What does leadership coaching really solve?

Please tick the box below to indicate what you would like leadership coaching to fix:

• Strategic Thinking
• People Skills
• Communication
• Change Management

The leadership challenges we tackle

At the risk of stating the obvious, I’m asked to provide leadership coaching when things need improving. There’s a leadership problem to resolve – leaders aren’t communicating well; they’re not getting the most from their teams and not gelling with their peers. Sometimes they lack a broad perspective on their decisions and their consequences. Other times, they feel anxious stepping into the unknown or find it difficult to gain support to drive change.

The four pillars of leadership development

My leadership coaching often revolves around four recurring themes: interpersonal skills/emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, communication, and change management. Leaders need to:

• Provide a vision, champion and sell the change, and build momentum.
• Think in an agile way to see the big picture goal and monitor the details to help them get there.
• Understand others, identify with them and build their skills.
• Position the right words for the right people at the right time.

Understanding the bigger picture

Each of these topics is broad, and there is great depth that can be explored within each. But a leader’s development is rarely ‘boxed up and packaged’ neatly into one of these four categories, even if an organisation presumes to know the leader’s ‘problem’.

The reality of helping elevate their performance is more nuanced and interwoven. The initially prescribed ‘problem’ often emerges as the symptom of another, more central challenge. To make matters more complex, we often kid ourselves - we hold onto assumptions, presume competence, and have personal blind spots. We deny or avoid the necessary steps to improve, particularly when our reserves and confidence are low.

The role of trust in coaching

My coaching works best when leaders feel there is enough trust in the room to lean into their areas of discomfort. In that space, we can pinpoint development areas, explore specific changes, and then zoom out to keep the ‘big picture’, connecting personal change to achieving business results.

Keeping the pillars in balance

So, in my experience, these four broad development areas are the ‘pillars’ of leadership. They consistently show up across a wide variety of business sectors, functions and contexts.

In leadership coaching, it is good to split out themes so they can be more clearly seen, reflected upon and adapted. Yet, the more critical step is to integrate those adaptations, keeping these leadership ‘pillars’ in balance – getting them firing simultaneously and working in harmony.

Explore how coaching can support your leadership

If you’d like to explore how these pillars can be strengthened in your organisation, I’d be happy to discuss a tailored approach.