Leadership - Leadership Coaching

Ben Ponne, Business Manager, Asia Pacific, Architecting the Enterprise

Enterprise Architects must be strong leaders. One of the best ways to develop your leadership skills is to learn from interactive coaching experiences. Sharing and analysing your own behaviour, and then working on an action plan to improve this behaviour has shown to be a very effective way to increase your leadership ability. In this article we will have a closer look at leadership coaching, what to look out for when you engage with a coach, and the benefits you can expect out of the coaching process.

What is leadership coaching?

For this article I will use the following definition of leadership coaching:

“Leadership coaching” is a one-on-one leadership development agreement between an independent professional coach and an individual client to accelerate the client’s journey to become an excellent leader.” - NEO

This definition implies some important differences with other definitions of leadership coaching you may have encountered. I use the term “client” as this implies a formal contractual relationship between the coach and the person who is coached. This also highlights the difference between internal managers who coach their employees, and external coaches that don’t have authority or confidential relationships with employees. Despite the fact that an organisation often provides the context for an agreement, the focus should be foremost on the individual and not just on the organisation. Leadership touches all aspects of your life, not only your professional environment. You cannot just switch off your behavior at the corporate door.

Coaching is not something that just happens to you or that can be forced onto you by an organisation. You must have a strong desire to learn, grow and spend the time and energy to succeed. Leadership development is a lifelong journey and at times you will be disappointed. Coaches are committed to help you make the journey and have a deep dedication to help you grow and realise your dreams.

Matching Coach and Client

There are many coaches that you can choose from and many use a different approach to coaching. You will need to find an approach that fits your view of leadership growth and also reflects your current situation. For example, if you are a CEO close to your retirement you may want a coach to help you deal with leadership succession. You may also be part of a large corporation that wants managers being coached to become future senior leaders. Or you may want to opt for a new leadership position outside your organisation and prepare for a career transition. Each situation will generate different developmental goals and will demand a different approach to coaching.

Not only is your situation is important, but also the style of coaching that fits you as a person. Personal characteristics, such as cultural background, customs, moral and ethical norms, preferences in learning styles, personality traits, aesthetics, experience with coaching, values, beliefs and attitude, are all important factors in finding the “right” coach and coaching style.

For example, you may have heard of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) as a valuable approach to becoming a better leader. Emotional Intelligence, popularized by Daniel Goleman in the 90s, is another approach that has seen considerable growth in the last decade. You may want to focus on behavioral aspects without psychodynamic thinking and revert to the behaviorist approach, which focuses only on the behavior that can be observed and manipulated without looking at the underlying motives. If you have a religious background you may want a coach that puts leadership in the context of your religion. Cognitive perspectives are other widely used approaches in clinical and counseling psychology, which focuses on internal mental processes and rejects introspection.

So shortly, there is a wide spectrum of coaching approaches available and you will need to find the approach that fits your personality and situation.

But we are still not there. The key foundation of a successful coaching experience comes down to your individual relationship with your coach. This should be a relationship of trust, confidentiality, collaboration, encouragement, intensity, commitment and action. So let’s have a look at the role of the coach.

The role of the coach

Coaches are facilitators that allow you to see new perspectives and gain clarity about your own emotions, thoughts and behaviors, related to your situation and social context. The coach will help you identify choices and solutions. Your coach will not be directive, which is one of the differences with consultants who will give you advice on what you should or should not do. Usually the coach will lead you through the coaching process while you have to lead the change yourself (self directed learning). The coach will not have formal authority over you but there will be an agreement in place between you and the coach that facilitates accountability and guidance through the process. Obviously, the conversations with your coach are private but the process is transparent and may be shared with your organisation. Especially when your organisation is the initiator of the coaching engagement.

