Unlocking Your Potential: What Does a Leadership Coach Do?

As a leadership coach, you can help people unlock their potential, improve performance, understand and resolve challenges, and reach their goals. An advisor uses their own knowledge, experience, or connections to offer ideas, listen, provide guidance, and facilitate presentations.

Leadership coaching

is characterized by collaboration, support, and guidance. Coaches focus on getting the best out of their teams by guiding them through goals and obstacles.

This leadership style is very different from autocratic leadership, which relies on top-down decision-making. In the 21st century workplace, however, this strict management style doesn't fit the priorities of most organizations. That's why leadership coaching is becoming increasingly popular. David Morley, a senior partner at the time, was one of the first to recognize this shift and began talking to his colleagues about the importance of high-value conversations.

Leadership coaching is the conscious process of developing talents and competencies in people so that they can work more effectively with others. Courtois identified that Microsoft's decision to adopt a cloud-focused strategy was the main reason for this switch to coaching. The authors explain the merits of different types of managerial, non-managerial and situational coaching and point out that sometimes no type of training is appropriate. If your employees view coaching as just another trend driven by Human Resources, they may not be as enthusiastic about it.

However, with the right tools and support, a solid method, and lots of practice and feedback, just about anyone can become a better coach. It's also possible that your employees don't need any kind of advice right now but would appreciate hearing from you later on. For successful leadership coaching to take place, it needs to be supported by the entire organization. This means that employees need to reinvent themselves as coaches whose job is to extract energy, creativity and learning from the people they work with.

Additionally, since leadership coaching is based on two-way communication, make sure you're just as responsive when it comes to answering questions. One axis shows the information, advice or experience that a coach brings to the relationship with the person receiving the training; the other shows the motivational energy that the coach draws from discovering that person's own ideas and solutions. It's one thing to aspire to this type of training but another is to make it a reality as a daily practice at all levels of an organization. When you start discussing a topic with someone you're training, establish exactly what you want to achieve right now.