How to be Excellent as a Leader with Coaching

The Coaching Process for Leadership Development

What is Leadership Coaching?

Leadership Coaching for corporate executives and business owners, is a tailored approach to developing and refining leadership and management skills. In many cases, the executive or business owner has technical skills and business acumen that got them to where they are. However, in many cases, what’s missing are some leadership competencies.

Improving leadership competencies of executives impacts the organization or business, in two very significant ways: 

1. It retains, builds and inspires employees into high performance individuals and teams, and
2. It improves business excellence, and outcome results (financial for for-profit, and societal for non-profit and governmental) for the organization.

It has been estimated that the cost of staff turnover is 2-3 times a worker’s salary. For example, if the average staff salary is $50,000, then reducing staff attrition by improving the executive’s leadership abilities, can impact the bottom line between $100,000 and $150,000 for every staff departure that is avoided! Increasing employee motivation and engagement, another positive consequence of improved leadership, has been found by Gallop Polls to generate huge results as well.

Leadership Coaching is about the executive, or business owner, creating their own leadership development plan, with the coach’s guidance; gets feedback on it, modifies or adapts it, implements it while monitoring progress, and makes decisions based on it.

How is Leadership Coaching Conducted?

Nowadays, effective executive coaching programs are no longer “pure” coaching. They invariably need to combine 3 complementary interventions:

1. Coaching – helps the executive to uncover their own strengths, and to find the answers to challenges within themselves. This is done through asking the right questions, and getting the executive to reflect and create
2. Mentoring – helps the executive to gain specific insights in specific areas, from the experience and specialised knowledge of the coach. For example, an executive may need to develop coaching skills to coach their own staff. The coach will guide the executive through the process, and share best practices and experience of the do’s and don’ts. Mentoring is done with a good degree of “telling” about skill application.
3. Instruction – helps the executive to learn the fundamentals and concepts of new skills that are required to be a good leader. For example, an executive with no prior knowledge of strategic planning, will have to learn from scratch. Options to learn could be to attend external courses. However, a coach with high competence and experience in this area, is also able to instruct the executive in this area, as part of the coaching process. Instruction is done through “telling” concepts, coupled with immersion in actual work requiring the particular skill. In the example of strategic planning competency, a junior executive who may not ordinarily be involved in corporate level strategic planning, may be assigned to participate in the strategic planning effort as immersion to acquire this process skill. 

Educational Briefings

Expanding on Instruction as a coaching tool, educational briefings are mini training sessions designed specifically for busy executives. 

Time is precious to any executive. Instead of sending them off to multi-day training programs, short educational briefings are integrated into coaching sessions where needed. The content of these briefings is tailored to their learning needs. Educational briefings could include, but are not limited to:

• Behavioral and personality types and profiling
• Effective communication
• Motivation and inspiration
• Performance management
• Coaching and mentoring
• Strategic planning
• Running effective meetings
• Managing conflicts
• Team development processes

Executives have found that education in customized bite-sized nuggets, give them the specific skills and knowledge they need in a very timely manner for tasks at hand. I have received much positive feedback from the addition of these tailored mini-workshop learnings.

9 Steps to Develop Leadership through Coaching

STEP #1 – Conduct a Smart Start

Smart Start begins the coaching process. It is essentially the preparatory phase, and its goal are to achieve the outcomes to:

• Educate the executive on the coaching process,
• Assess the developmental needs of the executive, and the context in which the executive operates
• Tailor the coaching process to the executive’s unique situation, and
• Organize the schedules, support systems & tools needed.

STEP #2 – Define the Desired Outcomes

Desired Outcomes are what the executive wants to achieve in the short-, medium-, and long-terms for their leadership competencies. It is critical to define the desired outcomes as the first thing to do, right after Smart Start, to give the whole coaching process a clear focus. This is simply beginning with the end in mind.

Desired outcomes in leadership competencies are usually a combination of these factors:

• What the organization expects from the executive,
• The executive’s own leadership philosophy, aligned to the organization’s management principles,
• Leadership competencies tied to identified business issues, and
• The career goals and core values of the executive.

