“When you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at change.”
-Max Planck
In the early 80s leadership coacing started to gain momentum, but the widespread adoption of executive coaching practices began only around a decade later. Of course, as long as people need needed guidance, some form of coaching had been always available, albeit under other names.
In the early days, however, having a coach was a kind of a dirty little secret. It was something you didn’t want to talk about.
If you had a coach, it usually meant you were in some sort of trouble. Being advised to undertake coaching meant you were being given a final chance to do something about whatever it was you were doing wrong. Initially coaching was stigmatized.
Nowadays, leadeship coaching is cast in a far more positive light. In fact, pendulum has swung to the other extreme and having a coach has become a status symbol. It means you are successful, that you are someone who your organization is investing in the future.
Coaching is no longer a reactive process. Today’s fast-track executives proactively seek some form of coaching and nearly every senior executive seems to have a coach.
One of the reasons for the current popularity of coaching is that many executives have realized that leadership coaches offer expertise that is not necessarily found inside the company. Another, which probably accounts more for its attractiveness, is that most find it easier to confide in an objective outsider. External coaches are more likely to offer a confidential relationship within which executives can discuss delicate issues freely, let their defenses down, and explore blind spots, biases and shortcomings.
The higher the executive climb on the organizational ladder, the less they can depend on technical skills and the greater their need for effective interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence.
This is where leadership coaches can make a major contribution. Coaches can help their clients to enhance their style, explore future options, and discuss their ideal and actual organizational impact. They can also facilitate their learning, help them to clarify their goals and guide them in getting things done,
Coaches can draw their clients’ attention to repetitive problems that they may not have recognized. They can help their clients realize that what they once regarded as strength could easily turn into weakness as they climb the organizational ladder.
They can also help them to become more effective with colleagues, subordinates, bosses, and other stakeholders and take a serious look at behaviours that may adversely affect these relationships. They can help come to terms with behaviors that cause difficulties and find more effective ways of functioning.
For example, the most common reasons why executives go astray are difficulties in anger management:
- being too domineering.
- reacting inappropriately when things are not to their liking.
- not handling failure well (not admitting error, covering up, or listening excuses).
- the inability to influence their people constructively.
- being too far removed from their people.
- or living an unbalanced lifestyle.
At its most basic level, the role of a leadership coach is to help the executive aknowledge and deal with realities that might otherwise be avoided, denied, or accepted with resignation. In addition, coaches may help them recognize defensive routines within their organization, and do something about them.
Effective leadership coaches contract with their client with the objective not only to improve their clients’ perfomance, but also to guide them on a journey toward personal transformation and reinvention. They can help their clients to break free from an unsatisfying or conflict-laden role and plan for new roles.
Coaches can expand their clients’ horizon of possibilities, eliciting powerful new commitments, transforming their view of themselves and fostering new ways of being and acting.
Practicing as an effective leadership coach requires a considerable amount of psychological skill and insight.
Coaches need to acknowledge not only what is immediately perceivable but also developments under the surface. Coaches need to pay attention to the dynamics within intrapersonal and interpersonal field. They need to be aware of the dynamics that occur when other open up to us and when we need to open up to them.
As with any kind of close relationship, coaching creates a new dynamic with associated past behaviors, patterns, and old ways of thinking.
In more traditional leadership coaching, these issues would usually remain in the background.
Source: “Mindful leadership coaching. Journeys into the interior” by Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries