How to Create Powerful Leaders Who Coach Across Your Organization

If you want to transform your company into one of genuine learning, you’ll need to do more than simply teach the leaders and managers how to be good coaches. You need to make coaching a company-wide capacity that fits within the company culture — you must effect a cultural transformation.

How can you achieve this? Follow these five steps:

1. Communicate the why. A good why will inevitably connect coaching to an organization’s mission-critical tasks. It should help people see the collateral benefits of coaching — enhancing their ability to serve clients. Developing these skills can also help them to become better at recognizing situations in which they don’t have to provide answers but can still offer value through attentive listening, asking the right questions, and supporting clients as they work out the best solution.
2. Lead by example. If you want your colleagues to embrace coaching, you need to embrace it too. This is powerful because it shows that the leader walks the talk and it helps to build momentum. Research shows that, when people are unsure about what constitutes appropriate behavior, they copy others’ actions — particularly those in power and of high status. In times of rapid change, employees look to their leaders for cues to follow.
3. Always be learning. Be open and vulnerable about where you are striving to improve. When leaders talk about their own areas of development, where they are looking to be better, and where they want to learn more, they open up the opportunity for their employees and direct reports to do the same. Establish a common thread of constantly learning and growing to create a culture of learning.
4. Initiate potential across the company. You’ll need to transform the culture from one of command-and-control to one of coaching. Do so by depending on the members of your leadership team to tailor the growth mindset to the unique requirements of their individual businesses/departments.
5. Eliminate obstacles. If mid-year and year-end reviews/appraisals cause anxiety and discomfort for your leaders, consider ditching them for year-round coaching conversations. This provides real-time feedback on work and creates a new and useful level of dialogue about career development.

We’re past the command-and-control era — we live in a changing world that demands constant learning and adapting. We must also develop this capacity in the people we supervise. With support from the entire organization, leaders must recreate themselves as coaches who can draw energy, creativity, and learning out of the people they work with.

Inspired by the HBR article, ‘The Leader as Coach.’

If leadership coaching or the impact Vayability has on leadership development is something you’d like to learn more about for your organization, get in touch.

Vayability is a leadership development platform built from the ground up to accelerate the development and business impact of emerging talent. Combining more than 20 years of executive learning, Vayability focuses on impactful leadership skills, personalized learning, live coaching, and measurable growth. Find out how top companies embrace success at vayability.net.

Written by Rachel Strysik