LeadWorkPlay

So why would YOU ever want or need leadership coaching?   First, because of who you are. If you are reading this blog, you already deeply care about your professional success and personal growth.  And second, because to achieve the kind of growth and success you know you are capable of, you know that you have to invest in yourself.

More than ever, you cannot rely on your boss or your company to develop you.  While you can ask for their help and support (including making a financial investment in your coaching program) at the end of the day you are the one who must manage your own your career. Growing your skills (capabilities) to lead is the obvious place to start.

Leadership is not just a job, it is a profession that requires certain abilities, both obvious (e.g., to set strategic direction for a team) and subtle (e.g., how to convey a tough message with realism and optimism, so employees don’t disengage).  I’m really talking about much more here than learning a few techniques about how to make a presentation, or just smoothing out your rough edges.

According to Charan, Drotter and Noel’s seminal The Leadership Pipeline, “at least 50 percent of the people in leadership positions are operating far below their assigned layer.  They have the potential to be leaders, but that potential is going unfulfilled.”   The reason why? Once you move from being an Individual Contributor into your first role as Manager (and at EACH new level of leadership beyond) the authors’ research shows that you must continually “acquire a new way of managing and leading, and leave the old ways behind.”

In my 20+ year career in business and human resources, I have coached and trained literally thousands of leaders.  Even the shining stars — when they stepped into their next, bigger role — had to unlearn old skills/behaviors that once helped them succeed but now could sabotage them.  As the old saying goes, what got you here won’t get you there (e.g., the skills that made you top performer hitting your quarterly sales may make you a mediocre to bad performer as a leader responsible for an operating division with a 3-year strategy and plan for growth).

To grow your leadership capabilities, you need to ask yourself two questions to get to the next level or role you want:  What do I need to learn?  And what do I need to let go of? These can be hard questions to answer on your own (we can’t always see ourselves objectively or know what it is that we are missing/should know).  Leadership coaching brings assessment tools, research and best practices to help you customize a plan to get you where you want to go.