What is Coaching Leadership?

Leadership coaching is a highly regarded leadership style that helps to ensure employees achieve their goals and find satisfaction in their careers. Coaching leadership is a style that is fully committed to partnership and collaboration. It opens up the forum to communication, creativity and innovation, and motivates staff to perform well. Coaching leadership is a relatively uncommon leadership style, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be an incredibly popular and high-performing one.

Wondering whether the world of coaching leadership is right for you? Or whether the model will work for your business? Here’s everything you need to know about coaching leadership:

What is Coaching Leadership?

Coaching leadership is a leadership approach where an individual adopts two roles simultaneously: the role of the leader and the role of the coach. Coaching leaders focus on the needs of their team, building positive relationships with them and helping to enhance their skill set at the same time. Coaching leaders empower their team members and encourage them to achieve and succeed. As a coaching leader, you will acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of your employees or team members. You will then use this knowledge to motivate your team towards self-improvement, ultimately increasing both their performance levels and their productivity. Coaching leadership is a leadership technique that unlocks potential. It creates a culture of high performance and encourages all team members to strive for that same level of high performance.

Coaching leaders help their employees to grow. They do this by incorporating a coaching mindset into their leadership style. They believe that everyone has a certain level of innate potential, and that feedback, trust, and collaboration can help to release that potential.

Characteristics of Coaching Leadership

Characteristics that typically define a coaching leadership style within the workplace include:

• Teams where 360-degree feedback is encouraged. Not only do leaders, and other members of the management team, regularly provide constructive feedback to their employees, but they also encourage their employees to provide constructive feedback to them. This feedback is then acted upon, in order to enhance performance, and positively develop the team.
• Coaching leaders are strong communicators. They use communication as one of their main workplace tools, and they communicate effectively with everyone with whom they interact with. They use their communication skills to share knowledge, engage with others, and actively listen to all members of their team. This in turn makes those team members feel valued and appreciated.
• Effective use is made of delegation. Coaching leaders aren’t afraid to delegate tasks to members of their team: they don’t feel the need to control their actions or situations. Instead, they give their employees the freedom and the opportunity to use their strengths to improve situations. They apply their existing skills and then they grow them, learning as they work.
• Coaching leaders demonstrate an abundance of empathy towards the needs of their employees and are also incredibly self-aware. This is clear in the open way that they communicate with their teams.
• Credit is shared. A coaching leader will share the credit for the success of a project with their full team.
• Coaching leaders are comfortable with letting go of control over projects. They trust their employees to manage their own workloads. Instead, they assume the position of coach and observer; they offer to guide their employees through the project, providing advice and support when it is needed.
• Micromanagement is discouraged in the coaching leadership model. This is perceived to be bad for the morale of employees. Instead, working to help employees reach their personal and group goals is perceived to be a greater motivation.
• Employees are encouraged to participate in personal and professional development opportunities. Continued professional development is often included in an employee’s list of obligations and objectives.
• The three buzzwords that succinctly describe coaching leadership are collaboration, guidance, and support. All of these elements will be evident in abundance if you are being led by a coaching leader.
• Coaching leaders encourage out-of-the-box thinking and creativity in their employees.
• Overall, coaching leaders try to bring out the best in people and often consider this to be a primary marker of their success.

Positives of Coaching Leadership

There are many organisational benefits of adopting a coaching leadership approach. These include, but are not limited to:

• Improved corporate culture. Corporate culture refers to the built-in behaviours and belief system of an organisation, and the way employees interact with each other outside of their business transactions. Many employees will choose their workplace based solely on its corporate culture, and this can also support staff retention, so it is important to create a positive culture and environment. Leadership coaching can play a huge role in shaping company culture. This leadership model can be used to create a positive working environment that will support the development of a desirable corporate culture and will provide guidance to those employees wishing to integrate with the existing culture. There are huge benefits of a shared culture, both from a business and social perspective.
• Increased team performance. Teams led by coaching leaders often outperform teams led by other leadership types. Teams led by a coaching leader tend to work more effectively and efficiently. This is because this leadership model allows leaders to not only set clear and measurable goals but also to support employees to develop the skills they need to achieve these goals. Coaching leaders focus on keeping the lines of communication with their employees open, and this can drive a collaborative approach that unlocks innovation and ultimately improves performance, and in turn productivity.
• Higher Employee Retention Levels. Recruiting new members to your team can be incredibly costly, with the cost to hire somebody on the UK average salary using a recruitment consultant estimated to be £3,000. Many employees leave their positions because they don’t feel their skills are being developed, but this concern is removed via the coaching leadership model. Coaching leaders provide in-house career development, and they also open the arena when there are opportunities for promotion and advancement within the organisation. Coaching leaders have better working relationships with their employees, build their trust and communicate in an honest and open way that is conducive to higher levels of employee retention.
• Team Skillsets are Increased. Coaching leaders work hard to encourage their employees to develop their skills and to focus on what makes them unique. This means that the number of skillsets a team possesses, and the innovations available to them, increases under this leadership model.
• Valuable Feedback Experiences. Employees with coaching leaders receive valuable constructive feedback on their performance and progress. Coaching leaders regularly give their team members feedback, observations and notes that will help them to positively develop within their role. This means that employees are more likely to thrive and reach their true potential, which will only help to enhance your business.
• Everyone is Included. Coaching leaders are not prescriptive. They understand that there is no one right way to do something. This means that teams led by these leaders tend to be more diverse, promoting equity and inclusion. Coaching leaders demonstrate empathy and encourage their employees to examine their biases. This means that underrepresented populations often have better development opportunities in teams that are led by coaching leaders and that these teams are often injected with a new and fresh perspective.