STEP #3 – Develop Key Success Measures

Key Success Measures are the measurable, tangible evidence that tells the executive and the coach, that the executive has achieved, or is on the correct path to achieve, the Desired Outcomes. Once developed, the Key Success Measures are critical to monitoring the progress of the executive in their leadership development through the coaching process. They define the Desired Outcomes in clear, measurable terms. They become the guides to maintain focus and stay on track toward the Desired Outcomes.

STEP #4 – Assess the Current State

The executive and coach will jointly assess the leader’s current level of leadership competencies. The executive’s strengths and weaknesses (related to the Desired Outcomes) will be scrutinized in detail, using various assessment tools, 360 feedback, self-assessments, coach evaluation and so on. From these, critical competency gaps will be identified.

Issues beyond the executive’s control, that may have an impact on the executive’s performance, will also be identified and discussed with the executive and their supervisor. These could be barriers to progress, or opportunities for development, such as business environment, resource limitations or potentials, board strategies or philosophies, ingrained culture of collective leadership, etc.. They will be taken into consideration when designing the core strategies in the next step.

STEP #5 – Design Core Strategies

The executive and coach will co-create focused core strategies (usually 3 to 5 in number), that most help the executive to bridge the gap, from where they are today (the assessed Current State) and where they want to be (the Desired Outcomes) ultimately. Core Strategies in leadership development are mostly a combination of some form of education, immersion, and coaching. Besides the coaching part itself, the coach will work with the executive to acquire the appropriate education, and create useful immersion opportunities.

STEP #6 – Create the Action Plans

The coach will guide the executive in creating detailed action plans, to achieve the core strategies. A substantial portion of the time spent in coaching sessions, will be on action plan development, implementation, monitoring, review, feedback, assessment and adjustment.

The actions will be “tough actions”. That is, actions that the executive would not usually take on their own, without the support of a coach. If an action is one that the executive would do anyway outside the coaching process, then another action is chosen that will push the leader forward. Action plans are not merely “To Do” lists. They are those “stretch”, difficult big-steps that the leader needs to push themselves to take, to make a quantum leap in their leadership competencies. This pushing of the envelope is key in leadership coaching.

STEP #7 – Prepare for Launch

This step is to ensure that the executive is ready, and able to, take the actions in the action plan. The coach and executive will discuss: making changes, overcoming resistance, communication, feedback, and setting-up the work environment for success. Without this preparatory step, many leaders fail in the execution of their plan.

STEP #8 – Launch and Sustain the Implementation

This is where the action occurs. The executive implements the action plans, and gets feedback with support from the coach. The coach ensures that the leader has the knowledge, tools, and abilities to make changes in their leadership through regular educational briefings. Educational briefings are conducted as part of coaching sessions where required and appropriate. They are on the specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes the executive needs, to carry out the changes or tasks in the action plan, designed to improve their leadership competencies.

Throughout the coaching process, the coach will use various channels to hold the executive accountable, to actually apply the new behaviours and skills as leaders. These channels can include: video and phone calls, text messages, email, check-ins with the team and the supervisor, learning logs, etc..

STEP #9 – Review and Next Steps

Progress is constantly tracked throughout the coaching process, using the Key Success Measures. At the end of the coaching contract, or each coaching term, a comprehensive and formal review is performed. This formal review will seek to re-assess the executive’s leadership competencies, determine the progress achieved, and the effectiveness of the coaching process itself. 

The further growth potential of the executive might also be assessed together with their supervisor. The latter might also then review the career plan for the executive based on their performance during the coaching process.

Next steps for the executive will then need to be decided. Further coaching may be needed for the current desired outcomes. On the other hand, if they are promoted to higher leadership positions, their leadership desired outcomes might shift, and they may need more advanced coaching. Or they may well need a break on coaching, so as to put to good use their upgrade leadership competencies.

In the case of business owners, they will assess the impact of the leadership coaching on their business performance. They can then decide, perhaps in consultation with the coach, how else they can improve as business leaders, to take their business even further.