Leadership is a role that involves constant self-development, with all the twists and turns involved in a typically high-stress position. With this role comes the need for improvement, for consistently listening to feedback from others, and for creating a productive and empowering environment for both team members and clients.
To manage a leadership role, it’s important to be the best version of yourself possible. This can be achieved through coaching.
Coaching can be completely transformative, for both professional and personal development. It’s often sneered upon by people in business, as misinformation has labelled coaching a sign of weakness. This couldn’t be further from the truth! The most successful leaders use coaching to take them above and beyond.
Read this article to find out how you can make the most of coaching, and why it will completely revolutionise your leadership.
Coping with stress and pressure
Leadership is full of stress and pressure, which can feel overwhelming and difficult to balance. Through regular coaching sessions, this can ease dramatically; by putting strategies in place that can help you cope, and having consistent support, it is easier to deal with this pressure. The ability to work through anxiety is the mark of a successful leader. Even if it’s something you struggle with regularly, it shouldn’t inhibit you from high performance.
Identifying and developing your leadership style
Coaching can also help with the most fundamental part of being a leader – and that’s finding your style of leadership. Ultimately, your style comes down to who you are as a person and what you want to achieve through your leadership. Many leaders run into difficulties when trying to use a style that doesn’t suit them or their team. With coaching, you can pinpoint your personal strengths and weaknesses, as well as gaining clarity on your goals. This allows you to develop a leadership style that aligns to your personality, vision, and the needs of your business.
Improving your productivity
The most important quality of leadership is your productivity. It can often feel like you have to be in multiple places at once to stay above water, with multiple pairs of hands – but this doesn’t have to be the case. Coaching can help you unlock your productivity, and help your stress levels at work, as we’ve discussed. In this article, we’ve outlined steps you can take to drive your productivity. Regular coaching can help you put these steps into action, and put you on the path to success.
Enhancing your time management
Time is money – and it’s highly valuable for achieving your successes as a leader. Coaching can benefit you in this regard; working with a coach to master time management techniques, scheduling, task prioritisation, and making the most of technology can be extremely helpful in managing your time productively. As well as this, coaching better enables you to monitor your progress, with measurable results. When you improve your time management through coaching, your growth will be easily quantifiable.
Helping your team through challenges
The best benefits to be found from coaching are the ways in which it allows you to help your team. As a leader, your team’s challenges are your own. By using coaching to pinpoint your own strengths, you can better work through difficult tasks and situations. This can be translated to your team’s efforts. Coaching can allow you to work out what they’re struggling with, and how you can support them to move forward.
Growing in confidence
It’s a commonly-believed myth that all leaders are confident and self-assured. In fact, many people who work in leadership positions struggle greatly with insecurity and imposter syndrome (which we wrote an article on overcoming, handily enough)! Through coaching, and the support it brings, you’ll be given the tools to grow your confidence and self-belief. By improving your self-awareness, keeping you accountable, building your self-esteem, and challenging negative thought patterns, coaching will help you reach your full potential.
Finding a better work/life balance
It’s essential to leave work at work. Having an effective work/life balance allows you to fully relax and unwind from the day – paramount as a leader! Don’t let work stress pervade every aspect of your life, or vice versa. Coaching can help with this separation, giving you the time to focus on what matters most to you.
Creating a better environment for your team
Like we said before, the most rewarding elements of leadership coaching are how it benefits your team. Coaching can enable you to improve on every facet of your leadership, which naturally extends to the environment you’ve created for your team. Even if you didn’t recognise it before, coaching can make you aware of any issues in the workplace, and give you the skills to address them, and then better support your employees. This makes your work environment better for all members, and can greatly aid confidence, performance, and retention.
Improving self-awareness and emotional intelligence
Coaching can greatly improve how you think about yourself and others. By improving your self-awareness, you can more easily pinpoint areas of personal weakness that may need working on. You can also find areas of strength, that you can accentuate and build upon in your quest as a consistently-learning leader. Emotional intelligence, or EQ, is paramount to being an empathetic and supportive leader; to develop your own emotional skill sets, and recognise where other people are struggling, are qualities that will lead you and your team to success.
Coaching has a multitude of benefits, not restricted to leadership. It is leaders, however, who can use coaching to take them even further in their career, and their business to even greater heights. This list is non-exhaustive, of course – coaching can help in thousands of ways! At Burles & Co, we’ve seen them first-hand. If you have any questions, or are interested in our coaching services for leaders, do get in touch.
