The Leader-Coach
The New Power in the Executive Suite: The Leader-Coach
Very few leaders have been able to appreciate the power of leadership coaching as a business proposition. Even fewer leaders appreciate that leadership coaching is an overall orientation that can be drawn upon to achieve strategic shifts that are critical to organizational and individual success. I am not talking here about the traditional model of external executive coaches coaching leaders; I am talking about a new game-changing paradigm wherein the leader is the coach.
When leaders act as coaches, they are much more able to facilitate profound shifts within their organizations. They become able to unlock purpose, passion, performance, engagement, and ownership and successfully channel these elements to increase value for the business.
This article demonstrates the revolutionary impact leader-coaches have on dramatically improving business outcomes. It articulates what a leader-coach looks like, explains what leader-coaches do differently, and practically shows how to become one. I am referring to a new frontier where the leader is the coach and, through doing so, creates a much greater impact than any external coach could ever hope to achieve.
The Art and Science of Culture Creation
Central to the leader coach’s role is articulating, shaping, and embedding a high-performance culture that delivers differentiated value. When we speak about the culture, we mean the symbols, systems, mindsets, values, attributes, behaviors, and capabilities that characterize the organization.
There are two leader-coach tasks associated with building a high-performance culture:
1. Articulating those behaviors and values that will truly make the difference to the organization
2. Ensuring the desired culture is consistently embedded across the organization.
Leader-coaches shape and embed culture primarily through their behaviors and through what they ask others to do. From recruitment and induction processes through to how the organization manages performance, approaches business planning, promotion, rewards, or measurement, leaders powerfully shape culture through what they role model as well as through the cultural expectations they set for both leaders and team members.
Purposeful Leadership: How Leader-Coaches Facilitate Shift
Embedding the desired organizational culture requires leader-coaches to execute three tasks:
1. Identify the cultural shifts that will most pertinently enable the achievement of the desired culture
2. Articulate those cultural shifts incisively and in observable, measurable and impactful terms
3. Enroll the organization to invest in achieving those desired cultural shifts
Concerning the identification of required cultural shifts, this requires the leader-coach to discriminate amongst the many elements that might make a real difference and to zone in on those that will be most transformational in taking the organization from where it is to where it needs to be. For example, does the delivery of the organizational strategy require a more collaborative culture? Is increased innovation what will make a real difference? Is increased speed the element that is missing, or is broader ownership the quality that is most required?
Leader-coaches clarify the mindsets and attributes that most positively impact performance, articulating them in behavioral, observable, and measurable terms.
Starting with the executive leadership team, the leader-coach enrolls and coaches leaders to own and to integrate those desired cultural shifts into their day to day work as leaders. Leader-coaches need to guide their leaders to successfully align, engage, enable, and build accountability around the desired shifts at every level of the organization.
Four Hallmarks of Effective Leader-Coaches
As part of their coaching process leader-coaches pay attention to four key tasks:
Alignment
1. Alignment includes creating a shared understanding amongst stakeholders around desired shifts and what they look like, as well as helping others to understand how those desired shifts are different from the current situation. It includes building an understanding of the “why” and the “how” of the change and its practical implications.
Engagement
2. While alignment brings a rational understanding of the desired shift, engagement generates momentum, energy, and commitment to achieving it. Without investment, leaders at best will receive compliance from stakeholders. With engagement, leaders will successfully tap into the discretionary effort and successfully unlock ‘the x-factor.’
Enabling
3 Enabling: The third pillar supports individuals and teams to achieve the required shifts successfully. Achieving alignment and engagement is incomplete without the enabling component.
Building Accountability
4 Building Accountability. Accountability includes ensuring expectations are crystal clear, and a feedback culture exists whereby stakeholders dynamically learn how they are tracking in relation to expectations. It also requires linking benefits and consequences to how people demonstrate necessary shifts.
How Leader-Coaches Build Insight and Ownership in Others
Leader-coaches are catalysts of change; they unlock potential, build ownership in others and facilitate not just incremental but transformational shifts. Being a catalyst in this context requires leader-coaches to enable others to access the assumptions, beliefs, drivers, and behaviors that will facilitate transformation. The bottom line for leader-coaches is their ability to facilitate high-value interactions. Well executed, leadership-coaching leads to far superior business outcomes and makes a massive difference to the way people feel about their performance, what they are motivated to do, and indeed the emotions and mindsets they bring to work each day.
