Overview: Becoming a leader requires time, experience, and emotional maturity. By proactively seeking leadership opportunities, understanding servant leadership, and enlisting the help of a coach or mentor, aspiring leaders can accelerate their development. Leadership coaching can help leaders discover their strengths and weaknesses and achieve maturity faster.
Becoming a true servant leader is an organic process. It takes aspiring leaders time to build trust and leadership capital with their followers. It’s not easy to expedite the process. Fast leadership is a bit of an oxymoron, though there are some things leaders can do to achieve servant leadership statuses faster.
The purpose of leadership coaching is to help leaders identify leadership gaps and plug them by developing the skills they need. Executive coaching experts know what leaders can do to build trust faster. Here’s a look at what leaders must do to earn quicker trust from the perspective of leadership coaching.
Seeking Leadership Opportunities
Leadership doesn’t simply happen. Even those with a raw talent for it must reach out and find opportunities to showcase their talents and put them to use.
To accelerate their leadership journeys, those vying for leadership roles should proactively seek them out. Assuming leadership of a project is a good example. Every opportunity to prove one’s leadership mettle is a good one.
Finding and taking such opportunities allows would-be leaders to practice leadership and show their abilities to higher-ups.
Understanding Servant Leadership
Leadership coaching is well aware that servant leadership is the key to successful leadership. Leadership is not a self-serving undertaking. It’s quite the opposite. Only leaders who put others’ needs above their own can hope to build trust and leadership capital with followers.
Servant leaders are facilitators and supporters. Their top priority is to help others succeed. By doing so, they build trust and leadership clout while sowing the seeds of strong, coaching-focused cultures that set up their organizations to succeed.
Bossing people around has little to do with leadership. Intelligent leadership is about inspiring people to buy into the purpose of an organization via leading through example and helping them achieve personal goals.
Servant leadership co-opts others as partners in ventures that promise fulfilling outcomes to everyone involved.
Building a Reservoir of Positive Leadership References Vicariously
To experience something vicariously means to experience something through the eyes, perception, and emotions of others. The exercise requires keen emotional intelligence, thorough knowledge of the person whose experiences one assumes this way, and plenty of imagination.
Experienced leaders have built their reservoirs of positive leadership references through direct experiences. New or aspiring leaders don’t have such experiences on which they can rely.
All is well, however, so long as they’re willing to learn from other leaders. Seeking out role models and mentors is natural for most of us. By studying the habits of successful leaders and reading about their lives, aspiring leaders can use their experiences to fill the reservoirs of references that will tide them through hard times.
Turning to Executive Coaching
Everyone can use help. An aspiring leader can use extra guidance from someone more experienced. A coach or mentor can plot a leadership development course for future leaders, starting from the strengths and weaknesses they help aspiring leaders uncover.
Mentors and coaches can also help new or aspiring leaders to:
- Navigate organizations
- Settle conflicts
- Identify networking opportunities
- Plan their careers
- Seek out new interests
Getting Used to Failure
Successful leadership requires a generous dose of emotional maturity. Under normal circumstances, maturity is a product of experience, wholly incompatible with the concept of fast leadership.
An experienced and successful leadership coach could help budding leaders accelerate their maturation by understanding why failures are stepping stones to success. Intelligent leaders know many of their decisions will result in suboptimal outcomes. Failure is inevitable, but how they handle failure is what differentiates mature leaders from immature ones.
Becoming a leader in the true sense of the word requires dedication, passion, and time. Aspiring leaders who are proactive, understand servant leadership, and enlist help from coaches or mentors will fast-track their careers.