BOTH WINNING AND PLAYING THE GAME WELL MATTERS
You know winning and playing the game well both matter in business today. To do both, you must continue to seek the best ways to support your leaders during these competitive times. While leadership development using customized programming and group training is still popular, you may want to consider the value of adding an individualized approach to help leaders tackle the complex and frequent internal and external challenges that exist today. Your leaders must be mentally nimble and able to shift their thinking to address the new challenges they face.
Here are a few new workforce challenges* where coaching can help your leaders:
- A rapidly shifting workplace. More complex decisions and more challenging jobs require a new leadership logic. This logic is not acquired through the traditional horizontal leadership development approach of training, but also vertical development that is included when coaching is layered into the leadership program. Decisions and actions are not made in a vacuum but rather with the pointed partnership of a coach.
- An unpredictable future. Leaders today must think not only about adaptation to the shifting workplace, but must also anticipate the needs of the future. Coaching helps leaders to think more broadly about possible outcomes and the subsequent actions to take for multiple future possibilities by using a discovery and questioning approach.
- Increasing complexity. Jobs are more complex today, and require significant mental focus and creativity, but they are often harder to monitor. Leaders must be supportive and non-controlling due to the nature of the work today. Coaching helps leaders work though the management of this complex work by thinking more creatively about approaches, and to understand that innovation happens through collaboration.
- Inexplicable events. Events can happen that are simply unexpected and unexplained. Coaching helps leaders react in a different way, to be prepared mentally, to respond with more objectivity.
All of your leaders experience a unique set of challenges daily, whether internal or external. And within rapid changes, the need for rapid leadership development is clear. Coaching can assist by giving the leaders the space and confidential forum they need to consider the day to day challenges as well as strategy. The benefits coaching can provide your organization are many, such as these four scenarios where coaching can benefit an organization.
Source: *Petrie, N. "Future Trends in Leadership Development." Center for Creative Leadership. 2015. 17 May 2016.