What Coaching Qualities Make a Good Leader?

Leadership is an essential skill for any successful business, and coaching is one of the best ways to develop it. Coaches provide business leaders with a private and confidential space to talk about challenges that they often ponder alone. A good leader gives all employees a deep sense of belonging and develops a level of self-awareness to help address their own prejudices, both unconscious and implicit. As a coach and leader, exceptional communication skills are needed to make people feel, listen and feel inspired to act.

The best executive coaches have seen and experienced a variety of interpersonal relationships, and have witnessed first-hand what motivates people and how they work together. A football coach won't be able to tell a quarterback how to move or where to throw the ball in the middle of a frantic play. Employees report reduced stress, greater purpose, and greater resilience after a client's manager received four months of leadership training. For organizations, training skills are the secret ingredient to unlocking the full potential of their team members.

The authors explain the advantages of different types of management, non-management and situational coaching and point out that, sometimes, no training is appropriate at all. And this is not to say that anything has to go wrong with hiring; the coach and coach could have had their chemistry sessions, set goals, the coach could have all the attributes necessary to be trainable; everything could be working, but at some point it may happen that the coach realizes that they are not equipped in the way necessary to train this particular client. Executives receive a case study and are asked to play the role of a manager who must decide whether to fire or train a direct subordinate who is not performing up to the task. One of the best ways to improve in non-management coaching is to try to talk using the GROW model, devised in the 1980s by Sir John Whitmore and others. And ultimately, you'll get a framework for implementing coaching skills in your workplace.