Congratulations you have made the move from a “doer” to a “leader”. You are now experiencing the challenges that come with moving from subject matter expert to generalist, from managing yourself or a small team to leading a business unit or company, from being responsible for your own behaviour to setting the tone for a whole organisation and most importantly from delivering results yourself to delivering them through a team.
The question becomes how do you manage that transition? Where do you acquire the Leadership skills necessary to be successful when likely as not most of what you will be doing in this new role you have never done before. All of this whilst the teams who work for you are watching and looking to you for strength and leadership. Unlike almost and job or promotion the one that moves you into a leadership role comes with almost no training at all. It seems to be expected that great managers or subject matter experts will just transform overnight into amazing leaders.
Enter the executive coach. There is nothing in your working world that is focused 100% on you. Am executive coach is somebody dedicated to helping you move from where you are to where you want to be. Imagine what you can achieve with the support and accountability that comes from someone 100 percent focused on helping you achieve your goals and maximizing your potential. When else in your career will you ever get the opportunity to experience that.
Traditional coaching conventions say that any coach can coach anybody using the right coaching tools. Reality is often different. In the real world, a business coach is also a mentor, a strategic partner and trusted advisor. It is therefore essential to find the right coach for you with the experience and battle scars to help you in your transition to leadership. If an executive coach isn’t something you’ve already considered here are 3 reasons why you should.
As you move into your new leadership role you will find that there are more groups vying for your attention, more decisions to be made, more problems to solve and more stakeholders expectations to manage. As a successful individual you will no doubt seek to meet all of these new demands. More often than not the promises that get broken first are the ones we make to ourselves. A business Coach challenges you to stay accountable to your own development, to strategize and develop your goals whilst meeting all of your other responsibilities.
A good business coach listens without judgement and is able to ask insightful questions that challenge your preconceptions and open new thought processes. Your business coach has no ulterior motive their only desire is to develop you, your thinking and help you to be the best leader possible. Nowhere else in your professional environment will you find a resource as powerful as a good business coach.
There isn’t a successful sporting team or athlete in the world that does not have a coach, successful business leaders are no different. If success and growth are what you are interested in then a good, experienced executive coach is exactly what you need.
High risk and ambiguous situations – perhaps I mean mining or banking, in fact there are great leadership lessons for corporate leaders from the fire service. These leaders face highly dangerous and ambiguous environments and have to make life and death decisions quickly and under pressure. So what can corporate leaders learn from leaders in high reliability organisations?
Benjamin Baran and Cliff Scott were curious and conducted exploratory research in 2010 on the Fire Service in the US. The researchers collected near-miss reports from stations across the US and analysed the results for key themes and patterns. This was an inductive process and they were able to identify a number of strategies that these leaders used effectively in highly ambiguous and dangerous situations.
Heedful interrelating - leaders were able to communicate with others by clear verbal communication, along with role modelling desired behaviours and role acting which is behaving in alignment with role expectations. Another key component was trust.
The researchers found that this mixture of behaviours, actions and processes were linked to managing high risk situations with lower numbers of injuries or casualties. When there were gaps in these components the injury rate increased.
Future leaders need to be able to lead confidently in ambiguous and complex situations where they may not know all the answers. They would do well to reflect on the leadership strategies of these firefighters.
What is the ‘potential’ in high potential?
Organisations invest heavily in their high potentials with training, coaching and mentoring often offered to prepare them for bigger roles. But what does a high potential leader look like? Strangely enough according to a research paper called ‘Learning Agility: a construct whose time has come’, high performance is not necessarily a good predictor of future success. In fact, success in a current role does not guarantee success in a different role. So what does? Researchers have been looking at this critical question and discovered that an individual’s learning agility is a much better predictor of success especially where a leader is transitioning from a known role to an unknown or novel role.
The authors go on to claim that ‘ The assessment of learning agility, we believe, will likely become a critical component of talent management practices in most organisations during this decade’.
In another piece of research entitled ‘ Learning Agility as a Prime Indicator of Potential’ the authors hypothesized that high potentials with a higher level of learning agility would perform better once they had been promoted. Indeed this hypothesis was borne out, the more successful leaders, once they had been promoted did indeed score higher levels of learning agility.
Mental agility – they are excellent critical thinkers who are comfortable with complexity, examine problems carefully and make fresh connections.
People agility – they know themselves very well and can readily deal with a wide variety of people and tough situations.
Change agility – they are curious, like to experiment and can effectively deal with the discomfort of change.
Results agility – they deliver results in first-time situations by inspiring teams; they exhibit the sort of presence that builds confidence in themselves and others.
Get more out of these experiences because they have an interest in making sense of them.
Perform well because they incorporate new skills into their repertoire.
So a high potential is someone who is a high learner, able to adapt, change and grow in ambiguous situations. So how do you spot those high in learning agility? There are assessment tools available on the market, however the research shows that a boss is more likely than peers or direct reports to identify high learners.
The need to identify high potentials is a critical one for organisations and it is worth thinking about how you are assessing these leaders. As a practitioner in the Leadership and Development field I am often asked to work with a group of leaders that have been identified by their level in the organisation, performance or personality and company fit. Let’s change the conversation and start to talk about potential in terms of an individuals ability to learn, adapt and grow.
Is coaching still relevant as a way of developing leaders?