Written by Adam Griffin
When I left my last role as a Global Vice President for a software company, I knew I wanted to get into coaching, but I didn’t entirely know what that meant. These days there seems to be coaching for any and everything. Where to even start?
To simplify the decision, I asked myself a question that would cut through the noise:
What is the biggest problem I’ve observed in my own career, that I’m well-positioned to solve?
And when I framed my coaching decision through that lens, the answer was obvious: leadership coaching.
Time and time again I had seen people get promoted into leadership positions without any sort of training or coaching in leadership. They were great individual contributors, but leadership requires a fundamentally different skillset. Many of these people were left to flounder and fail, and virtually all of them were left to figure it out on their own.
With that as the background for my origin story as a leadership coach, let’s dive into what that actually means.
Table of Contents
- What is leadership coaching?
- Leadership vs. management
- How does leadership coaching work?
- What skills are taught in leadership coaching?
- The leadership coaching process
- The impact of leadership coaching, and how leadership coaches help companies perform better
- How to choose the right leadership coaching program
- How can you bring leadership coaching into your organization
What is leadership coaching?
To put a definition to it, leadership coaching is the conscious process of developing an individual’s competencies and talents to make them a more effective team leader.
But underneath that definition is a combination of skills and systems. Skills are what help a leader organize, engage, and motivate a group of people, and systems are what help keep it all together.
When a leader can combine great skills and great systems, the result is the ability to lead a team in a focused and effective way that improves the day to day work for both the leader and their team.
A great executive coach uses inquiry to empower leaders and help them grow in the systems required for great leadership. Inquiry, aka asking questions, is a core component of executive coaching. Good questions lead to good insights, and a coach’s job is to use questions to drive leaders toward insights that help them grow in their role.
Beyond inquiry, leadership coaches are great sounding boards, letting their clients unpack things they’re working through in conversation, and when appropriate, leaning on their own experience to enrich the conversation.
There is also a teaching component to leadership coaching programs. Many coaches use specific frameworks to ground concepts in reality. Leadership coaching program oftentimes consists of teaching these frameworks to a leader and helping them apply the framework to their daily work.
Leadership vs. management
Every team has an objective that they’re tasked with (revenue, customer retention, feature releases, etc.), and the role of management is to direct a group of individuals in order to achieve that specific objective.
In contrast, leadership is the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute to the organization’s success. They sound similar in theory, but there’s a key difference.
If the scope of management is narrow, the scope of leadership is broad.
Management deals with the tactical components of a role and team – prospecting, sales calls, customer calls, development sprints, etc.
The team’s objective, and the management of that objective, is still critically important in the context of leadership. But alongside that is the importance of coaching and developing the members of the team, building trust and candor, communicating effectively, and making good decisions.
Great managers are great at achieving business goals. Great leaders are great at empowering their team to thrive. And the best leaders are both.
How does leadership coaching work?
Leadership coaching takes many forms and formats. There’s 1on1 coaching, group coaching, assessments, workshops, retreats, and everything in between.
Regardless of format, leadership coaching has a scale with Unstructured on one side and Structured on the other. Most coaches, in my experience, fall somewhere in the middle. Unstructured is exactly what it sounds like. The conversations often revolve around the day to day work of the leader, digging into specific problems, and using good questions to drive insights in the situation.
Structured coaching sessions are built around a specific topic, like communication or time management as examples. In a structured coaching session, there will usually be a framework or tool that is taught, and the executive coach will help the leader apply it to their day to day work.
What skills are taught in leadership coaching?
There are a lot of skills that can fall under the umbrella of leadership coaching. For simplicity, I’ll focus on the core skills and areas that I coach in my own practice, which will be a good proxy for what you’ll find in many coaches and programs.
To start, leaders have to understand their own strengths and opportunities for growth as a leader. There are a number of assessments out there that can help reveal this, like CliftonStrengths, HIGH5, and others. Many leadership coaches are certified facilitators of these assessments, and are trained in how to help you apply the insights to your work. When leaders can understand more about themselves, then they can understand how to better relate to and add value to their team. They shine a light on the growth areas and are great tools for learning how to show up to our work as our best selves.
At a more tactical level, my leadership coaching clients and I also work on skills like productivity and time management. These are important to learn and improve, because they’re skills that keep you sane and that you can directly teach and translate to your team, empowering them in the process.
Time management and productivity are also common root causes of stress and anxiety in leadership roles, and when people can get control back of their time, that stress and anxiety alleviates.
And then there’s the less tangible skills like communication, giving and receiving feedback, decision making, and building a culture of trust. These are oftentimes the areas where my clients and I will spend a lot of time, because they typically aren’t as central to individual contributor roles, but can be the difference in success and failure when leading a team.
The leadership coaching process
Leadership coaching is oriented around growth, and most coaches and programs will use various frameworks to help drive toward that growth mindset.
A common framework used by leadership coaches is the GROW model, which stands for Goal, Reality, Obstacles, Way Forward. Get clear on the goal. Be honest about the current reality. Identify the obstacles in the way. Commit to a way forward.
In my own coaching practice, I use a similar framework called the 3 Cs, which are:
- Clarity about what you’re trying to accomplish and what your current state is.
