Does adopting a coaching approach as a leader make a difference?

By Dr Rebecca Jones

Organisations are under constant pressure to grow and improve. It is widely accepted that the secret to continuous improvement is to ensure you have the right people in place to achieve organisational goals. However, getting the right people is only the first step. Once you have them, you need to keep them and enable them to do their best work. The key question is: how?

Humans are infinitely complex and diverse, therefore what works for one may not work for another. How, then, are leaders able to support their diverse and varied workforce to reach their full potential? We believe the solution is to adopt a coaching approach as a leader. Coaching as a leadership style is a flexible approach that works well with everyone as it can be tailored to the individual the leader is working with. Leaders as coaches hold purposeful conversations in the workplace, resulting in greater collaboration, increased awareness and responsibility and overall higher performance from individuals and teams.

Leaders as coaches achieve this by adopting a coaching mindset; for example, being open and curious, adopting a non-judgemental attitude (they ask rather than assume) and having a growth mindset (they believe people can learn and change). They also engage in coaching behaviours such as listening (when a leader is coaching, the team member does most of the talking), use goal-setting to direct and focus efforts and behaviour and create a reflective space to learn from experience.

So, what are the benefits of adopting a coaching approach as a leader? Does it actually make a difference? Research indicates that when leaders adopt a coaching approach, it both directly and indirectly affects a variety of important work outcomes. These include:

? Improved wellbeing – when people listen to us and genuinely seek to understand our perspective, we experience a greater sense of belonging and feel that we are valued as an individual. This desire to belong is a fundamental human need and therefore,when this need is meet, our wellbeing improves.

? Improved innovation – when we feel safe, we are more likely to engage in creative and innovative behaviours. Leaders who coach provide the conditions for their team members to feel safe. Through their growth mindset and non-judgemental attitude, they demonstrate that they believe in their team members.

? Improved engagement – when our leader listens to us, they are enabling us to take responsibility for our goals and actions; consequently we feel empowered. When we are empowered, we are more likely to show greater enthusiasm and engagement in our work.

? Improved learning – humans learn through experience, but this does not always happen naturally. To deepen our learning from our experience and ensure continuous development, we need to reflect. Leaders as coaches create the safe conditions and space needed to explore experiences, identify lessons learned and plan how to use this new knowledge to improve performance.

? Improved performance – when team members experience improved wellbeing, improved engagement and improved learning, there is a positive impact on their performance. Leaders as coaches enable team members to focus on what really matters, increasing their effort and persistence to reach important goals.

?So, how do you get started with a coaching approach to leadership? Changing our style or approach to working can feel risky; we inevitably experience a period of temporary incompetence as we give up our old ways of working but have yet to master the new approach. With this in mind, here are our top five tips to get started with a coaching approach to leadership:

1. Level up your knowledge and skills

Find a suitable programme or course that will teach you the knowledge and skills you need to start coaching your team members. Good programmes will tailor coaching skills to leaders (coaching your team members is a very different skill to coaching individuals who don’t report to you) and provide you with plenty of opportunities to practice your coaching skills in a safe environment.

2. Be open with your team

Talk to your team about coaching and how you would like to adopt a coaching approach. You can even role model coaching behaviours so that team members start to coach each other! By being open, it removes any awkwardness, particularly for example in your one-to-one meetings, which might start to look and feel quite different.

3. Take a baseline assessment

The only way we can know if a change in our behaviour has made a difference to outcomes is to gather evidence. Before you start coaching your team members, take a moment to reflect on where your team members and team as a whole are now, identifying criteria to measure and evaluate performance. This will give you a baseline to assess how behaviour is progressing over time.

4. Create time to reflect

Reflection is key to enabling behaviour change through coaching. Leaders as coaches create the space and conditions for team members to reflect, however don’t forget that you also need reflective time. Start a reflective learning journal to capture your thoughts and feelings on how your coaching conversations are going, what is going well and what could go better.

5. Be kind to yourself

Changing behaviour takes time and practice. Be prepared to be a novice and to stick with it. Remember, practice makes perfect and, for many of us, adopting a coaching approach to leadership means unlearning many behavioural habits that have become embedded over a lifetime. Be kind to yourself if you don’t get it right straight away.

?About Rebecca Jones

Dr Rebecca J. Jones PhD CPsychol, is a Professor in Coaching at Henley Business School.

She is the Director of the Henley Centre for Coaching , a world-leading coaching researcher and a Chartered Psychologist. Her passion lies in working with others to achieve their goals, realise their full potential and live life better. Using a coaching approach underpinned by supportive challenge and raising self-awareness, Rebecca's coaching style is underpinned by an evidence-based foundation from occupational psychology and behavioural change sciences.

Rebecca is the author of the book ‘Coaching with Research in Mind’, host of ‘Coaching@Henley ’ podcast and has published her research in globally renowned journals.

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