Senior leaders are required to effectively guide teams and make strategic decisions that drive business success – often while navigating organisational challenges and issues. Supporting your leaders through leadership coaching can help them reach greater levels of performance. In this blog, we take a look at what leadership coaching involves and offer next steps to get you started.

Providing tailored guidance and support can help leaders to recognise their strengths while addressing areas for growth. For senior management and executive teams, it can be a powerful tool helping to hone the skills they need to successfully navigate complex organisational challenges and change with confidence and clarity. 

Through one-on-one sessions, leaders can gain insights into their personal style, communication and decision-making process and develop strategies to improve them. 

Leadership coaching not only unlocks untapped potential in individuals but can foster cultural transformations within organisations. 

Leadership coaching promotes a culture of continuous learning and development, where feedback is embraced as an opportunity for growth. This models a commitment to self-improvement where employees feel inspired and empowered to also aim to reach their full potential. 

A cultural shift towards coaching drives collaboration, innovation and a shared sense of purpose, which impacts all areas of an organisation. 

Leadership development and coaching rely on strong relationships to improve self-awareness and develop soft skills. In a study examining the coaching relationship, Boyce et al (2010) found that rapport, trust and commitment positively predicted behavioural change and coaching program results.

Let’s focus on these qualities and some techniques for building these aspects in your program.

Rapport

Rapport is about finding and building on the similarities between a coach and the person being coached rather than focusing on the differences. In a coaching relationship, rapport looks like ease and warmth between two people. It allows each person to appreciate and respect each other as individuals.

Sharing common interests – professional or personal – offers a way to quickly build rapport. Building rapport can be difficult, and when not done well can be perceived as not genuine.

Trust

Mutual trust is essential in this relationship. It allows the person being coached to feel safe to try new things, encourages honesty and instils a sense of confidence in the coaching program. It means a coach can ask sometimes challenging or powerful questions that will engage the person being coached. It enables a coach to provide support and participants to participate in sessions while feeling safe and respected. A lack of trust is almost guaranteed to ensure that a leadership coaching program will fail.

Trust relies on respect for privacy and confidentiality. You can build trust by establishing boundaries and respecting those boundaries.

Commitment

A strong commitment to the program is positively associated with successful coaching programs. Leadership coaching relies on both parties being dedicated to doing the work required as part of a coaching plan – it can be described as both parties doing what they say they are going to do. This means attending scheduled sessions, preparing for sessions and trying out new behaviours.

Developing an operating rhythm for coaching sets up a course for success. Read Optimising your operating cadence for employee development success to learn more about how you can create a cadence for your employee development program.