- Competing interests surrounding the change; the things that could potentially get in the way of you accomplishing it.
- Commitment to the next steps, with defined actions and timelines.
You can’t intentionally grow in an area without first having clarity about what the ultimate goal is. By identifying competing interests, you can plan ahead for things that might get in the way of this growth or goal, and commitment is where the rubber meets the road by taking tactical steps toward that goal.
A framework is like any tool at the end of the day. They’re useful if they’re used well, but ultimately the value in an executive coach will come from their ability to cut through the noise and guide their clients toward insights that aren’t at surface level.
The impact of leadership coaching, and how leadership coaches help companies perform better
There are numerous studies that have been done on the impact of leadership coaching on organizations. They’ll all present different statistics and results, but those results are always unanimous: executive coaching has an outsized positive impact on organizations. A few examples:
- Coaching has upwards of a 788% return on investment, including a 70% increase in individual performance, a 50% increase in team performance, and a 48% increase in company performance.
- 99% of companies that engage leadership coaches are satisfied or very satisfied with their investment.
- 75% of coaching clients say that the value of coaching is considerably greater than the investment.
- 80% of coaching clients report an increase in confidence.
- 57% of employees leave a company because of their manager, costing the business $20,000-$60,000 or more.
- Companies that invest in the professional development of their front-line leaders are 4.2x more likely to outperform their competitors that don’t.
Put simply, good coaching is good for business.
Having been both an executive and a leadership coach, I’ve seen both sides of the relationship, and understand why coaching can have such a profound effect on business results. Leaders are asked to do challenging work every single day. From ensuring the most important work is prioritized, to having hard conversations, to navigating difficult situations and decisions, oftentimes this work happens in a silo.
Effective coaching provides better outcomes in all of these areas, not by telling someone what to do, but by using great inquiry and great frameworks to help the leader discover what the best path is. When leaders are making better decisions and taking better action multiple times per day, this adds up to real results for both the individual, the team, and the organization.
How to choose the right leadership coaching program
Every coaching program has its own style and structure, and they can feel wildly different for the coaching client. When hiring a leadership coach, it’s important to find a program structure and coaching style that you click with.
If you don’t like online learning, a course likely won’t be for you. If you’re easily distracted in group calls, 1on1 leadership coaching program might be a better fit for you. Conversely, if you’re extroverted and love meeting new people, group executive coaching can be a great addition.
But perhaps most critically, find a leadership coach whose message, story, or style you connect with. Coaching of any sort requires the challenging internal work, and you’ll be much more likely to grow and stretch with a leadership coach that you connect with. The more clearly you can articulate upfront what you want out of your executive coaching, the easier it will be to identify it when you see it. Don’t be afraid to have multiple introductory conversations with executive coaches, and research testimonials too see what outcomes the coach has driven. You truly get out of leadership coaching whatever you put into it, so taking your time to find the right fit will make it easier for you to fully buy-in and engage in the business coaching sessions.
Also read: Change Management – How to Implement & Top Reasons Why it Fails
How can you bring leadership coaching into your organization
Coaching culture makes its way into organizations in a few different ways.
Sometimes it’s individuals that seek out coaching and training programs on their own, to help them improve leadership skills in their role. A lot of companies offer learning and development budgets that can cover or partially cover the cost of coaching program. If that’s not an option, many people pay for leadership coaching out of their own pockets.
Coaching and leadership development can also be introduced to companies at the team level. Leaders will recognize the opportunity to improve their own team through executive coaching, and will get coaching for individuals, workshops, or small group sessions.
And finally, leadership coaching can be adopted by the organization as a whole, which requires alignment and buy-in from the executives. In this setup, I’ve seen companies either rotate employees through the coaching program or give a specific amount of coaching hours to employees based on their role or seniority.
I’ve been both the leadership coach and the coachee in all of these scenarios. Here are some things to consider when trying to bring leadership coaching into your organization:
Define the problem you’re trying to solve
The more specific you can be about the problems you’re trying to solve with business coaching programs, the easier it will be to identify the best fit for you or your organization.
Get buy-in
Leadership coaching is powerful when the person being coached is open to improvement and committed to taking action. But it’s useless if the person being coached doesn’t want to be there. Encourage people to approach coaching with an open mind to ideas and insights. Buy-in is critical.
Incorporate business coaching into daily life
An organization doesn’t need third parties to build a culture of coaching. Leaders and managers in organizations can and should incorporate coaching into their daily rhythm. By consistently giving and seeking feedback, and coaching your team toward clear business goals, coaching can be the foundation from which you and your team grow. Start with a simple framework like GROW or the 3 Cs noted above, and start getting reps and practice at the art of coaching.
About The Author
Adam Griffin is a sales leader, leadership coach, and personal development writer based in the foothills of Colorado. Through his writing and coaching, Adam teach others the art and science of creating high performing teams and high performance lives, through practical systems and consistent action. He has been featured on INC.com, FastCompany, Men’s Journal, Men’s Fitness, Lifehack, and The Art of Coaching to name a few.
Adam has spent the last 14 years as a technology sales leader, studied leadership at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, built entrepreneurship communities across the U.S. with Galvanize, and was the founder and CEO of Bodeefit, a fitness technology company with over 500,000 users in 26 countries.