Coaching as a Leadership Style

by Seth Sinclair

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.

How Coaching Helps Improve Morale

by Seth Sinclair

In my last post, I discussed the results of the 2014 Federal Employee’s Viewpoint Survey, which demonstrated that morale at federal government departments and agencies was low—and getting lower every year.

Low morale results in lower employee engagement with the goals of the organization—and employees who don’t feel connected to their organizations’ successes.  In an age in which ever-higher levels of quality service are demanded of all employees, including those who work for the government, lowered morale has the opposite effect and puts quality at risk.

As agencies throughout the government search for ways to turn things around, one approach is to invest in employee development, with individual and/or group coaching as a proven effective solution. Coaching is linked to better morale.  It fosters a learning and growth process that can help employees whose morale has been suffering to reconnect with their organizations’ goals and needs while advancing their own professional development.

Coaches are uniquely positioned to help employees at all levels define their personal and professional goals, improve self-awareness, understand others’ viewpoints, and ultimately increase their effectiveness.  They accomplish this by assessing individuals’ personality and leadership styles, and the ways in which they interact with others.  They use this information to create new insights and foster a learning process tied to specific individual goals. 

A good coach can get to the bottom of the reasons many respondents to this year’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey are unhappy in their work—and help employees choose intelligent and rational actions to reduce that unhappiness and make them once again engaged members of the workforce.  In times of stress, including those times when resources are constrained, coaches can help employees to focus on what they can control, instead of feeling overwhelmed by what they can’t. 

Coaches can help employees cultivate a positive mindset about the future, instead of dwelling on past negatives, and help them learn lessons about the past to create success in the future.  They help employers shape the future by increasing their ability to retain talented employees, and to retain and develop new generations of skilled employees.

Finally, coaches work with managers and leaders to improve others’ morale, by helping them explore and implement strategies to get their staffs excited, motivated, and energized about their mission.  

Great executive coaches are fully trained to help employees achieve all of these objectives.  I’ve written about the skills coaches bring to the table in many previous posts.  In our next post, I’ll talk about a different way to support morale in federal agencies and elsewhere—by training agency leaders themselves to act as coaches themselves, in addition to their other responsibilities. 

I call it “coaching as a leadership style,” and every leader will benefit by having the basic coaching technique I outline in his or her arsenal of leadership tools.