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Every Leader Needs To Be A Coach
When people grow, business performance grows.
The ability of leaders to coach their organizations, teams, and employees can elevate good organizations to exceptional ones. Perhaps this explains the growing recognition among organizations that coaching is a critical leadership tool for achieving business strategies and goals, and for helping people change behaviours to achieve specific business outcomes.
Coaching unlocks people’s potential and maximizes performance. Every good leader who has a vision to execute, a team to lead, and outcomes to achieve needs to be a good coach. Here are some key thoughts on introducing or strengthening the coaching culture within your organization.
Recognize the goal of coaching. Leaders who are good coaches recognize there is a connection between people’s behaviours and business outcomes. The purpose of coaching is to improve outcomes. Whether the context is about helping people to develop, perform or adjust to change, coaching helps people move from point A to point B, for their own benefit, and for the benefit of the organization. The goal of coaching is to improve outcomes by helping people to change behavior.
Develop a coaching mind-set. Coaching can’t just be an ‘event’ that leaders choose to do some of the time. Leaders who are committed to achieving their business goals need their team to continuously build their skills, improve abilities and grow. Coaching must become part of a leader’s mindset and valued as a core part of one’s role as a leader or manager.
Make coaching a core behaviour. If you have this mind-set, then coaching becomes second nature, a natural part of your interactions with people to ensure that your people continue to achieve business targets and remain challenged.
Reinforce that it’s about the business results. Ensure that your managers, team and people understand the reasons behind the coaching. You should be able to demonstrate business results (directly or indirectly) or improvements in employee engagement and morale as a result of your coaching.
Coach the person, not the problem. Remember, a leader’s role is to coach the person rather than resorting to solving the problem for them. This is ultimately more rewarding for both your people’s potential and the bottom line.
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