Click here to visit Part 2 of this Post - Coaching Leadership Skills
Leaders can successfully lead in many ways. In 2002, psychologist and journalist Daniel J. Goleman identified six different leadership styles.
Commanding and coercive leaders tell people to “do what I
tell you to do.” Visionary and
authoritative leaders mobilize people toward a common vision. Affiliative
leaders focus on emotional needs over work needs; democratic leaders focus on
participation of the entire work force; and pacesetting leaders build
challenging and exciting goals for staff. Good leaders know their own natural styles
and learn to employ aspects of different styles at different times, for
different purposes.
Goleman’s sixth style of leadership is coaching. He
describes coaching leaders as those who focus on helping others in their personal
development, and in their job-related activities. The coaching leader helps team members develop
successfully, supporting and mentoring them to make sure they have the
knowledge and skills to be successful.
Coaching leadership requires a confident and grounded leader who
believes that employees are capable and willing to learn, even if it means
making mistakes along the way.
Coaching leaders focus extensively on problem solving and
feedback, help employees build organization-wide perspectives on their work,
and identify the reasons they are doing what they do. They also have a strong focus on helping
employees grow within their organizations.
Coaching leaders are valuable, because they help meet the
needs of today’s employees and organizations. Younger employees, especially, expect more
control and influence over their work and their organizations; coaching leaders
offer them that opportunity. Coaching
leaders’ focus on developing staff means they delegate as often as possible,
and they are willing to tolerate failure as part of a learning process. Their outlook lends itself to flexible and
innovative management thinking, and helps them thrive in situations in which
their workforce is widely distributed and often virtual—which in turn, is linked
with better morale.
Goleman believes coaching leadership works best when
employees understand their weaknesses, are receptive to suggestions for
improvement, and are willing to put in the work. Those who effectively use coaching as a
leadership style tend to be less judgmental than others, emotionally
intelligent, curious, confident, and patient.
They work in organizations that support learning, and allow employees to
test new ideas.
Goleman also believes coaching leadership is among the most
effective of the six leadership styles he identified, but that it is also the
least used of the six. He argues this is
because of senior leaderships’ tendency to want results quickly; because it
often seems easier for leaders to step in and fix things; and because, when
things go wrong, most leaders default to the commanding and coercive style to
get things done.
Finally, Goleman believes most leaders don’t have the proper
skills to fill a coaching role. We’ve
devoted many posts to the skills good coaches need to be successful—but in our next post we’ll focus on four skills specific to the coaching leadership style. They are strong listening skills; the ability
to ask powerful questions; the ability to communicate in a direct manner; and the
ability to get employees to move from thinking
about action to making a commitment to move forward.
