Why Coaching And Mentoring Are Effective Leadership Techniques

As a leader, what’s your biggest secret? 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 and mentoring employees helps your colleagues become more effective at their jobs, which in turn makes your business more profitable. 

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

1. Coaching and mentoring teach self-accountability

Some leaders may think coaching others is like teaching them with training wheels on. They may  think that coaching won’t help someone after they’ve stopped being coached (i.e., once the training wheels come off). That’s why some business 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News flash: that thinking is outdated, stodgy and ill-informed.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, mentoring workers actually makes them more self-reliant. It’s just that some leaders don’t know how to coach effectively. 

Instead of giving employees training wheels, great coaching involves helping your colleagues change their limiting beliefs in order to tackle bigger problems without the rigid inflexibility of a game plan, algorithm or goal checklist. 

2. Coaching and mentoring teach better time management

Tired of hearing that your employees “don’t have enough time” to get the job done when you’ve been pulling late nights to keep the ship running?

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 with not a whole lot of time, not all of your employees know this.

Coaching can help your colleagues see how efficient they can be with their time. Mentoring effectively will demonstrate that goals can be accomplished even with the same—or less—time than others as long as we are able to see that we have the resources to get the job done. 

3. Coaching and mentoring teach 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, your business suffers—and so does everyone’s happiness. 

We all want to do amazing things, right? For example, the Associate IT Manager on your staff 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 to get people to stop tolerating sub-optimal outcomes, coaching is required to show us that we can change our thinking about the situations we’re in to change our circumstances. That’s mentoring at its finest. 

4. Coaching and mentoring make 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 work with your own coach before you jump headfirst into mentoring and 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 been coached 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 really confident you can do all those things without the house (a.k.a. your business) burning down first? 

Learning from actual experts about how to properly mentor and train someone will save you from accidentally instilling unhelpful beliefs into your workers that might make your business flounder instead of thrive. 

If you’re serious about improving your leadership, and you need a personal coach. 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?