The Coaching Leader Blog

What's going to make the difference in your leadership in 2011?

New Year and a new resolution to improve on the poor use of this great blog. What's on our minds at the moment is the number of leadership challenges that people are wrestling with at the moment - organisations racked by change and uncertainty, staff insecure about their futures, brand and reputation risk high on the agenda etc.

And yet we work in many regions and across several sectors. There isn't going to be ONE answer about where leaders should focus their efforts and we've never believed in prescriptive models of the "10 things to be a great leader" variety.

That's why we're inviting people to give their opinions on specifically what, in their business/sector/geography, leaders should be focusing on in 2011 to deliver excellent leadership. 

Please feel free to look at our ideas (e.g.www.technologyofleadership.co.uk) and let us know what you think. If we can collect lots of ideas and circulate them, then everyone gets to benefit from our collective thinking.

Remember to be specific, I think that will help.

The Coaching Leader and the Future

“Be reassuring......be brave.......be enthusiastic”

This call to action comes from a Master Class we held some time ago. One of the speakers, Paul Barlow (interviewed in Chapter X) encouraged the audience to foster a positive, inclusive, authentic style of leadership.

 And there is little doubt that in the near future, we will all need to practise some of the key learnings from the Master Class:

• demonstrate that we understand the pressures on our people
• continue to develop ourselves and our teams
• increase the opportunities for real dialogue
• audit the communications processes
• find time to think
• simplify the strategy.

But beyond the near future, what then? Will Coaching Leadership style be the recommended way to run your business?

Here are my five reasons why the Coaching Leader will be even more effective and even more in demand in the more distant future:

•  you'll be working even more internationally than you are now.  Increasingly, your customers, suppliers and sources of funds and products will be in the Eastern hemisphere. A positive, inclusive authentic style of leadership will be essential for interactions across many cultures and time zones.
• Your team will not be your employees. As patterns of work continue to evolve, your virtual PA might be in another country and your team could be made of outsourcers, consultants, contractors and co-opted specialists. And by the way, they will probably be working remotely too. How will you manage people without the hidden message that you have control of their career prospects and salaries?
• Your job 10 years from now probably does not even exist yet. But the main reason that you will get it is because of your leadership style and skills. Product and system knowledge can be acquired and become redundant at an ever faster rate but leadership is always a premium asset.
• Your job will be a hybrid, a combination of functions that only makes sense in a particular organisation, in a particular market at a particular time. You might combine IT, HR and Legal in  job called Chief Knowledge Officer. Or take care of Sales and Accounting as doing business becomes ever more driven by regulation. A lot of your time will be spent in new environments trying to act on unfamiliar information. Just as well you also invested time in developing a coaching culture!
• Part of your performance review will be an evaluation of how well you delivered the skills of Ambassador/Evangelist/Brand Champion. With Corporate Social Responsibility even higher on the agenda and lessons learned brutally about damage to reputation, your business will specify the number of days to be spent visiting schools, trade bodies, regulators, government and the media.

Perhaps I am wrong about the Coaching Leader of the future and my predictions may turn out to be hilariously far from the realities of life in forty or fifty years time.

But if we look at the suggested profile of a Coaching Leader (see page X), I feel that he or she will be well-equipped to achieve and deliver in a more complex, international and decentralized business.

If you do not agree, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please put a message with your views on one of our websites and thank you for reading our book.

Is there a ‘right’ way to coach?

As members of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, we learn a great deal by getting together with other people and organizations who work in similar ways.

At a recent EMCC meeting, we joined a discussion about the role and style of coaching. Is the coach there to air his/her opinion and give advice? Or is their role to help the client figure things out for themselves?

In the end, everyone agreed that the 'either/or” statements above were too black and white and adopting the right style is a complex set of factors to do with expectations, relationships, cultures and contracts.

Here's a summary of what people thought: 

The ’Don’t be Directive’ faction said:

• Giving advice doesn’t work
• People have their own ideas….they don’t want yours!
• If you start a discussion by giving your opinions, you’re skewing the relationship and taking charge
• The coach is there to guide the process, not get caught up in the content

The ‘Advice can be OK’ faction said:

• We’re coaching executives not needy people who want counseling or therapy
• Busy, resourceful people want to get to a result which might involve the coach’s ideas
• Your ideas might be really useful!
• Most of our clients are happy to take a challenge from the coach and happily accept or reject it.

Maybe these are too black and white too? Maybe it’s about sticking to the role of being “in service of the client” or asking permission or signposting or visibly taking one hat off and putting on another.

What do you think?