Leader-coaches need to develop the behavioral patterns, attributes, drivers, and mindsets that enable them to work optimally with others. Leadership-coaching requires the ability to listen deeply as well as the facility to ask quality questions that will facilitate deep internal shifts. It requires letting go of an expert approach. Ultimately leadership-coaching requires the ability to facilitate self-coaching in others. It is one of those developmental approaches that depends less on the sharing of expertise and more on the facilitation movement within another person. Therefore, in leadership-coaching, the currency is the trust one can engender, the space that one can create, the awareness of self as an instrument of shift. Excellent leader-coaches demonstrate the ability to read what is happening within another. They are generous and bring empathy to the process. They understand that one’s map of the world is but one of many, rather than the only one.
Stepping up: From Technical Leadership to Leadership Coaching
The leader-coach recognizes that for people to perform at their best, they need to possess certain knowledge, skills, and behaviors and as well as the attributes, emotions, drivers, and mindsets that enable them to be successful. Successful leader-coaches focus on dimensions that facilitate the most significant shift.
While shifting knowledge and skills is tactically easier, the most significant shifts occur when leader-coaches penetrate emotions, drivers, and mindsets to facilitate transformation. Such work requires leader-coaches to have the courage and the skills to move beyond technical conversations and engage much more deeply with their people to explore values, drivers, and mindsets. This kind of work takes greater levels of intensity, and consequently, the competence required to work at this level is significantly greater than that needed to engage as leader-expert.
How Leader-Coaches Capitalise on Coaching Moments
The creation of a coaching culture occurs interaction by interaction, moment by moment. Leader-coaches recognizes all interactions as a potential opportunity to facilitate shift. They adopt coaching as an orientation rather than as a discrete activity on top of one’s day job.
The best leader-coaches are superb at recognizing the opportunities that exist to transform brief interactions into opportunities for shift: we refer to these opportunities as “coaching moments.” A coaching moment, otherwise known as a disguised coaching opportunity, is a spontaneous, and often brief, opening where one individual takes the opportunity to assist another to shift. Some coaching moments build alignment; others enhance engagement, capability development, or accountability. Coaching moments occur in a wide variety of situations and have the potential to make a significant difference to individuals, teams, and the broader organization.
Demonstrating your Leader-Coach Bona Fides: Engaging in Authentic Conversations that Add Value
We discussed earlier that successful leader-coaches engage in robust conversations that facilitate the shift. The ability to structure high impact conversations is pivotal to leader-coaches reliably facilitating insight, objectivity, and the kind of ownership that will bring about transformation.
The facilitation of five milestones within a conversation is key to achieving high impact:
Opening the Dialogue
• Opening the dialogue involves building rapport and emotional engagement, exploring the “topic” at hand, narrowing the focus and clarifying the desired outcomes of the conversation
Building Insight, Objectivity and Ownership
This second broad stage of the conversation sees the leader coach facilitate a thorough, in‐depth and objective understanding of the key elements impacting the topic under discussion. This involves building insight and catalysing ownership and commitment to respond effectively to the issue, problem or opportunity at hand.
The objective in this phase is to enable the other person to understand the core of their issue. This process is akin to peeling the layers of an onion. Each time the leader-coach helps the other person to peel back a layer, they move closer to the heart of the issue. The earlier layers are often merely symptoms of the issue at hand.
Crafting the Future
Here the leader-coach assists the other to develop several broad options in response to the issue. The aim here is to facilitate lateral thinking. It is about helping the stakeholder to develop strategies they can put in place to help them move from where they are now (point A) to where they can be (point B). The leader-coach’s skill is to push for breakthrough thinking and to stretch the paradigm. The key tasks include generating new possibilities for moving forward, creating an optimal strategy, and addressing potential barriers to success.
Mobilizing Commitment
The generation of workable options creates the basis for the final step in the conversation when the leader-coach invites the stakeholder to articulate the action plan. This stage focuses on the who, what, when, how milestones, and measures of success. Good leader-coaches conclude this part of the conversation by ensuring that it adheres to “four C’s”:
• Clarity ‐ the stakeholder is clear about their action plan.
• Commitment ‐ the stakeholder is committed to the action plan.
• Confidence – the stakeholder is confident to execute the action plan.
• Competence ‐ the stakeholder has the competence to execute the action plan.
The Leader-Coach with Subordinates, Peers and Superiors
A leader-coach orientation has a myriad of applications and there are many opportunities for leader-coaches to apply a coaching orientation with subordinates, peers, and superiors. With subordinates, leader-coaches can apply a coaching orientation to ensure the performance management process truly builds high performance within a team or enterprise. They can also use it to ensure meetings build better alignment, engagement, capability development, and accountability. A third example is utilizing feedback to enhance both performance and engagement. With peers, leader-coaches can leverage a coaching orientation in strategic planning processes, when faced with everyday challenges and to collaborate around building organizational alignment and engagement. Coaching with superiors can be used when seeking sponsorship of an initiative or to solicit or receive.