4 Key Characteristics of Leader as Coach

Coaching skills are vital for every leader’s toolkit, although the necessary skills come naturally to only a few. Organizations are often investing their time, effort, and money to develop the coaching skills of their leaders and managers, despite their initial high levels of enthusiasm, they fail to adopt those coaching skills in their workplace and end up slipping back into old command-and-control leadership behavior patterns. Therefore, here are several key characteristics of leader as coach that shall be known by organization.

Learning to improved results

Leader coaches recognize that fostering an environment which supports deep personal learning raises new ways of thinking and behaving, in which ultimately contributes to improved performance and the company’s bottom line.

Proactively hand out stretch assignments

Seeking development opportunities for their employees and arranging “stretch” assignments to accelerate their development is key to an effective leader coach. They take advantage of people’s existing readiness for change, create a sense of urgency, and help them eliminate organizational and personal obstacles that prevent the action.

Always thinking about making their employees better

Leader coaches should provide feedback at the time of the action. This was done to make the feedback is meaningful. In this way, leader coaches “seize coachable moments” by delivering feedback in real time, when employees are optimally focused and better positioned to learn.

Facilitate insight

Effective coaches are not advice-givers but they should be the agents of change. Through asking questions, fresh thoughts and ideas, leaders could provoke and mobilizes employees to take action in a new way. Developing coaching skills can be challenging. However, if they are mastered through dedicated individual effort or through the assistance of a professional partner the results will worth the effort.

Conclusion

To summarize, by enabling and developing coaching skills in leaders, it will be beneficial towards the organization in order to enhance their goal attainment and increase their productivity. Therefore, it can lead to the organization's success and advancement.

Reference:

Goleman, D. (2000). Leadership that gets results. Harvard Business Review.

Grant, A. & Hartley, M. (2013). Developing the leader as coach: Insights, strategies and tips for embedding coaching skills in the workplace. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice. 6. 102-115.