Coaching skills are the foundation for most other leadership skills
Because coaching skills are so important, the first module of our 12-month Realising Your Leadership Potential programme by teaching them.
During the Coaching Skills module, we teach one model of coaching as a management tool. Each participant will experience coaching as a coach or as a coachee, and are encouraged to meet before session two and swap roles.
We then provide opportunities for peer-coaching during different modules throughout the programme.
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This has several benefits:
- Managers & leaders at all levels benefit from improving their coaching skills, and for senior leaders, starting with 1:1 coaching helps them be more honest about their challenges.
- We must practice a skill to develop confidence: because our trainees coach each other throughout the programme it naturally becomes part of their management style.
- Being coached really helps anyone, at any level, to learn and develop, so our leadership training participants get a lot of coaching on their live work challenges while they’re learning.
Once learned, coaching helps managers to be more effective in most other management tasks, for example delegation, performance reviews, giving feedback and managing conflict.
Why is coaching so beneficial?
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It is the opposite of a directive approach, when a manager tells their people what to do and how to do it. Directive approaches are needed in some work situations. In particular, when new team members join, for some lower-grade roles or a task where a mistake could have significant negative consequences.
Unless a manager has experienced being coached, they may default to being directive and stifle the potential for learning by trial and error, which can hinder people from building confidence in their own judgement. When working with an experienced team, this can lead to disengagement. If team members always look to the manager for guidance, it will only add to the manager’s workload.
This is why a coaching approach can help to reduce manager overwhelm: it encourages others to develop their own decision-making and problem-solving abilities, so they rely less on manager input. Leaders and managers then have more time for strategic thinking and resolving higher-level challenges.
Ways to bring more coaching into your organisation
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As you probably already know, Your People Potential provides a very practical, behaviour-based approach to leadership training. So here are some easy-to-implement ways to bring more coaching into your organisation:
- Stay curious: rather than jumping straight in with a solution or suggestion, be curious about how your team member understands the situation and what’s needed.
- Actively listen: rather than rushing to share your thoughts or your solutions, listen, paraphrase what they’ve said and ask clarifying questions.
- Ask open questions: “What do you think our priority should be?” rather than “I think our priority is X, do you agree?”
- Recognise strengths: help people to understand what they’re already good at, so they can build on it rather than focusing on what they don’t know.
- Ask instead of tell: When someone comes with a problem, ask them how they’d go about solving it or what worked in similar situations they’ve encountered.
If you’d like to talk about how we can help your leaders and managers to use a coaching style, and in turn develop capacity and skills in their teams, we’re happy to have a chat.
We run our 12-month Realising Your Leadership Potential programme in-house for larger groups, or as an open course if you have one or two participants who would benefit from some skills development.
We also work with our clients to create bespoke leadership and management training that delivers the positive results your organisation is looking for.
Get in touch today to find out how we can help support your managers
Email or call 07880 776756 to talk to our founder, Jacqui, and find out more.
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