There are many skilled executive coaches who are equipped to work in depth with leaders and managers on their career development or an acute intervention to address some immediate behaviour or competence needs. When we focus on managers as coaches this level of skilled knowledge is not the ambition. Rather it is equipping the manager with an understanding and a set of tools to be able to have useful coaching conversations when it is appropriate.
Think of truly great sports teams and you immediately think in football terms about Barcelona, Brazil, Holland, Manchester United, Real Madrid, Spain and West Germany. In the USA, they will typically talk about the men’s Olympic basketball team or NFL teams such as the Green Bay Packers, the Dallas Cowboys or more recently the New England Patriots. By any measure the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team are the world’s most successful sports team.
Being “present” is a big challenge for most executives and many are failing to see the consequences of not being present in terms of their impact on others and their relationships.
As executive developers at PPI we are often engaged in discussions around the characteristics of good leadership. Most of us will know that in recent years there has been a huge debate around how leadership is supposedly changing. We have all been urged by many gurus, writers and commentators to consider that leadership is becoming much more “collaborative and distributed.” Technology and social networking have been key to driving this notion. We have been constantly advised that old style “command and control” is being assigned to the trash can.
Becoming more self-aware in how we make decisions.
This book by Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Kahneman,* offers a terrific addition to the coach’s toolkit and is packed full with fascinating insights that will help you in your coaching engagements. It was first published in 2011, so many of you might already be familiar with it.
Ask many leaders to think about their personal brand and they’ll struggle with the task. Some will say they’ve never given the idea much thought or that it is for others to judge. But the reality is we all have a brand, whether we think about it or not. What our bosses, colleagues, customers and suppliers say about us is a strong indicator of our brand and it’s probably one of our most important assets.
Consistent organisation research studies show that a majority of employees have a trust issue with their leaders.
For example a Gallup Poll published in January 2015 identified that 51% of US workers were “not engaged” and 17.5% were “actively disengaged”. *
Being true to others involves providing a psychologically safe environment, facilitating upward communication, giving performance feedback, and helping people to grow through delegation and coaching.
Being true to your responsibilities involves having clearly thought about your organizational impact, your leadership brand, how you collaborate with others and build effective team working. It also includes constantly making sure you maintain and develop your knowledge and skills.
Be true to yourself means finding out about your blind spots and unknown areas of potential through feedback, validated psychometric tools, connecting with your values, and then challenging your habits to do something about it.