The coaching process

Coaching is an experience-based process. Compare this with how you learned as a child. When you learned to bike you probably fell over a few times and hurt yourself. Instead of explaining the rules of gravity to you and give you a range of solutions, a coach would show empathy, ask open questions, listen, talk about the experience and encourage you to find your own solutions to stay on the bike. The child’s agenda is key here and it is not the agenda of the coach that leads. The challenge of the coach is to facilitate the formulation of your agenda and then translate it to action and accountability.

What can you expect from coaching

Coaching can deliver a variety of outcomes. Many of these outcomes will relate to you personally, as this is what coaching is about. However, the personal benefits usually translate into an organizational impact. This is why a coach is often brought in by HR to help realise an organizational transformation.

The most common personal outcome is an increased awareness and self-knowledge. This provides clarity about your goals and how you can make changes to achieve these. This also allows you to take ownership and responsibility of your own decisions and slowly you will build up confidence and self-belief. You will be given the space to experiment with, and reflect on, your knowledge, emotions and behaviors. The coach is there to clear up any blockages in your leadership development journey. She will ask you to step back and look in the mirror to see your life in proportion and encourage you to take new perspectives. Once you are able to make decisions with clarity of purpose and aligned with your inner world, you can move forward. This will also have an impact on your mind and body. You will feel more optimistic, in control, and your energy levels will be higher. The coaching process is exciting and you will uncover new opportunities that will give you renewed energy. Coaches will channel this energy to change your feelings and behaviors for long lasting impact.

Leadership coaching will have a variety of benefits for an organisation, such as increased engagement and commitment, higher productivity, stronger culture, increased risk-taking and creativity, and healthier employees. Productivity is one of the most attractive measurable outcomes for organisations. Even a small increase in productivity would have a large impact on the bottom line because salaries are usually fixed costs, which means that productivity immediately drops down to the bottom line. But it is not only about improving the current environment. Excellent coaches will encourage you to explore the impossible that you carry within you and stretch your mind and skills to reach it.

Are you ready to be coached?

Not everybody is coachable and professional coaches will go through an exploratory session with you to make sure that you will get the benefits of your coaching experience. Many top coaches will not coach you if they consider you as non-coachable. Not everybody is ready to be coached. There can be a few serious obstacles that can make or break the coaching experience.

First of all you need to be committed to the coaching process. Coaching is a major effort from the coach and the client over a long period, with many ups and downs. If you have no intention to put in a lot of effort then the coach will lose interest and put her energy somewhere else. Coaching should be seen as a great opportunity to become a better leader and never seen as a punishment for dysfunctional behavior. The more active you are involved the more you will get out of it.

Unrealistic expectations are another major cause of failing coaching experiences. Behaviour is very difficult to change and there is not a quick solution for it. Many weight-loss programs promise to turn you into a beautiful swimsuit model overnight. They fail to tell you that weight-loss, like leadership development, is about changing our habits, which takes tremendous effort to achieve. Discuss your expectations with your coach and make sure they are realistic and achievable.

Another serious roadblock is defensive behavior. Such as blaming everybody else for things that don’t go well, so that we don’t have the carry our own responsibility. Or denial, such as filtering performance feedback for favorable information and discard other information, which distorts our view of reality. For coaching to be successful you need to be brutally honest about your strengths and challenges. Putting up defenses will limit a coach’s ability to help you. These defenses may not always be at concious level but may be unconciously build up during your life.

You can’t do the coaching in isolation with your coach. You are part of a social environment and feedback from people in this environment is essential. Your managers, peers, subordinates and family are valuable resources that can provide additional insights into your behavior and its impact. You will be surprised how helpful they can be in the process. The majority of people respect someone who admits his or her shortcomings and wants to improve.

Next steps

Behind almost all great leaders is a great coach. A coach can provide tremendous value in your path to become a great leader. Coaching is intensive and can be confrontational because it reaches into our thinking, feeling and behaviour, but it opens up possibilities for change that you may not have realised before. It can add another valuable dimension to your journey to become a great leader.