Overview: Intelligent leaders strive to create a culture focused on coaching relationships in their organizations. Such cultures offer ample opportunities for learning not only for those being coached, but the coaches themselves. Everyone has a lesson or two to offer those willing to listen.
How a Leader Can Learn by Coaching Others
Leadership coaching helps executives improve their leadership skills, allowing them to fulfill their potential. By turning leaders into better versions of themselves, leadership coaching improves organizations in many unexpected and unpredictable ways.
The pinnacle of success from the perspective of a leadership coach is to turn mere executives into coaches for their reports and peers. A true leader is a coach. Instilling a culture of coaching in an organization can turn it into a highly competitive, adaptable organism primed for sustainable success.
By coaching your reports, you create two-way learning and teaching situations that can teach you as much as your followers. What can your employees teach you? What lessons can coaches derive from their coaching relationships?
It’s How You Make People Feel That Matters
Humans are infinitely complex in their feelings, emotions, and needs, but our basic wants and needs are remarkably similar. We all want to:
- Be seen as productive members of a community
- Be heard as such
- Be appreciated for the efforts we make
- Be rewarded for the results we attain
When you establish a coaching relationship with employees, these truths become self-evident. In your person-to-person relationships, it does not matter what you say. What truly matters is how you make people feel.
Seeing Situations from Different Perspectives
Emotional intelligence is key to improving your leadership skills. It allows leaders to put themselves in the shoes of others and experience situations vicariously from the perspectives of their interlocutors. Executive coaching insists on developing a leader’s self-awareness and emotional intelligence to activate this ability. How can your interaction with others develop emotional intelligence?
Like good executive coaching professionals, good teachers do not deliver dry, flat information to students. They instead ask questions to gain an understanding of their students’ frames of reference. From there, they deliver information tailored to these frames of reference, making it easier to digest.
Constantly interacting with employees, the coach teaches leaders:
- The importance of getting to know employees and their mindsets before determining their roles in the organization
- The importance of formulating and asking questions
- The significance of understanding how others view a person
- The true meaning of the analogies and linguistic peculiarities people use to describe situations
By learning these lessons, you can improve your leadership skills in that:
- You learn how to build trust quickly and efficiently from the ground up.
- You understand the importance of feedback and learn how to facilitate its seamless flow.
- You improve your collaboration skills.
The Importance of Simple, No-Nonsense Communication
Coaching your employees will teach you that simple, straightforward communication is the best tool you can have as a leader.
Engaging in elaborate communication rituals and expecting others to read your mind is hardly conducive to seamless collaboration. Trying to read others’ minds is an exhausting and potentially frustrating exercise. Keep it simple.
Avoid Being a People Pleaser
It is not a leader’s job to please everyone at all costs. By trying to make sure everyone is always happy, leaders miss the opportunity to practice genuine leadership. Instead of acting along a set of personal values in alignment with the purpose and values of the organization, they deviate, confusing their reports.
People like genuine, sincere leadership. They are more likely to follow genuine leaders than acts and entertainment.
The Inevitability of Change
Nature has programmed us all to dislike the uncertainty of change yet change comes regardless of how we react to it. We can embrace it or fight it. Coaching relationships with your employees teach you that there are always reasons behind change, even if you fail to see them initially.
Embracing change is the only reasonable way to handle it.
For a leader, being around people always offers lessons and learning opportunities. Everyone has something to teach us.
To learn more about how you can join the IL Movement as a coach, or how you can benefit from bringing IL Solutions to your organization, contact us today.