3 Best Leadership Coaching Strategies to Transform Managers into Leaders

As a middle or upper-middle manager, your company is expecting more from you especially in the current business climate. Companies and their leadership teams, across all levels, face increasing complexity and a greater need for anticipation and rapid adaptation.

The key to a leader’s success, especially for middle and upper-middle managers, is scaling influence and impact.

Situation

The old model of “command and control” doesn’t work in today’s dynamic environment, as discussed in Harvard Business Review. When managers attempt to control every outcome, involve themselves deeply in every assignment and seek to prescribe what employees “need” to succeed, at best they’ll exhaust themselves. At worst, they become a chokepoint in their team’s productivity. As such, their team will never grow beyond their own capacity.

Managers don’t have, and shouldn’t expect to have, all the answers. They also don’t have the bandwidth or capacity to solve every problem, execute every assignment and oversee every detail of implementation, as they did when they were individual contributors.

But many well-intending managers get in their own way and jeopardize effectiveness when they remain stuck on this question: “If I can’t see and control everything, how do I ensure I’ll be successful?”

Solution

Leadership coaching focuses on middle and upper-mid level managers. Furthermore, its goal is to improve your performance in:  

  • Motivating and inspiring a team

  • Influencing decision-making

  • Driving change

It also concentrates on effective leadership, optimizing and managing factors that enable your ability to perform at high levels and deliver results consistently.

Top advantages of leadership coaching include:

  • Helping to develop leadership skills

  • Scaling effectiveness

  • Increasing confidence in empowering their team and delegating

  • Improving decision-making in the face of uncertainty

  • Building trust in and from their team

Whether it’s delivered on a cohort basis, one-on-one, or a combination of the two, the benefits of leadership coaching even extend beyond you and will help your organization through:  

  • Building bench strength for up-and-coming talent

  • Increasing leadership and managerial effectiveness

  • Improving employee engagement, retention and loyalty because of greater satisfaction in how they are managed and led

When Leadership Coaching is Most Effective

During your professional career, leadership coaching is highly beneficial when you’re promoted to a first-time manager or when you become a leader of other managers.

Moreover, leadership coaching helps develop:

  • Up-and-coming “next gen” high potential talent

  • Managers with an expanded mandate, or who are facing complex leadership challenges

  • Managers or leaders whose style is sabotaging their teams’ or their own ability to attain goals

How Leadership Coaching Changes a Career Course

Leadership coaching can change your career course in a positive way, by preparing you to earn a promotion or take on greater responsibility. It also improves your effectiveness and ability to scale your performance in your current role.

Other ways leadership coaching can change your career course is through:

  • Increasing your emotional intelligence to manage challenging situations or colleagues more confidently and adeptly

  • Improving how you influence others without authority

Effective Leadership Coaching Program Elements

Finding the most effective leadership coaching program begins with selecting the right leadership coach. Look for a leadership program that incorporates performance data and research-based insights on reputation, leadership strengths and weaknesses from personality assessments, like the Hogan Personality Assessment and 360 surveys.

Other attributes of a successful leadership program include those that:

  • Build and improve leadership skills such as executive presence, decision-making and effective communication, with coaching around awareness (self and situational), emotional intelligence, confidence, fearlessness and resilience

  • Provides support for addressing common leadership challenges such as delegating effectively, motivating and inspiring a team, building trust, influencing others, and time management

Best Leadership Coaching Strategies

Being a “leader” or a “manager” goes beyond titles, levels or scope of responsibility. Leadership coaching focuses not only on leadership skills, but also on creating and having a powerful leadership mindset. One of the biggest distinctions between leaders and managers is their mindset for how they approach leadership itself.

A “manager” typically has a performance orientation. They measure success based on how they compare and compete with others. They are driven by the opportunity to do better than others, to prove them wrong, or to demonstrate their own value and importance. They rely on authority, coercion and dominance to push forward their agenda.

Their sense of self-worth and value is tied up in how they perform. Their strongest motivations are likely to be extrinsic, which include money, promotions and praise from others. These are outside of their ability to control.

