Expanding Leadership Capacity

by Seth Sinclair

In response to a recent request, I wrote the following:

Great coaches expand their clients’ capacity to lead; improve their skills in critical areas such as leadership, teamwork, communications, establishing relationships, and dealing with conflict; help them provide better service to their customers and stakeholders; drive new actions; and change old behaviors.

Those words embody the entire reason and purpose for executive coaching.  All leaders, or prospective leaders, would like to improve their abilities in each of those areas.  Coaching is, at its heart, a way of helping clients learn, and while no coach can guarantee success, there are techniques great coaches use to maximize their client’s chances to improve their leadership skills. 

In the next few posts, we’ll examine a few of these skills and demonstrate ways coaches help leaders to improve in these areas.

Our first topic will be expanding leadership capacity.  A Canadian leadership coach and blogger named Doug Blackie has offered an interesting way to think about what leadership capacity is and how it is developed. 

He suggests that a person can be hired to build a house, and given all the tools he or she will need to do so, including tools, lumber, building materials, blueprints, and even advice.  However, without the benefit of experience and the skill to execute the plan, the house is never going to get built in a satisfactory way.

In a similar fashion, Blackie argues, most leadership development training programs offer the tools prospective leaders need to manage groups of individuals—but without developing the capacity to lead, those tools will be of minimal utility. 

“Telling a leader that the best way to deal with conflict is to use respectful confrontation,” he writes, “will go nowhere if the leader fears rejection or has issues with conflict.”

Great coaches seek to expand leadership capacity by focusing on the individuals with whom they are working, instead of on specific leadership techniques.  They ask rather than tell.  They are partners in a journey towards greater competence and effectiveness.  They help leaders get as close as possible to achieve their full leadership potential, whatever that potential may be.

A coach can’t really help a client get better at something as specific as building a house—but a coach can surely help someone who knows how to build a house, but has a vision of becoming a successful developer.  In that case, coaching can help that person to get the leadership abilities and personal growth he or she will need to fulfill his or her vision.

Great coaches help leaders look within themselves, gain better perspective on their own beliefs and actions, and work with them to identify where these traits and behaviors are serving them well or holding them back. 

Great coaches don’t solve problems for clients.  Instead, they facilitate the kind of thinking processes that allow clients to solve their processes themselves. 

Finally, great coaches help clients look outside themselves as well as inside, and determine whether or not they are getting the support they need from employees, peers, and supervisors.  By identifying challenges and opportunities in theses in these areas, coaches support the client in identifying solutions, exploring changes—and expand their clients’ leadership capacities.