Why Executive Leadership Coaching is Essential for Today's Leaders

We live in a time where businesses need to be more agile and innovative than ever before.  Talent shortages, exponential innovations in technology, increased competition, higher customer expectations, thrown in on top of a volatile political and economic environment, and environmental regulations moving towards carbon neutral are all elements of a complex challenge that leaders are facing on a daily basis.  Leaders need to not only think strategically, and make quick decisions; they also need to be able to motivate their teams to achieve results. Executive leadership coaching can help leaders develop the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in today's challenging environment. 

Developing Key Leadership Skills: How Executive Leadership Coaching Helps You Lead Better  

After having the privilege of coaching thousands of leaders over the past decade, I’ve found that there are three fundamental areas where executive leadership coaching helps you to be a more effective leader who positively influences and inspires others, and creates a positive impact. 

One of my favourite quotes is from one of my mentors called Wayne Dyer.  He said: ‘when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.’  Most of us have seen an optical illusion picture that on first glance you see one thing, yet, if you change your perspective, you see something different in the picture.  One of the famous pictures that has been used for this in corporate training is the picture of the woman looking off into the distance.  For some they see an older lady wearing a shawl on her head.  For others, they see a young lady wearing a hat with a feather.  If you pay attention, you will see the other figure that you initially missed in the picture. 

So why is this Wayne Dyer quote so important?  The first fundamental area where executive leadership coaching can help you lead better is by changing the way you look at yourself. 

Increased Self-Awareness: The first element of emotional intelligence is self-awareness.  In fact self-awareness is the first step to creating any transformation in your life.  Executive leadership coaching helps you to ask self-inquiry questions that elevate your self-awareness around your habits of thinking, feeling, and acting.  As Einstein once said. “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”  Your first step is to self-reflect and find the insights that increase your self-awareness on what you need to change for you to be a better leader.  This can be challenging to do on your own.  I’ve found that executive leadership coaching can really help facilitate this self-discovery phase of you being a better leader. 

Creating a Leadership Identity:  Once you elevate your self-awareness around how you are getting in your own way of being an even better leader, you are well positioned to create an empowering leadership identity to live into.  Why is it important to create a leadership identity?  If you want to create a high-performing culture where you consistent generate outstanding results, you will likely need to do some things differently than you did before.  In order to change your behaviours, there is a critical part of the equation that most leaders miss, that executive leadership coaching can help you with, and that is creating an empowering leadership identity.  Imagine you asked a smoker not to smoke.  They would find it very hard, because they identify as a smoker.  Ask a non-smoker not to smoke, it would be easy.  So in order to consistently demonstrate critical leadership behaviours, you must first create an identity congruent with those behaviours to make it easy to live into them every day.  A great executive leadership coach will guide you through this process. 

Develop Leadership Skills:  Consistency is the key to success.  Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of Psychology at Florida State University, was a pioneer in researching the concept of deliberate practice and what it means in the pursuit of peak-performance and excellence.  According to Ericsson: Practice is the act of rehearsing a behaviour repeatedly.  One of Ericsson's core findings was that how expert you become at a skill has more to do with how you practice than with merely performing a skill a large number of times.  

An expert breaks down the skills that are required to be expert and focuses on improving those skill chunks during practice or day-to-day activities.  The difference in practice and deliberate practice is that deliberate practice  is paired with immediate coaching feedback.  All the peak-performers in sports have coaches to give them immediate and effective feedback on their performance.  You absolutely need to receive effective feedback to consistently sustain peak-performance.  Executive leadership coaching helps hold you accountable to practice the leadership skills that you develop during your coaching.  More importantly, your executive leadership coach provides effective feedback to reinforce the leadership skills required to be successful.  This pairing of frequency of practice with effective feedback accelerates your journey to mastery. 

In summary, where executive leadership coaching can help you is by increasing your self-awareness to determine who you need to be (leadership identity), what you need to do (leadership skills), in order to get the results you want as an outstanding leader. 

Making Effective Decisions: How Executive Leadership Coaching Improves Your Decision- Making Skills   

If you are a leader or manager, one of the most critical parts of your job is to make decisions.  In fact, it’s why you have been employed as a leader in the first place.  If you are not making good decisions, you are putting yourself, your team, and potentially your organisation at risk. 

