Being a leader can be a highly rewarding, fulfilling and meaningful experience. However, leadership is challenging as it brings a significant weight of responsibility to maintain and ensure the company’s continued financial health and viability. The magnitude of this responsibility is particularly felt when leaders come to grips with the consequences that the company’s financial health has for their family, employees and clients.
Fulfilling this responsibility is a difficult, relentless challenge. Leaders are tasked with making high risk decisions often with limited information. They bear primary responsibility for solving the organization’s most difficult problems. They play a pivotal role in charting the organization’s future direction, which often entails challenging the status quo in order to bring positive change.
Compounding these challenges is the pressure leaders feel to look like they are confident and in control. However, under the surface, leaders often experience doubts about how best to proceed and resolve issues. More often, leaders need someone to talk through the complexity of the situation in order to find the best way forward. Unfortunately, out of a desire to project confidence and that they are in control, leaders can feel that they have no one they can turn to and feel the pain of loneliness or a lack of support as they have to deal with their responsibilities by themselves.
An additional factor that adds to the complexity of leadership is how hard it is to determine how you are progressing as a leader. Most leaders aspire to become better leaders. However, leaders often do not receive honest and constructive feedback. In addition, because leaders are expected to know what they are doing, opening themselves up to feedback can be challenging. Due to these conditions, leaders can feel a sense of isolation as they are left on their own to determine how best to lead and what they need to do to become a better leader.
Coaching Plan
Typically, client engagements focused on leadership development are often a combination of unstructured and structured coaching.
Unstructured coaching occurs when I serve as a sounding board to talk through the issues you are currently facing. Because leaders are often juggling several issues at one time, these coaching sessions often begin by sorting through these issues and identifying one to focus on. Next, we drill down into the complexity of the issue and explore the situation with the goal of hopefully surfacing a key insight that will facilitate your ability to confidently move forward. Once key insights have been surfaced, the final step is to develop an agreed upon set of action items to be completed prior to our next meeting.
The structured part is often designed to help you improve as a leader by providing you with insights into your leadership style, clarifying your strengths and identifying areas for improvement. Accordingly, the coaching plan often follows a three-step process:
Step 1: Assessment
We often begin by performing various assessments, which may include:
An assessment that will provide insights into your leadership style such as preferred mode of thinking, communication style and behavioral traits.
An assessment designed to have you evaluate yourself on various leadership success factors.
A 360-degree verbal assessment where I interview your colleagues to understand your strengths and areas where you can improve your leadership.
During this step we will work together to determine which assessments make sense for your situation.
Step 2: Plan
The next step is to review the assessment results to understand what you do well as a leader and to identify areas for improvement. Using this information, we will construct a leadership development plan designed to build on your strengths and improve in the areas that we agree will have the most impact for your success.
Step 3: Execute
As we work through executing your leadership development plan, the final stage comprises coaching sessions directed at discussing your progress and talking through any issues that may surface.