Sharpen Your Coaching Skills to Become a Standout Leader
There’s no doubt that a good leader must have a coaching mindset, looking for opportunities to help others catch the vision of their potential for continuous improvement.
Tiffany Gaskell certainly embraces that view. With Sir John Whitmore, she’s coauthor of Coaching for Performance: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership. This sixth edition of the international bestseller is chock full of real-world examples of effective coaching in the workplace. Gaskell is CEO of Performance Consultants, a global consulting and training firm focusing on corporate culture, executive performance, and change management.
Gaskell says coaching is “emotional intelligence in practice” because it’s based on self-awareness in relation to others as well as self-regulation.
“Many company leaders get to the top because they are technically brilliant,” she says. “But so often they can benefit from developing their emotional intelligence as the most important leadership skill.” She tells of working with an aerospace company to design a leadership development program that taught their global leaders transformational coaching skills. The company attributed a significant return on their investment to these new skills. “In one example,” she says, “a sales leader was faced with a customer complaint over a major delivery of goods worth millions of dollars. He applied his coaching skills to manage his (understandably panicked) reaction and chose instead to get curious and explore the customer’s perspective. Through this approach, he saved the sale and ensured the customer was happy.”
Gaskell says the Covid pandemic highlighted the value of coaching in the workplace.
“The pandemic exposed how the highest levels of performance are found in collaborative cultures where the bedrock of trust is working interdependently,” she says. “Interdependence does not mean consensus or working slower. It means being so aligned to goals that a state of ‘organizational flow’ is achieved. This is facilitated by a coaching leadership style because it generates awareness and responsibility in colleagues and ultimately to high performance characterized by enhanced learning, higher productivity, improved communication and greater collaboration, and better work life balance.”
What role does good coaching play in helping people find and embrace meaning and purpose in their work?
Gaskell tells of a company leader who noticed the way his colleague was brimming with excitement and enthusiasm about a weekend sky-diving trip. The leader asked Gaskell and her team to help him get people as excited about work as they were about their weekends.
“Good coaching, by which we mean transformational coaching, enables this engagement because it goes beneath the surface to get in touch with people’s values and the things that are important to them,” she says. “This helps uncover their purpose. And then it gives people responsibility and agency to create that in their work.” She cites Johnson & Johnson’s innovative ‘Purpose Planner,’ a tool that guides people in defining their aspirations, exploring their desired contributions to the world, and uncovering their personal purpose.
So, what can leaders do to create and maintain “coaching-friendly” workplace cultures?
“I recommend setting collective expectations and agreements,” Gaskell says. “This seemingly small thing can make all the difference. Organizations or teams can do this by asking themselves where they are now and agreeing where they want to be, and how they can get there.” She recommends that leaders and their teams have open and honest dialogue about what a high-performing culture would look and feel like, then agree on steps to create the culture to which they aspire.
Gaskell talks about how awareness and responsibility help activate learning, and explains the coach’s role in such learning.
“A coach works with a person to open up new areas of thought,” she says. “Awareness is the lightbulb moment. Then, once you’re aware, you have a choice. With choice comes responsibility. For example, whether to let things continue as they are, or to take responsibility to create things as you’d like them to be. This is a path of learning and growing.”
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