on how to train and use those strengths, motivating team members by revealing hidden meanings and knowledge, and upholding the core values of the team. Leadership coaching is based on many of the same foundations.
Leadership coaching uses developmental research and frameworks to increase performance and adhere to the leader’s core values in difficult situations. As a leadership coach, I support my clients in becoming courageous leaders in a number of different ways, including:
Defining values
Developing a creative mindset
Building communication and team-building skills
Improving problem-solving practices
Coaching leadership definitions vary, but the goal of leadership coaching is to support you in becoming a braver leader by utilizing your unique strengths, supporting your learning, and encouraging you to expand possibilities.
How Does Leadership Coaching Work?
So how does it work? Leadership coaching uses a variety of behavioral and systemic models to help you improve leadership skills. Coaching is designed to help you define where you are stuck, talk about your strengths and goals, and create an action plan. During a leadership coaching session, we do the following:
Talk things through
Brainstorm ideas together
Design your plan
Coaching is a partnership and works to bring out the best in yourself while also focusing on your goals and challenges. Maybe you’ve found yourself feeling lost or don’t know how to become a better leader. Coaching is one way to narrow down the small manageable steps you need to take to improve your leadership skills and achieve your personal development goals as a leader.
Why Leadership Coaching is Important
There may be many occasions when you feel like the skills that you used to help you get to your leadership position aren’t the same skills you need to be able to be successful in that position. Sometimes a new role or a new place in life requires an entirely fresh approach or a new mindset.
Some of the benefits of leadership coaching include:
Setting clear goals and taking actions to achieve them
Maintaining harmony between work and life
Improving work performance
Managing stress
Becoming more resilient
One of the many reasons development and leadership coaching is important is because the result is often a more balanced lifestyle. I work with clients to meet their goals through the plan they design so they can have their needs met both inside and outside of their leadership roles. By creating awareness, we can change our way of thinking and our approach to it.
A coach is there to support you in working out what you want in life and reaching those goals in a manageable way while also navigating through all the noise and figuring out what’s the most important. Coaching is also a way to gain confidence in your leadership skill set, understand yourself better, and identify blind spots in your leadership that can be worked on.
Finally, not only will you find yourself succeeding mentally and emotionally as a leader, but it will have a lasting impact on your personal life and career. One of the biggest takeaways from a coaching program is the benefit it has for your overall well-being to live a happier and more fulfilling life.
The Financial Benefits Of Leadership Coaching
Feeling resistant about leadership coaching? Not sure if there are financial benefits you can convince your boss about? Chances are you or your company want a good return on your investment in leadership coaching services.
According to the International Coach Federation (ICF), the ROI for leadership coaching was $4-8 for every $1 invested. They also found that training alone equals a 22.4% increase in productivity. When combined with coaching, productivity rises to 88%. You, and your company, see a significant ROI when you choose to invest in leadership coaching.
Coaching not only accelerates your development as a leader but it also saves you time, stress, and money by having someone there to keep you accountable and provide support along the way. Coaching brings new ideas and strategies into the market, helping you to develop yourself and your team’s abilities to achieve financial goals.
Ready To Take Action?
If you’re ready to feel more clarity in your responsibilities as a leader for your team, leadership development coaching may provide you with the right steps you need. I work to bring out the best in you so you can take on your role with a fresh new perspective.
Let’s talk. Contact us today to discuss what’s challenging you and how we can support you in navigating a path forward.