Overview: The evolving business landscape requires organizations to implement fresh operating models on the go. Such changes require updated leadership skills, increased flexibility, and a consistent focus on innovation. Leadership coaching can help leaders become effective advocates of change in organizations. Coaches can help leaders find ways to keep their leadership skills up to date.
While it’s potentially rewarding and certainly a position of privilege that allows leaders to impact others’ lives positively, leadership can be stressful. It’s a constant race that pushes leaders to the edge and puts their skills to the test. As the business landscape evolves, so do the requirements concerning leaders’ skills.
Companies must phase out old business models that don’t work. They must implement new structures focusing on innovation and flexibility. New organizational structures require up-to-date leadership. How can you, as a leader, keep your abilities current? How can leadership coaching help you?
Executive Coaching Can Help
Leadership coaching can help leaders identify gaps in the leadership skills they need to guide organizations to success through new operating models. New models require new types of leadership, so the gaps are likely to be many.
Team building has always been a central piece of leadership. Leaders must assemble teams as they did 20 years ago. How they accomplish this goal today is radically different, however. Executive coaching understands that keeping people engaged and focusing on communication are central tenets of the paradigm of intelligent leadership.
Leaders now lead teams comprised of of on-site talent, suppliers, and remote freelancers. They must bring these people together in folds that value and reward continuous improvement, innovation, and employee-driven learning.
No one can afford to fall behind and ignore the need for updated leadership. Organizations that do will fail and wither. Here’s what leaders can do to keep their skills current.
Busting Organizational Silos
Organizations maintain different departments to handle tasks more effectively. There may be HR departments, communications divisions, etc. These departments may develop into silos due to tribalism and leadership failures like shortsighted planning, lack of overarching visions, and general leadership deficiency at the organizational level.
To destroy these silos and defeat the mentality that leads to their formation, leaders must build cross-departmental bridges, broaden employee vision, and promote cross-departmental communication.
Executive coaches can identify ways for leaders to reach across divides by building relationships and scheduling meetings. These meetings should identify projects on which different departments can work together.
Learning what Employees Value about Their Work
Leaders set organizational visions and the values that support these visions. They expect employees to work, act, and behave in alignment with these values. They should also identify what employees value about their work and accommodate their values in the organizational folds.
Identifying and accommodating values allows leaders to connect with employees on personal levels. Also, seeing their values respected and promoted allows people to feel like meaningful contributors.
Knowing what employees value allows organizations to optimize employee-facing investments, quantity and quality-wise.
Openness to Experimentation
Self-aware, emotionally intelligent leaders are open to trying new things. They understand change is an essential part of business success. As change ambassadors for their organizations, they must embrace it.
Teams may express a preference for trying new work formats or optimizing old ones. Team members and managers often have valuable ideas in this regard. Intelligent leaders are open to experimenting with such changes. When something doesn’t work, they shouldn’t refrain from acting as initiators of change.
Experimentation is a useful exercise in updated leadership. It involves giving and asking for feedback, making adjustments, engaging employees, and defeating resistance.
The risks leaders assume by updating their leadership skills are low. The likely results of their efforts more than justify said risks. Leaders can’t afford to keep doing things as they always have. Advocating change is a matter of organizational survival.