How can you identify areas for leadership development in your clients?

The first thing is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your client. Their role, responsibilities, and challenges they face. In addition, ask relevant questions that can help you gain more clarity on their thinking, goals, vision, and strategies to get a clear picture of them.

Context is vital into any leadership development plan to match the needs of the business with the skill set of the leader. What are the competencies needed for leadership success? What qualities (principles or company values) are valued at the organization? What does proactive leadership look like? The client also brings the personal perspective of how they experience the culture and where they need the most focus to be and feel successful.

In my experience getting them to do a DISC assessment will help confirm their strengths and growth areas , so that a customised approach is possible instead of a generic solution

Gain a deep understanding of the client's work environment, organizational culture, and industry dynamics. This involves understanding the business strategy, challenges, and the specific leadership competencies that are valued within the organization and industry. By doing so, you can align the leadership development efforts with the broader organizational goals and industry standards.

Self-assessment, performance and 360 feedback help ensure self-awareness matches external perception. The client typically self-identifies where they feel imposter syndrome or experience frequent self doubts. Looking at various types of feedback helps to calibrate the size of the gap between self and others to put in a right-sized plan to improve. At the leadership level, it’s expected that most challenges will be intrinsic rather than technical or external.

From my corporate experience days as Leader of People & Talent Management and Development, the methods that proved to be most effective were talent review committees, 360o feedback and competency assessments, to name a few. In my practice as a Coach and Organizational Consultant for Personal Effectiveness and Cultural Transformation, I have complemented the above with other resources, such as strengths finders, personal values and motivation drivers assessments, behavioral or personality styles, and even life mission and Ikigai. Feedback and feed forward are also as powerful as usual, then thoughtfully provided. Information strengthens self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is key to transforming our leadership competencies.

Collect feedback from a variety of sources including peers, direct reports, and supervisors through 360-degree feedback mechanisms. Encourage clients to engage in self-assessment to reflect on their own perceptions of their strengths and development areas. Tools such as personality assessments, leadership style inventories, and emotional intelligence assessments can provide valuable insights.

By now, the client knows what the plan will focus on and more specific goals can be established for coaching. However, the best path forward is to align goals to the leader’s unique strengths and interests. Alignment includes intentions, beliefs, values and behaviors that bring the leader’s full authentic potential to life.

Analyze the feedback and assessment results to identify discrepancies between the current and desired state of leadership competencies. Prioritize the development areas based on their impact on the individual's effectiveness and their alignment with organizational goals. It's important to consider both the development of strengths and the mitigation of weaknesses.

A great visual that I use with my clients is a three column table. The left column is the desired state. Include as much detail as possible in this column. The middle column is a list of all the blockers getting in the way of already achieving the desired state. Using the SELF framework, capture the stories, excuses, limiting beliefs and fears in column 2. The final column is the outcome achieved once the blockers are reduced or eliminated. Visually, this presents a simple way to move through leadership goals for personal change.

As a coach, identify areas for leadership development by first using tools like 360 feedback, DISC profiles, or Belbin Team Roles to assess your client’s strengths and weaknesses. Analyse the results to pinpoint specific leadership gaps. Collaborate with your client to create a Personal Development Plan (PDP), setting clear goals and actionable steps to address these gaps. Provide targeted training, resources, and ongoing support to build on perceived weaknesses, ensuring your client steadily develops into a well-rounded leader. Regularly review progress to adjust the plan as needed.

Monitoring and tracking progress is ongoing and can happen in each coaching session in the form of accountability. Generally both client and coach will experience either forward movement or not. It’s important to mention that setbacks are additional feedback and do not mean the client is off track. Using the setback as feedback helps course correct and raise awareness to achieve the goals.

Leadership development areas can be a blindspot. A self awareness drive might be the most helpful way of figuring out customized leadership development areas - a reliable assessment that covers communication, leadership, teamwork etc like @Lumina might be helpful - a trust quiz where a leader can learn about how much they trust themselves to be able to trust others - a social skills assessment to know about their social skills pattern - a team model assessment And many such tools that can give additional information on the blind spots which can help in carving out a detailed development plan

Leadership development should be integrated with an individual's career goals, align with the organization's mission and values, focus on building cultural competence in a globalized environment, and be sustainable to promote ongoing learning and growth.