Leader as Coach: How to Bring Out the Best in Your Team

Leadership is providing inspiration and vision, then developing and empowering others to achieve this vision – Marshall Goldsmith

Being a leader is more than a title. The expectations on a leader has been shifted from a figure who has power to command and control to someone who is able coach his team to reach full potential.

Leader as Coach is the core leadership role to bring out the best in the team. The acronym 'LEADER' describes how coaching is incorporated in the leadership style.

Learn to know your team.

Empathize to build rapport and trust with your team.

Align their personal goals with organisational goals.

Develop to empower them to move forward.

Expand to unleash their potential.

Reinforce to sustain their growth mindset.

Learn: Know Your Team Member Individually

Your team members are not just a group of people who work for you. Each of them is an unique individual. They have their unique purpose, values, strengths, passion, etc.

It is critical for the leader to know them individually. This knowledge would help the leader to place and develop the right person at the right place.

HOW

• Start from you.

Make efforts to let the team know you first. When you share, you don’t share about your achievements as a leader but about yourself, as a person, the human being the same as them. ?

• Start with small talks.

Start the meeting with the questions ‘How are you today?’, ‘How did you spend your weekend?’ and so on. Their responses would help you to understand about the team’s feeling, what they have experienced outside of work, and so on.

• Ask meaningful questions.

Move forward to ask the questions such as ‘what would be your biggest dream?’, ‘what would be the importance of your dream to you?’, and so on.

• Be curious and present.

Show that you are genuinely interested to know them by being present. When you have conversation with them, there should be no distraction.

Empathize: Build Rapport and Trust with Your Team

Trust is fundamental in the leader and team relationship. Without trust, the team would not engage themselves with the leader's vision. Without engagement, it would be impossible for the leader to motivate his team to give their best performance.

HOW

• Open up.

Show your humanity side by being vulnerable. Share about your own concerns and challenges to the team. Be open and honest.

• Show care.

Show your genuine care to the team through simple actions, such as by allowing them to take their leaves when needed, avoiding to have meeting during lunch time, never disturbing them during weekend or when they are sick, etc.

• Ask and Listen more.

Avoid to instruct and tell, but ask and listen more to understand the team's thoughts, ideas, concerns, etc.

Align: Identify and Align Their Personal Goals with Organisational Goals

Organisational goals could be seen by the team as disconnected and unrelated with their personal goals. When the alignment is absent, the team would only just do what they are told to. It would be challenging for the leader to expect extra mile from the team.

HOW

• Understand more.

Ask the team to share about their personal goals in life, and the importance of these goals to them.

• Reflect.

Provide the opportunity to the team to reflect on whether what they are doing at work to support the organisation would help them to achieve their personal goals.

• Use their language.

Use the team's own language/terms instead of standard terms as it would help the team to connect with.

Develop - Empower Them to Move Towards Their Goals

Through their journey to pursue their goals, the team could face challenges. The leader could help the team to identify the challenges and explore the solutions. The leader would empower the team to take ownership and determine the action plan to realize the solutions.

HOW

• Trust.

Trust the team to take ownership of what they are doing. The team would be the ‘driver’ and the leader would be the ‘co-driver. ?

• Partner.

Be a reliable partner and help the team to identify the challenges and explore the options for solutions. The leader would not dictate on the solutions that he thinks would be the best ones.

• Support.

Be there to support the team when they need. The team might need to learn more knowledge/skills or help in networking with the other leaders.

Expand - Challenge Them to Unleash Their Full Potential

Every individual would like to progress in their career. Nowadays, employees change job more frequent, especially when they think that their job is not challenging anymore. Although there are certain group of employees that are happy to do the same thing for years, but organisations need employees who are ‘thirsty’ for the development. These group of employees are commonly known as ‘Talent’ or ‘Future Leaders’.

HOW

• ·Set high performance standards.

The clear standards would help to motivate employees to perform not only ‘better’ but ‘the best’. Along with the performance standards, the consequences standards should be set as well. The team would need to know how they would be recognized when they perform at their best.

• Give constructive feedback.

Giving feedback is different from judging. When you judge, you look at the person’s flaws and negative sides. When you give feedback, you look for the opportunities for the person to learn and develop further. The person who is being judged would feel hurt but the person who receives constructive feedback would be grateful and say ‘thank you’.

• Track the progress.

Set regular meetings to track and discuss on the progress. In the meeting, the leader would help the team to identify their challenges and explore for the options.

• Stretch the team further. ?

Provide them assignments that is outside their comfort zone. When stretching them, the leader would continue to journey with them in their development process.

Reinforce - Sustain Their Growth Mindset

Once the team has the awareness and takes the ownership to grow, it is very important for the leader to continue to reinforce this mindset. The new mindset needs to be integrated into the behaviours.

HOW

• Celebrate the success.

Whenever the team makes progress in their efforts, the leader would celebrate together with the team. This action shows that the leader appreciates the efforts.

• Reflect on the key learnings.

?Ask the team to reflect on the key learnings, ‘what have you learned?’, ‘With these key learnings, how would you move forward?’, etc.

• Share to others.

?Encourage the team to share their key learnings with the other team members. Sharing enables them to continue to remember on their key learnings.

Final Words

Leadership is a journey and not a destination. Having been a leader myself in my previous companies, I took it as an opportunity to develop myself and my team. I have learned a lot from my leaders, peers and team through any interaction we had. Using coaching style in leading has helped me to understand and support my team better. The rewards would be to see the team continue to grow in their career and life.

Questions? Have any points that I missed?

Share below in the comments - I'd love to help and hear them!.

For further tips on Career and Leadership, please reach out to me for 30 minute free consultation.

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Setiawani is a Career and Leadership Coach, based in Perth. She holds ACC credential from International Coaching Federation. She helps professionals and leaders in unleashing their potentials to achieve their goals in career and life through coaching. Her experience as an HR Leader in multinational companies across various industries for more than 20 years has been added value to those that have been coached by her.

Find about her profile and follow her at linkedin.com/in/setiawani-sukri-coaching.