A Journey to Coaching Leadership

As a manager for many years in the same company, I was often the one colleagues and team came to get quick answers. With my experience and willingness to engage, it was natural for me to provide advice and solutions I thought were best. I thought this was the way to support my team - for a long time.

Transition to Coaching Leadership

My journey took a new direction when I trained as an NLP coach to replenish my own leadership backpack, and then participated in an international leadership program, “My Conscious Leadership”. Here I learned that Coaching is about awareness and being focused in the moments, asking powerful questions, listening on multiple levels, and actively being present. I had to put my own ego aside and believe that individuals and teams could find the answers themselves, often better than my own solutions. This required training and a change in my leadership.

I informed both my colleagues in the leadership team and the teams I led that I wanted to change something in my leadership style, which is appropriate as it can be confusing when you start asking many more questions instead of giving the answers.

This may seem simple, but it requires a high degree of awareness and presence to practice Coaching Leadership.

After Coaching Leadership

Through this process, I experienced the power of more often allowing employees to find their own solutions. This has strengthened both results, individuals and teams, as well as opened up new thinking, creative processes and innovative solutions.

In retrospect, as a leadership developer, I have coached and trained several hundred managers to understand the power of own coaching leadership. I have delivered basic Coaching courses for management teams and middle managers in various industries, with excellent results.

Are you a good coaching leader for your teams?

‍In my years on the inside of companies and as a leadership developer, I have observed that many managers who answer “yes” to this question are often ill-equipped to answer.

Why? For managers tend to think that they are exercising Coaching leadership when in fact they are just telling their employees what to do at all times.

The key lies here, understanding the differences and applying different techniques into their leadership.

Advisory Leadership

• Focus: Provides specific advice based on their own expertise.
• Method: Offers guidance and concrete recommendations.
• Objective: Solves specific problems.

Coaching Leadership

1. Asking Questions: Asking open-ended questions that promote reflection.
2. Active Listening: Being present and listening on multiple levels, which requires understanding, effort, and training.
3. Challenge and Support: To balance between challenging employees to think for themselves and supporting them without providing direct solutions.

The Power of Understanding the Differences

1. Situational Adjustment: Understand when it is best to exercise Coaching leadership or give advice.
2. Building Competence: Helps employees develop skills and confidence.
3. Promoting Autonomy: Encourages employees to think independently.
4. Improve Relationships: Strengthens the relationship between the manager and the employee that creates trust.

Benefits of Coaching Leadership

1. Individual growth: Employees develop personally and professionally.
2. Increased motivation: Employees feel valued.
3. Better work environment: Creating an inclusive and learning culture.

Disadvantages of Coaching Leadership

• Change of mindset: Requires training and a change in mindset.
• Patience: May take more time at first, than providing quick solutions.
• Building trust: Requires time to build trust.
• Measuring success: Difficult to measure impact qualitatively.

Adapting to Changes

Coaching leadership is empathetic, builds relationships and fosters continuous learning, which is essential for emerging challenges.

Increased Innovation

Coaching leadership encourages continuous learning, which fosters innovation. Leaders who practice this style have demonstrated how it can drive innovation across the organization. This helps team members feel valued and motivated to contribute their best ideas and efforts.

How to Balance KI and Human Coaching

KI can analyze data and handle routine tasks, while humans meet with empathy and presence. KI can create coaching plans and provide support through chatbots, while managers fine-tune the plans with open-ended questions and active listening. Empathy in physical encounters builds trust. By combining AI for data analysis with human effort for relationship building, organizations can create a more learning organization.

Developing Future Leaders

This leadership style is crucial to the needs of the future. The need for new leaders is great, and coaching leadership challenges and supports faster individual development, which makes more people want to take more responsibility more quickly.

Promoting Individual Growth

Coaching leadership focuses on developing employees' potential, leading to improved performance and job satisfaction. This is especially important in a time of uncertainty, a changing world and massive digitization, KI and where especially younger generations, such as Gen Y and Z, enter the labor market with unique perspectives and expectations for follow-up, inclusion and daily feedback. Then Coaching leadership is very beneficial.

Coaching leadership is a powerful approach that not only strengthens today's organizations, but also prepares them for the challenges of the future.

Conscious and more present leaders who are able to use different techniques can create a more forward-looking, empathetic, inclusive and evolving work environment, while increasing performance and delivery overall.