Leaders shoulder a huge load of responsibility—ensuring quality production, responding to customers’ needs, creating an environment that inspires innovation, keeping tabs on individuals’ morale and ongoing development, and more. Despite the long list of duties, organizations often throw leaders into situations that they are woefully under prepared for, and then wait to see if they survive—a rather Darwinian approach to leadership development. We’ve found a better way to help individuals strengthen their abilities as a leader while they tackle their day-to-day challenges—Coaching.
As compared to traditional training and in-house mentoring, leadership coaching provides several distinct advantages that yield the highest rate of return for your development investment.
Put simply, Leadership Coaching is a proactive, goal-focused series of one-on-one interactions between the leader and coach designed to elevate the leader’s effectiveness at meeting the rapidly changing needs of the organization. Working with a professional leadership coach offers the leader a level of support, challenge, and structure that permits a deeper level of dialogue and encourages the promise and fulfillment of meaningful commitments to change. Coaching is not the same as advising. Advising tends to be oriented to the near-term and, particularly where behaviors are concerned, is limited in its ability to provide long-lasting change. Coaching supports the leader in addressing current challenges in real time through examining thought processes and expanding the leader’s awareness—changes that fundamentally shift the leader’s ability to respond to future challenges.
Learn more about two specific forms of coaching sought most often by our clients: