First of all, coaching can help leaders easily identify skills that need to be developed, reveal their key strengths and find proper strategies to improve those skills. Focusing on achieving goals is also a very important feature a leader can benefit from coaching. Improving performance from using coaching is a supreme goal for leaders.
Leadership coaching is helping leaders to discover and analyze in more depth their weak points, achieve a more accurate perspective regarding their abilities and most important how to better use them. To work with an executive coach can definitely help persons in leadership positions learn how to gain power and how to share that power to their teams.
Businesses are in a perpetual dynamic. Even when engagement among the employees is high, senior-level managers and executive leaders are facing a very high pressure. They have to set the direction for the organization and at the same time align and commit their teams in order for the organization to move forward successfully.
Find the confidence in whatever way you can to just keep moving onto the next page. The only way you will finish projects and get better is to keep moving forward.
Charles Forsman
The most important results coaching has brought for leaders are the following:
- Sustains and accelerates learning
- Develops critical thinking skills
- Improve performance in team leadership
- Contributes to an increased self-awareness for leaders. The strengths are better used and the management of areas of weakness is more efficient.
The GROW Model
There are kinds of ways to get results when it comes to non-directive coaching. Among the most efficient methods we remember the GROW model.
The GROW model was developed in the 1980s by Sir John Whitmore and others. GROW is about four action steps, the first letters suggest the name of these steps. What comes harder is to practice, of course it is easy to imagine conceptually. A lot of self training is needed and also you need to think about yourself, your role and values you have as a leader.
Which are the four action steps?
Goal.
It is very important to set right from the start what the person who is coached wants to accomplish. This goal should be set right after someone chooses the topic. Here, we are not talking about goals for some project or role the person has in an organization, but about what that person hopes to achieve from the coaching experience. As it is not easy to do this naturally in a conversation, people often need help to talk about what they truly want to achieve. A good start would be to simply ask : What do you want to obtain when we arrive at the end of this conversation and you don’t have it now?
Reality.
Once you have established the goal of the conversation you will need to ask very specific questions using what, when, where and who. These questions help people come down from the clouds and get very realistic. This is what turns the discussion into a real and constructive one. You don’t need to ask why. Why? Because asking why requires people to go further seeking reasons and motivations, rather than facts. This brings to light a lot of judgment and self-justification, which can be very counterproductive.
The next step is to focus on reality. Ask “What are the main things we need to find out? “
Listen carefully to what and how people respond. Maybe they miss something important. Or maybe they are getting very technical and they forget the human part. Maybe the other way around?
This is the moment when people tend to lose themselves in an estate of contemplation, until a light sparkles. Now, they are ready to face the problem on their own, bringing a new and fresh energy and point of view. Perhaps this is a crucial moment, as people cease to look for solutions and get to the conclusions. The more questions are asked, the more they will get the answers by themselves.
Options.
Why do people need coaching? The answer is that they feel stuck and feel that there is nothing that they can do to find a way out. They may feel caught between two options, or even consider they have only one valid option, which doesn’t satisfy them.
You arrived at the point when you have to help them think more deeply. To open them a new perspective, you can simply ask : If you had magic powers what would you do?
It would be very surprising to see how people can answer this question. They will start thinking in a new, fresh and productive perspective. Once they come up with new options the next step is to think more deeply, being encouraged to analyze the bright side, the darkest side, the gains and the risk of each solution.
Will.
This part rarely happened in a natural conversation. People need help at this point. First they need to be asked :” What will you do?”
This leads to reviewing all the specific action steps they talked about during the conversation. In case you had a good conversation, people will have a clear perspective in mind regarding an action plan. In case the plan is not yet clearly defined, you simply review the steps of the GROW process to help the person define a plan and find a viable solution to his problem.
Conclusion
Nowadays we live in a world of flux. A successful leader is forced to complement his functional expertise and industry with a capacity for learning. This capacity needs also to be developed in the people they manage. The days when a manager gives commands and controls people are long gone. Team members are no longer rewarded only if they do their job flawlessly. With the help of coaching leaders, they need to turn themselves into coaches. Their job will be to inspire energy, to revive creativity and also learn from the people they work with.
The GROW model is a simple tool, efficiently applied in companies in order to transform leaders.
Our coaching programs use a more deep perspective, choosing more profound models to help leaders become successful.
These models will take the client to the next level of experience in coaching.
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