Professional Leadership Skills

Being a good leader and being able to coach your team is not something you learn by accident. It requires intentionality on your part. Just like working out, if you want to improve your coaching skills you need to work at it. Relationship Co-Creation

Develop Trust

All coaches as leaders need to be able to develop trust / professional closeness with their team. If you don’t feel you can do this then either you have the wrong people, or you are in the wrong place. Usually the latter.

Provide Support / Create Boundaries

Good leaders are always supportive in their leadership, even if you are dealing with incompetence or lack of skill. Being supportive is essential. However, in building a supportive culture a great coach leader will always build in great boundaries, commitments, genuine concern

Commitment / Genuine Concern

As a leader you need to commit to the team you find yourself leading. Remember all issues in a team start with you, the leader. Part of that commitment is to show genuine concern for you team. Don’t fake it – they will know. See above under trust.

Effective Communication

Being able to communicate effectively is key.

Remember this: “Communication is what the listener does.”

Peter Drucker

So how do you do this?

1. Firstly being aware of your own style – using tools like DISC, Enneagram etc can help but the key is self awareness.
2. Develop Active Listening Skills – being attentive with their interest in mind not just yours.
3. Ask Open-Ended Questions – these are questions that require some finesse on our part but also a more detailed response on theirs. Open ended questions encourage deeper awareness around their perceived questions – will give you greater awareness of their perceived challenges. Closed questions (typically yes or no or single answer) can be easy to ask and get an answer but will give you data only.
4. Never ask WHY… When you want to find out why someone is doing something that maybe frustrates you think about how you can ask how, what, help me understand, where… kind of questions.
5. Get To Understand Emotional Intelligence – layered on top of ongoing behaviors, emotional intelligence is the deeper ways we respond to inputs around us. We need to be able to control them to be able to help others to do likewise.

Watch Language and Physiology – Energy

There is a lot of other language going on in our conversations. Below are some that I look for when I am coaching others, not just in them but how I might be responding to the coachee.

1. Watch for energy shifts – energy shifts come in all sort of forms but you can tell when someone is high energy v low energy. What do you need to do to bring the energy up or down appropriately.
2. Tone of voice – similar to energy shifts, tone of voice is another indicator of what is going on
3. Pace of speech – under pressure or when excited, people may speed up their pace of speech
4. Physical changes – body language is a key element in any

Powerful Questioning

Powerful Questioning uncovers more than just the facts, it will also build into what is possible. Questions are an art form. All leaders should have some “go deeper” questions on stand by to push past deflection and to communicate greater interest.