How Can Coaching Help Leaders Make an Impact? | Emeritus India
Leaders play a crucial role in developing teams and walking them towards the path of success. It’s a common fact that leadership is one of the toughest jobs a person has because, here, one is not responsible for managing the team. Instead, a leader needs to walk with his team and achieve success through better performance, conflict management, upskilling, etc.
However, most great leaders worldwide are known to adopt a slightly different approach to taking their team toward success. The slight difference is established because these leaders rely more on coaching than instructing and commanding. As we have already said that leadership is not equivalent to management. A leader needs to be accountable, responsible, understanding, and humble. These characteristics can be developed once a person adopts the coaching method to create an everlasting impact on the team members.
What are the Four Responsibilities of Coaches in General?
The first thing that we have to understand is what coaches do in general. Here we are not associating coaches with leaders. Instead, we are taking references from our daily lives and understanding what a coach normally does. This person can be a sports coach, a trainer, an educational coach, and anyone else. In general, a coach has four most important responsibilities:
1.  A coach’s responsibility is to help everyone in his team understand their strengths and weaknesses and use analytical study to perform better.
2. A coach always encourages others to bring out everything they have and become their best version. It’s like telling people to give their 100% and present themselves at their best.
3. It is also a coach’s responsibility to formulate strategies that can help them convert the average performance into great ones that are accountable, responsible, and reliable.
4. The last responsibility of a coach is to support ideas and habits that can help improve the overall team’s performance, facilitate growth of individuals and the team, and increase knowledge.
How is Coaching Different from Normal Leadership?
Less Talk, More Listening
A leader who incorporates coaching in his leadership strategies always listens to what the team members say. Sometimes, giving advice and talking with others is not the ultimate solution. Sometimes, a leader may have to sit down and listen to what others say.
After all, it’s always believed that a good listener can understand every detail much better than any other person. When you actually start listening more to your employees, you can understand their emotions, behaviour, thoughts and many other such aspects in a much better way.
Ask Questions and Do Not Instruct
Often leaders are so involved in their day-to-day activities that they completely forget that their employees might have some problems. In the midst of doing every task and managing the entire team, leaders do not pay attention to what questions their employees might have and start instructing and ordering them about the activities, the roles and responsibilities, and so many other things.
This is not a way to achieve success and become a great leader. You have to sit back and ask your employees whether they are facing any problems and, if yes, what these problems are. As a leader, you must cooperate with your employees and find a common solution to their problems instead of instructing them every now and then. Leadership is not about creating any dominion. Instead, it’s about creating a ground where everyone can feel at ease and approachable.
Focus on Goals and Not Problems
When you focus on solving problems more as a leader, you block the ways of achieving success and improving the overall performance of your team. Therefore, instead of focusing only on the problems, you should focus on achieving the goals and improving team performance. This will help you succeed and empower your team with more knowledge and responsibility.
Ideation to Overcome Problems and Achieve Goals
As a leader, you should consult with your employees, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and use that knowledge to form ideas for achieving goals and overcoming problems. Do not think that you can do everything on your own since you are in the position of being a leader.
Leadership is not about going or walking on a path alone. Instead, it’s about walking with everyone else toward success, and that’s where ideation comes in. With the help of this process, you can involve everyone in your team and achieve success in meeting the goals and overcoming obstacles.
Agreement on Accountability and Execution
Last but not least, you and your team need to decide on action plans that should be done to achieve the goals and improve the overall performance, set certain key points for accountability, and ensure that everyone follows this particular work process.
Conclusion
You must understand that leadership is not about achieving success for yourself. Instead, it’s about taking your team towards success and improving their performance. As a leader and coach, you can easily create the next generation of leaders, or should we say, great leaders.
