Executive Coaching: Essentials of Leadership Coaching

Essentials of Leadership Coaching

Many of today’s professionals seek to experience greater effectiveness in their roles as leaders. Simultaneously, they want to achieve this effectiveness without sacrificing their health and personal relationships.

Leadership coaching is an effective way to strengthen essential skills, enhance efficiency and increase responsiveness to the constantly-evolving environment in which executives lead themselves and others.

Leadership Defined

Leadership can be broadly divided into two intertwined elements: Professional Leadership and Personal Leadership.

For coaching purposes, Professional Leadership involves the responsibility for key actions and behaviors that enhance business success, while Personal Leadership involves the key personal considerations, qualities and requirements that support the individual leader’s ability to find fulfillment in their work and in their lives beyond their work.

The Leadership Challenge

Today’s leader is expected to seamlessly navigate both their professional leadership dynamics and challenges, as well as their personal leadership dynamics and challenges. As a result, many leaders struggle because they see professional leadership and personal leadership as separate and unrelated.

This mistaken viewpoint often leads to leaders overworking to meet professional expectations while sacrificing their personal health, relationships and fulfillment. Many see only that the two must exist in zero-sum opposites.

The Leadership Solution

Effective leadership coaching is dual-focused—addressing both the professional and personal leadership development needs—engendering a fluid rhythm that meets needs of each.

In order to evolve into a better leader, the essential qualities, challenges, and needs of each type of leadership must be addressed on the coaching journey.

Leadership Coaching Roadmap

Key questions for leaders to consider—and which dual-focused leadership coaching can help answer—include:

How can I be less stressed and more productive?
How can I hold people accountable in positive ways?
How can I create greater alignment among my team?
How can I resolve emotionally-charged conflicts?
How can I motivate myself and others in more effective ways?
How can I support others to grow and develop?
How can I be fulfilled professionally without sacrificing my health and my relationships?
How can I become more resilient in response to change?
How can I focus on the present and remain open to my future aspirations?
How can I live a worldly life without sacrificing meaning, purpose and fulfillment?

To map out a leadership development plan, first the client and coach must identify the essence of their journey together. And, to do so, the Client must understand the integrated dynamics of Professional Leadership and Personal Leadership.

Professional Leadership

Professional Leadership is an intertwined matrix of six key elements with the evolving leader (Client) at the center. The leader is expected to manage individual, collective, and hierarchical needs within this framework with efficiency and effectiveness. However, without tending to the identified needs of each of these factors, the individual and collective elements begin to break down.

Stress Management
Creating Positive Accountability
Communicating Effectively
Conflict Resolution
Increasing Motivation
Cultivating Leadership

Stress Management

Managing expectations
Managing relationships
Managing resources
Managing time
Managing change
Understanding and Reducing stress (individual & collective)
Transforming habits
Identifying and aligning values, actions and results
Determining solvable problems

Creating Positive Accountability

Managing Commitments
Negotiating positive agreements
Fostering Self-responsibility and ownership
Creating positive accountability – Self and Others
Addressing and completing agreement breakdown

Communicating Effectively

Managing Commitments
The Listening Conversation
Seeking understanding beyond agreement

Resolving Conflicts

Reaction vs. Response
Navigating team and hierarchy dynamics
Evaluating, owning and resolving breakdowns

Increasing Motivation

Aligning vision
Motivating others and Inspiring others
Negative vs. positive fuel sources
Enrolling vs. Selling

Cultivating Leadership

Motivating others and Inspiring others
Engaging creative mindset vs fixative mindset
Meeting conflicting demands
Addressing fear
Engendering responsibility as leadership
Leveraging strengths

Personal Leadership

Personal Leadership is an intertwined matrix of five key elements with Self (Client)—and their Self-Management needs—at the center. Without tending to the needs of the Self, the intersected elements begin to break down.