Today’s world needs highly competent leaders who can unlock success and push the business forward. We all know that great leaders gain skills through learning and experience, but high-performing teams are always led by leaders who wear a coach hat. The role of a coach is quite important- they interact with their teams to unlock their potential and communicate clear business goals to build trust and drive innovation. For successful leadership development, leaders need to excel in three key areas-
- Inspiring employees to work together and attain intended business goals by sharing feedback, giving recognition, and emotional support
- Giving a clear direction on the company’s overall mission, vision, and a key objective
- Encouraging team collaboration through teamwork and delegation
In addition to the above qualities, leaders can positively impact workforce performance if they possess coaching skills. Leaders imbibe creativity at work and promote engagement, leading to higher productivity and improved employee retention. Also, effective leadership coaching fosters a positive learning culture at the workplace as employees get timely feedback from their leaders and work on honing their skills and improving performance.
Leadership development through coaching is considered the key driver to leverage career development opportunities. Following are the five key steps that leaders must follow as a coach to drive employee engagement, boost productivity, and enable business success-
1. Set a Clear Business Objective
A leader needs to have a clear goal in mind before any coaching interaction. The focus should be around boosting performance, improving career paths, and developing new skills (or bridging the gaps). A leadership coach must question their teams beforehand about expectations from the coaching program, how they define success, and what results they want to attain from this program.
2. Communicate the Business Vision
Leaders should motivate their teams to follow the right path to accomplish a common company vision. They become great coaches when they inspire everyone to unlock their best potential and enhance performance.
3. Give Assessments to Understand the Audience
The coach must ask questions for the utmost understanding to drive any conversation between a coach and his audience. Leaders may be aware of the situation but want to get insights and listen to their audiences’ perspectives. As a coach, your leader may share assessments to ask questions on past work projects, skills required to improve productivity, and how to grab opportunities to prepare for the future.
4. Share Timely Feedback
Employees are highly influenced by their leaders. Therefore, leaders must timely share constructive feedback, recognize good performers, and give coaching at the point of need. Feedback builds a sense of trust between leaders and employees and encourages employees to work on their weak areas and reinforce areas where they performed well.
In addition, feedback also drives employee engagement. As per Gallup, when employees strongly agree that their manager provides meaningful feedback, they are 3.5x more likely to be engaged than other employees.
5. Continue Giving Support
Once the goals are set and achieved, the last step leaders should take is to follow up with their team and give them continuous support. As great coaches, leaders must keep motivating their teams to face every hurdle while moving towards achieving their goals and keep recognizing good performances at regular intervals so that employees feel valued.
Key Takeaway
A leader can be a great coach if he focuses on achieving the business goal and encourages others to work together to accomplish the targeted goals. Great coaches grab every learning opportunity to engage, retain, and upskill their teams. Following the above five steps can help improve the coaching skills of a leader and drive amazing results from a leadership development program.