When an outcome falls short of what they hoped, they seek to find reasons for what went wrong and anchor themselves to “past thinking.” This leads to blaming others, the environment or organizational culture. It also contributes to deflecting accountability or questioning themselves and their capabilities, plan or direction.

The best coaching strategies to transform yourself into a leader involve:

1.    Adopting a “mastery” orientation. When this is accomplished, your mindset will shift from outperforming others to developing into the best leader you can be. You’ll perform and lead to become more competent, effective or highly skilled than you already are. By doing so, you’ll be concentrating on what will help you lead better in the long run.

You’ll be internally focused and have strong intrinsic motivators. This includes satisfaction from completing a task, building connections with others, and increasing alignment within and among teams, which are inside your ability to control.

Most significantly, the outcome of any given performance won’t affect you too greatly. No matter what has occurred, there is always something to learn from what happened to move you closer to mastery.

2.    Identifying and breaking through inner performance blocks. This works by addressing any limiting beliefs, interpretations, assumptions and negative self-talk. The result is building a mindset and approach for leading with power, instead of by force.

3.    Delegating like a leader. As noted earlier, many managers are stuck on the question: “If I can’t see and control everything, how do I ensure I’ll be successful?” It’s a natural outcome of a manager’s performance orientation mindset. Accordingly, delegation is frequently an area where managers with a performance orientation struggle.

Mastering delegation is fundamental to leadership. It’s not only critical to time management, but also to building and developing trust, motivating and inspiring a team, and influencing others. Your ability to delegate is one of the biggest differentiators between being a manager and becoming a leader.

When a manager doesn’t delegate well:

  • They’re sacrificing their own effectiveness

  • Their team will not develop new skills and knowledge

  • The team will not gain scale and grow beyond the manager’s own capacity

So, how do you delegate like a leader? Look for opportunities with well-defined rules and parameters. Then ask:

  • Who’s available?

  • Is there time?

  • Is training required?

  • Is this a growth opportunity?

  • What is the priority of the assignment?

Additional ways to delegate like a leader:

  • Provide structure where it’s lacking

  • Agree on expectations, empowerment and authority

  • Delegate the results, not the process, if experience warrants

  • Establish checkpoints and milestones

  • Identify available resources and support

  • Talk about consequences

  • Define your role

Leadership Coaching Transforms a CFO into a Leader

Leading Edge Coaching & Consulting (LECC) coached the interim CFO of a private-equity-backed tech firm. Overall, he was effective in his role, but he struggled with time management and prioritization. More significantly, his demeanor would shift from congenial and collaborative to bullying, authoritative, exacting and micro-managing when under stress or if a project was not going to plan.

As he shared more, LECC recognized these derailing behaviors were exactly the ones that came out on the cricket pitch when his team fell behind or lost focus. He was the team captain and was always supportive of his teammates when things went well. When they weren’t going well, he would unconsciously summon his “Hulk” persona. This meant ramping up his own game and intensity, while confronting, chastising, or intimidating his teammates if they failed to perform.

Although these behaviors could be effective in the short run, the discussion centered around how they were unlikely to build a great deal of loyalty from his team. He saw how he was supporting his team only conditionally and tying his support to the outcomes on the field.

It was the same at the office. He rigidly tried to control all outcomes. His team would discuss among themselves which of his “versions” was going to show up in a meeting. They feared sharing unwelcome news or coming to him with problems or challenges, for fear of the “Hulk” being unleashed.

This wasn’t the leader he wanted to be.

Coaching sessions revolved around how adopting a mastery orientation would be a game-changer for him as a leader. By becoming more approachable and less judgmental, he and his team developed greater trust in each other. By supporting his teammates more consistently, the team’s loyalty to him increased, and they were willing to stretch and take on more responsibility.

This allowed him to delegate more freely and increase his engagement in big picture, strategic projects with his senior team colleagues. He was more effective in these settings, making significant contributions and sharing insights while being far less likely to have his performance derailed when things weren’t going according to his plans.

Get Results from Leadership Coaching

If you want to transform into a leader, you could benefit from collaborating with a leadership coach. Schedule a complimentary discovery session today.