Why Every Leader Should Have a Leadership Coach: 9 Compelling Reasons

After 15 years of leadership coaching and integrating emotional intelligence strategies with global top executives and emerging leaders, the following are the main reasons why every leader could benefit from coaching.

1. You have blind spots

Executive coaches use validated leadership assessments, 360-degree feedback, and interviews with stakeholders to bring to light others’ perceptions of you. The gap between your perceptions and others’ can establish your blind spots.

2. You get less feedback

The higher up you are in the organization, the less feedback you get. As leaders move up the corporate ladder, they get less feedback from others in the organization for many reasons. Their direct reports are afraid to give honest and direct feedback for fear of retribution, and how that impacts their reviews.

So senior leaders don’t get the feedback they need to continually improve. A coach can not only give you feedback but also help integrate the feedback into specific actions.

3. Change is hard

In every organization, a major challenge is change, whether it is changing personal behaviour or helping your team deal with constant change. Most leaders are inundated with change scenarios.

Getting people to accept change is a leadership challenge. Coaches can bring best practices for leading change, focusing on behaviour change using the psychology of motivation and performance research.

4. Telling rather than asking

An executive coach can help you focus on strategies to ask the right questions in a constructive way that empowers others and can help you improve communication, collaboration, and coaching skills quickly.

5. Lack of deep thinking

A coach can help you think deeper and longer to improve decision-making by challenging your thinking and mindset. Can you focus on a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset? What would be a proactive response versus a reactive response?

A coach adds clarity to your input about yourself and others and thus enhances your output on your decisions, communications, solutions, and results.

6. Self-awareness and self-management

Awareness and self-management are two sides of the same coin. How can you manage what you don’t see? A coach helps you master the moment by putting a spotlight on your inputs about yourself and others, so your outputs, which are your decisions, communication, strategies, and results, are the best they can be.

7. Building strengths and identifying derailers 

As a leader, your first priority should be to gain more clarity about your strengths, which is difficult to do on your own. Your coach will assist you in identifying your strengths, increasing them, utilising them more frequently, and broadening them to areas of weakness.

A variety of assessments and coaching tools help you build on your strengths, competencies, and skills. If a person has some derailers, also called “fatal flaws,” those must be addressed first, and the coach can help you build awareness and manage of them.

8. You are the emotional thermostat; leverage your power

Most leaders are focused on their tasks and results, while their direct reports are focused more on their contributions and recognition. This is a major disconnect between leaders and followers in terms of their needs and wants from their conversations.

The leader is the team’s emotional thermostat. Their mood is the most contagious. Other people notice when they are irritated, stressed, or short. If they are upbeat, encouraging, and empathic, their team will be as well.

9. You are creating your leadership legacy

A leader’s primary focus is usually on getting results. Having a coach forces you to prioritise the development of your team and emerging leaders. This is where the leader can leave their greatest legacy. 

Their leadership’s best practises can be passed down to their direct reports after they are long gone. Leaders have an impact on all of their people and their families, and they can improve their quality of life.

Your direct reports’ expectations of your coaching include:

• Communicating clearly and candidly
• Establishing clear performance objectives and milestones
• Delivering on promises made
• Respecting their ability to make decisions
• Being an advocate for their development and career growth.

That means you can’t take shortcuts to deliver on their hopes and expectations. You need focused time to think deeply and slowly, and that is best done with an experienced coach who acts as a thinking partner with you and for you.

Are you ready to maximise your leadership potential and leave a lasting legacy? Take the first step towards becoming an exceptional leader and schedule a consultation today. Click here to get in touch with us and learn more.