Leadership Coaching – For Every Leader, We Have Followers – This Is What Leadership Is All About
What is Leadership Coaching?
Coaching leaders is a different ballgame. Leadership coaches faces a set of unique challenges Women in Leadership that you do not see with other type of coaching. The reason is because of the wide variety of leadership philosophies and what leadership really represents. Everyone in middle level management can consider themselves a leader. The capabilities of someone being able to motivate or inspire hope in others can have that status of a leader. The question is: How far up the organizational ladder should you be in to call yourself a leader, and if so, arriving at that stage in your professional career should reveal lots of positive features about yourself that might not need the help of a leadership coach. Well, this is where you need to adapt a different approach.
There was a line in a documentary with Arnold Shwarzenneger in the movie Pumping Iron, where Arnold was confronting Lou Ferrigno for the 1975 Mr Olympia, and they were making a joke about the Big Lou Ferrigno coming to get the Olympia title from Arnold: They were saying how hungry Lou Ferrigno was to win, yet Arnold already on top, might of lost motivation to keep winning the title. They were making analogy about a wolf at the bottom(Lou Ferrigno) of the hill that is very hungry and needs to look for the sheep on top of the hill will always fight harder then the wolf already on top(Arnold Scwarzenneger): Arnold respond was: “At least if the wolf on top gets hungry, the food is there waiting for him”. What to understand from this analogy is that to keep yourself on top, you still need the help of professional leadership coaches so you keep coming with strategies to keep your status and not let someone else, with the drive and determination, take your status away. In every organization, you will notice that everyone has jumped in a race that only a few will get to the finish line and if you do fall, without the tools to get back up, it can end up being very difficult to catch up with the rest of the team, yet lose respect from your peers and get demoted.
As a leadership coach, you need to have the nose or intuition on how to scope for the real leaders instead of the positional leaders. There is a strategy for that, I will explain. The best way to approach this technique, is to gather the key personnel for a meeting, explain to them why I been called for and bring in several key questions that is relevant to why the problem originated from. Obviously, these questions are for me to determine who will answer and how the rest of the crowd will respond to each individual who speak in public.
Questions can vary:
- Who are our customers?
2. What is our role in serving our customers and what do we do well?
3. What would our customers say that we need to improve on to better ourselves?
It was then time to sit back and watch for the dynamics of the room. The results were as anticipated.
First, the Positional Leaders (Managers on the company chart) would speak up and tell me their view of the world. I would ask more questions and probe their responses. Then the real leaders come in and speak up. How could you tell they were the real leaders?