How Leaders Become More Successful Through Coaching

Defining Leadership Coaching:

There are many different definitions of leadership coaching, but at its essence, it’s about taking excellent leaders and helping them hone their skills in order to foster continued success. There are three elements or characteristics of leaders that graduate successfully from leadership coaching. The first element is having courage. It takes a lot of bravery to come to a coaching session and explore your weaknesses and your blind spots, and identify the ways in which you weren’t being successful and the ways that you can improve. The second characteristic is humility. It can be very difficult to admit that you have room to grow and that you want to fix the blindspots that you had the courage to explore. Without humility and the admission to yourself that you have things to fix, you cannot grow as a leader. The final trait is discipline. Having the discipline to make these changes in leadership style can really be a game-changer in how you lead your employees.

Goal Setting for Leaders:

Goal setting is critical. It involves a specific goal, the ways that you achieve the specific goal, and the outcome or benefit of improving that skill. The goal has to be specific and measurable. Leaders who are especially eager might feel compelled to set a multitude of goals for their time in coaching, but it’s not really about trying to boil the ocean. Coaching usually involves doing just one or two things a bit better, and that alone can make all the difference. Focusing on too many things can derail the process, and it’s important to be realistic about what can be accomplished. Selecting one or two specific, measurable goals is the path to success.

The Measure of Success

Success in leadership can be a relatively subjective thing at times. It is not always easy to measure the effectiveness of a leader, which can make measuring the success of leadership coaching a challenge. When going through a coaching program, a coach will often utilize a certain timeline marker to do an evaluation and assessment. For example, if a coaching program is a year-long, the coach might send out a survey and take a poll of employees, shareholders, and other people that interact with the leader, and assess how they have made progress or made changes on their previously identified goals. The same measurement test is done at the end of the coaching program, and hopefully the leader will have improved linearly in a noticeable way.