Leadership Coaching
Leaders today are operating in increasingly demanding working environments driven by unparalleled change & uncertainty. A greater emphasis, therefore, is needed to be placed on leaders at every level to be able to adapt, cope with ambiguity, work skilfully with complexity, build change capacity & capability, motivate, engage & encourage discretionary efforts despite today’s volatile climate. Leadership coaching develops skills to support these challenges.
Highly experienced & highly regarded leadership coaching with multiple past assignments of individual ‘performance improvement’ coaching of senior leaders within the private, public & 3rd sectors at UK domestic and international levels.
Coaching Approach
Our leadership coaching provides a personal mirror & space to enable coachees to reflect & think out loud how their leadership challenges & work behaviours are playing out from which to generate greater levels of self-awareness and learning about their leadership style & the relationships they have with others across the organisation. Shifts tend to occur when assumptions are challenged & questions are uncovered that possibly may not have been explored or asked by coachees.
All coaching conforms fully to the European Mentoring & Coaching Council code of ethics where areas such as contracting, boundary management, & maintenance of confidentiality are core stipulations. All coaching carries professional accreditation from The Institute of Leadership. All leadership coaching is subjected to regular professional supervisory reviews in order to monitor & maintain quality standards.
At the beginning of a coaching assignment, we start with a clarification of the role of coach along with details of the coach’s experience. During this stage, we also get an early understanding of the coachee’s background (for example, key personal milestones, personal vision) along with their expectations of leadership coaching. This initial work helps to build the foundations of confidence & trust between coach and coachee.
Upon agreement of coaching objectives & measures of effectiveness, support is given to explore & analyse the current leadership situation with coachees & to agree the areas of their leadership that require change or adjustment. Key areas of specialism in coaching are:
- Linking leadership responsibilities to align with corporate & operational strategic objectives
- Engagement/dialogue skills to aid developing relationships with colleagues and other stakeholders
- Role and responsibility performance issues
- Conflict resolution
- Systems thinking (how parts of a system relate to the whole)
- Personal impact (power & influence)
- Organisational change leadership (RFLC Applied researched frameworks)
- Leadership team effectiveness (agenda focus, climate & development)
- Talent responsibilities.
- Role transitioning
The support and guidance with coaching is such that our coaching will not give solutions or quick fixes to coachees’ challenges & leadership behaviours but instead help them to find sustainable solutions & shifts themselves. We believe this approach aids greater understanding and learning about situations along with an understanding of the drivers of their behaviours. This approach also allows coachees to develop their abilities to self-coach & coach others. Experimentation with new behaviours with leadership duties is encouraged along with soliciting feedback on these changes to check for effectiveness, progress & learning. A variety of learning and development frameworks is offered as a resource to help with this.
Each coaching session commences with goal setting for the session and concludes with a review of the work taken place during the session. An assignment is agreed with the coachee (normally a theme that has emerged from the session) for the coachee to work on for review at the next coaching session.