While employing a leadership coach to enhance an individual's skills and perspectives is common, in my experience, leadership coaching can also involve several other very pragmatic applications:
- Sorting through personal and professional issues. Professional workplaces can involve conflicts with others, whether they be a supervisors, peers with whom you work or direct reports. Working with a leadership coach can help you to understand the dynamics of these conflicts and develop effective strategies for limiting, resolving or even transforming these conflicts. For example, it's common to see one person as the source of the conflict, leading to simplistic assumptions that the conflict would disappear if this person left the organization. In reality, such conflicts are generally much more complex and solutions that change the context in which the conflict occurs is inevitably more effective than trying to remove the person associated with the conflicts.
- Exploring and utilizing workplace opportunities. All too often employees make limiting assumptions about their workplaces and overlook or are unaware of important opportunities that may exist. For example, your employer may pay for leadership coaching, but you may be unaware of this option because the employer considers leadership coaching as a confidential employee matter. It's always worth asking if coaching and other professional development opportunities are available, such as leadership or skill development programs, mentoring programs, job enrichment programs that could involve cross-training across specialty areas, temporary assignments, affinity and support groups, financial support for further higher education and more.
- Helping you plan and manage complex change projects. My experience is that professionals are often assigned to manage large and complex change projects without being allowed adequate time to set the stage for a success and develop a viable change process (i.e., who will actually implement the changes and how will they be involved?). A coach can help a client think through all the elements required for a change project to be successful and assist in helping the client negotiate for needed time, personnel and resources. For example, many change projects fail because there wasn't sufficient planning time, inadequate efforts were made to gather valid data early on to benchmark the situation to be changed (required to demonstrate success with later reassessments) and sell its need to project participants. Another common situation is that the lifespan of a change project may exceed the tenure of the leader who assigned you the change project. This situation requires early efforts to "leadership-proof" your change project so it isn't undone by a change in leadership. One common strategy for addressing this problem is to make sure that the commitment to the change project is made at the highest level of organizational leadership. Another is to invite others outside of your own organization to join as formal partners in the change project (e.g. other companies or organizations with similar interests, governmental bodies, industry groups). A more detailed discussion of these strategies is available here.
- Assisting in efforts to change organizational climate and culture. It must be acknowledged that most efforts to change organizational culture are actually efforts to change organizational climate. Organizational climate consists of the most palpable aspect of organizational culture -- what one sees, hears and feels -- and has been proven to be much easier to change than organizational culture. Changing organizational culture involves the much more difficult task of identifying and then altering the myths, stories, symbols and rituals of an organization. In short, changing organizational climate, if successful over a period of time, can but doesn't always change organizational culture. For example, it is relatively easy to change the organizational climate of a university to reduce the incidence of sexual harassment, but changing the organizational culture of a university is a much more difficult task (e.g. those faculty robes, symbols and traditions have their roots in medieval monasteries). More detail on changing organizational climate can be found here.
- Assisting in efforts to create new organizational culture and climate. Creating an organizational climate and culture in a new organization is much easier than changing them in an existing organization because there is no prior climate or culture. Still, people who populate the new organization do bring their own personal expectations regarding organizational climate and culture based on their past workplace experiences. In such a situation, the person or persons creating the new organization need to be very explicit about the type of organizational climate they want to create. This typically involves having initial clarity about the vision, mission and values of the new organization that can be communicated to anyone thinking of joining this organization. In some cases, employees of the new organization may be directly involved in shaping its vision, mission and values. Digital Electronic Corporation used this "Green Fields"approach to building disk drive factories in the 1980s...actually starting in a green field where the pant was to be built with the new employees to plan how the plant would be laid out and how it would operate. An example of how this applies to solo entrepreneurs growing a business can be found here.
- Coaching in which the client is a group. Examples include senior management teams, work groups, non-profit boards of directors, family businesses, business partnerships and so on. Issues in group coaching can be resolving conflicts within a group, intergroup conflicts, and conflicts within an organization, strategic planning, developing engagement agreements that spell out the ground rules for group members and agreements about holding each other accountable. Usually group coaching focuses on a specific issue or group of issues and/or tasks that a group wants assistance in addressing.
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