The benefits of coaching your leadership team
What is the GOAL of good leadership?
It’s a question that I ask in the various training sessions I run on a regular basis. Is it to get the job done? Is it to get your team to excel? Is it to align the team’s efforts to the company direction? Is it to be more efficient in achieving revenue for the company? Is it to inspire, or to engage? I could go on.
If I were to create a mind-map to explore all of the objectives for good leadership, and all of the avenues that it would propel us into discussing, it would bring us to one cohesive answer that would cover all of the above. To make the most and the BEST of your most valuable resources. The next question I want to consider in this article is: What is the GOAL of coaching?
I will leave that there as a rhetorical question, as I am sure that you see the correlation that I am trying to make. Instead let us look to explore what is the basis of coaching and why it is becoming a more commonplace practice amongst organisations; whether it is sought externally or generated from an internal source.
It has been evidenced time and time again, that work for many has become a more stressful place to be. As a consequence, engagement is affected, creating an undesired level of low commitment of employees. The journey we are currently embroiled in with COVID-19 and the newfound necessity to work from home may have relieved some employees, whilst frustrating employers due to an increase in a lack of engagement, commitment and urgency to meet the targets, objectives and expectations related to their accountabilities.
Kicking off a coaching journey by having a solid level of self-awareness is a great way to ensure that anybody could become a leader with strong coaching capabilities.
In Google’s Project Oxygen, the top of the 10 Oxygen behaviours of best managers includes the following:
- That a manager is a good coach
- That a manager empowers the team and does not micromanage
- That a manager creates an inclusive team environment showing concern for success and well-being
Let’s be frank here. Having an expectation for your leaders to become good coaches overnight, and to undertake behaviours polarised from the ones they have become accustomed to within their management and leadership capabilities is tantamount to setting them up for failure. However, there is an undeniable intrigue in knowing that the leaders within your organisation would be able to coach each and every member within the team to further their potential and achieve it. Imagine that.
To engage people to have ownership of their contribution towards your company; and in doing so, encouraging a strong sense of empowerment through their decision-making ability, as well as the impact that they can clearly see that they are having on the organisation. Sounds like a painted scene of rainbows, unicorns and pots of gold, doesn’t it?
Well, it doesn’t have to be cheesy, nor does it have to be unrealistic- it can look somewhat like a rainbow, however.
Kicking off a coaching journey by having a solid level of self-awareness is a great way to ensure that anybody could become a leader with strong coaching capabilities. This is why we use PRISM Brain-Mapping to get to know the individuals that we are coaching and to help them get to know themselves, their behaviours. In doing so we are able to set up a clear pathway of development for the coachees to utilise their own individual skills and capabilities to the maximum potential in order to coach, develop, and engage others.
The science that supports the effectiveness of this tool is the basic fact that all behaviour is brain-driven. There are scores of research and papers that explore the neurobiological differences that affects our behaviours. The objective of using PRISM brain-mapping as a tool in coaching would be to have the coachees understand how genetic and environmental factors have contributed towards creating the stable patterns of their own brain function that produces their individual personality.
This discussion, and this elevation of one’s own self-awareness has a profound impact on the individual receiving the development as it allows the individual to understand, that the strengths and the development areas that exist within themselves are there for clear reasons. The coachees finally have a verbalised explanation for the way they behave. Only with this level of self-awareness can one really determine what changes are needed to get to where they want to be. The coach facilitates that journey and enables the coachees to tap into their abilities and to utilise them for the best possible impact.
So this brings me back to my original question: What is the GOAL of coaching? To make the most and the BEST of your most valuable resources.