Negatives of Coaching Leadership

Whilst coaching leadership has many benefits, there are also negatives of coaching leadership too. These negatives include:

• Coaching Leadership Takes Time. It takes time for a coaching leadership approach to be established and requires that the leader spends considerable time with each of their employees. For this reason, this is one of the least-used management techniques in the modern workplace. Modern workplaces are busy, and so many leaders don’t have the time or the patience that is required to establish this kind of leadership style. It requires a significant upfront investment of time that many employers simply don’t have.
• Coaching Leadership Requires a Lot of Skill. As well as being talented leaders, coaching leaders must also be talented coaches. It is important that a coaching leader is highly trained to ensure that they possess both of these skillsets. If they don’t then there is a risk that they could do more harm than good: they could give their employees ineffective advice or fail to address the development areas that will be most beneficial to the business. It is not enough just to have good intentions if you’re following a coaching leadership style.
• Mentoring Doesn’t Work for Everyone. There are some situations where an employee will not benefit from being mentored by a coaching leader. Coaching requires a collaborative relationship and if the employee doesn’t want to be in that relationship, then this could lead to frustration and disappointment. Working relationships could become difficult. Coaching leadership is not a quick fix for companies that have problems and will not always be the right approach for all businesses.
• Finding the Right Coach Leader Can be Difficult. Specific situations will call for specific types of coaching leaders. Just because someone is a great coach, doesn’t mean they will be the right coach or leader for a specific organisation. This can make finding the right match feel incredibly difficult and is a huge drawback of the coaching leadership model. There needs to be chemistry between the manager and the direct reports for this style to be effective and finding this person can often feel like a needle in a haystack.

Situations Where Coaching Leadership Works

Coaching leadership works best in situations where the leader in question is highly skilled, and the employees working under them are receptive to learning and developing their skills. Coaching leaders can only work with employees that want to be coached. Coaching leadership works best in slow-paced working environments that have lots of time and room for creativity and deliberation.

Coaching leadership styles can be difficult to implement in large groups, so the coaching leadership style tends to work best in small businesses. It can also be used in smaller subsets or larger teams of larger businesses. This ensures that there is the time and space needed for strong personal relationships to be developed between the leader and the employee that they are coaching.

In the shorter term, coaching leadership can also be introduced into teams to help them to align personal and organisational goals while developing shared accountability and success. If team environments are in need of refreshing or businesses face other people-related issues, then coaching leadership could be a robust and viable way of overcoming those issues.

When to Avoid Coaching Leadership

The coaching leadership model requires a confident and highly qualified leader to implement. When a manager doesn’t know how to get started or how to complete a task, this type of leadership model should be avoided. When your competence on specific tasks or goals is low, you are not the right person to be teaching others how to achieve that goal. You should also avoid coaching leadership if you are unable to offer context for the coaching that you are giving; for this reason, coaching leaders should often assume an observatory position before they begin to coach their employees. If you don’t have context for the changes, you are encouraging your employees to make then those changes may not be relevant to the situation.

Finally, you should avoid coaching leadership if you haven’t established a trust-based relationship with your employees. Trust should be considered the foundation for any coaching relationship. The manager’s role can be especially hard because they have both perceived and real power over direct reports, who may be intimidated by this power. Earning this trust will take time, and the coaching element of your leadership role shouldn’t begin until it has.

Great leaders often blend coaching with other leadership models to get the best results, so if you’re interested in coaching leadership but aren’t sure that your business has the time or the resources to implement it fully, why not try integrating coaching leadership into your business practices on the small scale instead?

Examples of Coaching Leadership

There are many great examples of coaching leadership throughout history. Modern examples of coaching leaders are harder to come by. Some of the best of these are:

• Satya Nadella in his role as CEO of Microsoft. Nadella took over a stagnating, stalled business that was ready for rejuvenation and innovation. He decided that a mindset shift was needed across the company, and he used a coaching leadership model to do this. Employees were encouraged to learn, whilst Nadella demonstrated the importance of listening and sharing knowledge. The company turned its fortunes around, turning this into an example of where coaching leadership really worked to improve both employee morale and business success.
• Red Holtzman (NBA coach) mentored Phil Jackson (NBA coach). Some of the best coaching leaders are best known as being mentors to other successful individuals, and this is certainly the case for these two famous and successful NBA coaches. By using creativity, a listening ear, and other mentorship techniques, Holtzman was personally responsible for Jackson’s success.