How Coaching is an Effective Leadership Technique

As a leader, what’s your secret to success? We’ll take a guess: if you’re really good at what you do, we’re assuming you’re always looking to become even better at what you do.

The desire to be better is a crucial quality not only in business, but in coaching, mentoring and leadership as well. Not only that, but the benefits of coaching as a leader are huge: becoming a better leader through coaching your team helps them become more effective at their jobs, which in turn makes your organization more successful.

Let’s look into how and why coaching and mentoring as a leader can supercharge your results.

1. Coaching encourages self-accountability

Some leaders may think coaching others is like teaching them with training wheels on. They may think that coaching works in the short-term, but that their team members will become dependent on them for guidance. That’s why some leaders think that forcing workers to struggle on their own actually makes them better at what they do.

News flash: that thinking is outdated, stodgy, and ill-informed. Instead, when done correctly, actively coaching your team members makes them more self-reliant. It’s just that some leaders don’t know how to coach effectively.

Instead of giving your team members training wheels, great coaching involves helping them fundamentally shift their thinking so that they can tackle any challenge that comes their way in the long-run. By helping them address the thoughts that are getting in their way, sustainable change can occur.

2. Coaching teaches better time management

Tired of hearing that your team members “don’t have enough time” to complete their tasks when you’ve been working your butt off to get the job done?

Coaching can help.

The truth is that everyone has the same amount of hours in the day. The most successful people don’t have any more time than less successful people. The difference lies in how we think about time management. While you might have learned that you can do a whole lot in not a whole lot of time, not everyone knows how to do this.

Coaching can help your team members see how efficient they can be with their time. When you take the time to identify their beliefs about their time, their skills, their resources, and their workload, you can begin to challenge those beliefs and demonstrate a new thinking process around what they can achieve.

3. Coaching implores us not to settle

While you may believe there’s always room for improvement, not everyone thinks this way. Many people tolerate the problems in their lives by saying things are “good enough.” But when employees make a decision to live with less than what’s optimal, their performance suffers—and so does everyone’s happiness.

We all want to do amazing things, right? The Associate IT Manager on your team, for example, wants to feel good at what she does; what’s more, she deserves to feel that way.

The key to help people stop settling for “good enough” is coaching.

In order for people to stop tolerating sub-optimal outcomes, coaching is required to show them the correlation between their thoughts and their results. Do your team members feel pride in what they do? Do they feel acknowledged and celebrated when they perform well? Do they believe that they deserve to live large? Discovering the answers to these questions is coaching at its finest.

4. Coaching makes you a better leader

Learning how to coach and mentor others doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time to build this skill—which is why you’ll want to learn from a coach before you jump headfirst into coaching others.

We know that as a leader, you like taking the bull by the horns and learning how to do things on your own. We get that, because we’re leaders, too. But trying to coach before you’ve learned how to coach is a little bit like trying to put out a fire without first learning how to be a firefighter.

Sure, you know you’re supposed to throw water on the blaze… but what if it’s an electrical fire? A grease fire? Or what if the blaze is so big that you need to bring in a fire hose to do the job? Are you confident you can do all those things without the house (a.k.a. your leadership) burning down first?

Learning from an expert about how to properly coach someone will save you from accidentally instilling unhelpful beliefs into your team that might make your organization flounder instead of thrive.

If you’re serious about improving your leadership and coaching skills, you need an experienced coach to guide you. Delaying that step now goes against what leaders stand for—where’s the sense in believing in constant improvement if you’re not open to improving yourself, too?