Alison M. Reynolds, John A. Hollenbeck, and Amy E. Humphrey conducted a study on the impact of leadership coaching on decision making.  The results showed that leadership coaching had a positive impact on decision making.  Specifically coaching was found to improve the quality of decision making, the speed of decision making, and the confidence in decision making. 

So why do leaders sometimes make bad decisions?   

Emotions: The emotional state you are in determines the decisions you make and actions you take, that ultimately determine the results you get in work and in life.  If you are feeling strong unresourceful emotions like confusion, frustration, anger, fear, or sadness, you are going to make a very different decision than if you are feeling calm, happy, focused, excited, or grateful.  Recognising that your emotions influence your judgement, one of the fundamental areas an executive leadership coach can help you is to regulate your emotions.  When you take control of your emotions, you take control of your decisions. 

Perspective:  We make decisions based on how we see things.  How much information you have will influence your perspective on what is happening.  Everyone has biases, whether innate or learned.  Bias can disproportionally weigh in favour or against an idea, thing, or person, and are more often than not, unconscious.  There are as many as 175 different types of cognitive bias.  Some of the more common biases include affinity bias, conformity bias, age bias, gender bias, the halo effect (when you see one great feature and ignore everything else).  Executive leadership coaching gives you the skills to ask powerful inquiry questions to get a fuller perspective on what is happening.  It also increases your self-awareness around how your biases are impacting your decision making, and how to objectively make informed and effective decisions that will elevate your leadership influence.  

Peer Pressure:  Have you ever felt pressured into making decisions that you know are wrong?  Many leaders find themselves in a position where they want to maintain relationships with their team members, avoid perceived conflict and potential discomfort in the office.  This is further fuelled by team members putting pressure on you to make the decision they want you to make, that might be good for them in the short term, but not for the greater good.  The fear of being judged, making a mistake, the need to please others can all contribute to bad decisions.  Executive leadership coaching can help you to stay composed and centred in times of pressure, whether it’s driven by peers, your one-up, clients, or share-holders.  Remember, emotional regulation is the number one way to make great decisions, so working with an executive leadership coach to help you develop strategies to manage your emotions, make great decisions, so you can be successful in today’s challenging environment. 

 Leading with Confidence: How Executive Leadership Coaching Can Boost Your Self- Confidence and Esteem  

“Did I make the right decision?  I should have done better?  It’s not good enough.  I’m not good enough.  They don’t respect me.  I’m a failure.”  There are times when your inner critic is the loudest voice in your head.  When you listen to it, your self-esteem and confidence evaporates. 

One of the biggest pitfalls that impacts leaders being effective is their negative self-talk.  This voice is often at its loudest when you begin your leadership journey, or you get promoted into a new or different leadership role.   Uncertainty breeds fear. 

Confidence is an emotion.  As we discussed, emotions impact your decision making.  Building emotional regulation and interrupting the inner-critic is critical to your leadership success.  There are several strategies your executive leadership coach will help you to adopt from challenging your negative thoughts, to helping you shift your perspective, practice positive self-talk and help you to focus on acknowledging yourself for your accomplishments. 

The most powerful tool I’ve discovered is to ‘vet’ your emotions to elevate your self-awareness on what you’re feeling in any given situation, and then deconstructing your emotion into its three component parts.  That’s right, all emotions are made up of the same three ingredients.  The acronym I use is V.E.T.  Your ‘VOCABULARY,’ the words you use to describe your experience.  Your EMBODIMENT, how you are using your body and physiology to express the emotion, and the TARGET OF YOUR FOCUS.  When you’re not feeling confident, you are using very specific words, that direct the target of your focus, that ultimately show up in your embodiment of the emotion.  Executive leadership coaching can help you deconstruct specifically what is contributing to you feeling low levels of confidence and self-esteem.  More importantly, executive leadership coaching will help you to construct, and condition your own recipe for confidence in any situation by using the V.E.T. model.  Boosting your self-confidence is critical to leading effectively.  When you feel good about yourself, you are much more likely to achieve your goals, and be an outstanding leader. 

If you are a leader who is looking to improve your leadership skills, or if you are an organization that is looking to improve your leadership team, executive leadership coaching is a valuable investment.  If you would like to know more about how executive leadership coaching could help you or your leadership team, you can click on the link below to find out more. 

https://www.martinhassan.com/