The Five Skills Applied to Coaching Leadership

The best form of leadership is coaching. The five skills approach engages people in a quest that becomes their own, making for accelerated success.

If you can align your organization’s goals with individuals’ goals so that by working on one they’re also achieving the others, everyone is happy and motivated to do well. Artificial means of paying for specific performances pale in comparison to the value of having people understand how their and your goals align.

Money is nice, but no one works as hard for money alone as they do to learn skills and grow in the directions that are truly important to them. This has been studied endlessly over the last 25 years by all kinds of management professors and consultants, always with the same results.

Whether you pay an executive coach $7000 for 12 meetings over 6 months as many companies are beginning to do for their best managers or you simply coach yourself or ask friends to help, the process of effective coaching follows very specific steps. A great coach helps by asking great questions that make you think and guide you deeper into directions you wish to go sooner than you’d get there yourself. And they keep the steps in perspective so none are forgotten or left out.

There’s no doubt qualified executive coaches with business knowledge bring advantages in the type of questions they can ask in business situations that amateurs can’t. For many of us, much of the time, however, someone working alongside us or who has wide experiences in life can ask equally useful questions in many areas. Whichever way you approach improving yourself – alone, with friends or paid coaches, a similar process works best.

Effective coaching, as a process, parallels exactly the five skills that create greater effectiveness in any activity.

Step 1 is to focus on asking what the person really wants. Ask yourself if you’re working alone. Ask carefully and go over it each time you review, because this step is the key starting point. It’s not always easy to say exactly what you want the first time. In this, as in each of the five skills, practice makes this better. Once you can get someone revved up about goals they really, truly want to achieve, they’ve already taken a solid step on the road to achieving them. Positive feelings, motivation, desire, call it what you will, if you can keep these in focus steadily as you work, reaching the goal is virtually assured. Keep reinforcing them as you add in the other steps.

Step 2 is to begin creating as many ideas as you can for ways to make progress toward your goals. You can’t do them all and some will not work. Having lots to choose from begins one on the journey to testing what will ultimately take them there.

Step 3 is inevitable for most people. Most coaches don’t dwell on what’s holding you back. We’re all too competent with the word “but” on our own. As soon as ideas surface you can hear your brain “but’ing” already. Those are hurdles in our path, things to overcome. Great leaders face these and determine to go ahead anyway… within common sense. The bigger the hurdle, the longer it will take to surmount. Virtually any hurdle takes only time to beat. “Where there’s a will there’s a way.” Face them… and relax – you will overcome!

Step 4 is determining what to try first and getting started. Overcoming several hurdles on the way to a goal is commonly required. One must usually develop new skills or habits to overcome each and perhaps may need several for each hurdle. There’s usually a slow period of trial and error at the outset, beginning with developing partial steps that seem to lead to the goal, but running into blind alleys and shortcomings that weren’t foreseen. All can be overcome with persistence.

Step 5 is really one that should begin with Step 1 and continue as each new step is added until all five steps are functioning as smoothly as they can at the same time, together. Step 5 is about balancing effort, positive attitude, acceptance of reality and the need to steadily persist regardless, through what always feels like a long period required to make visible progress. Afterward, on looking back, the time will seem short. While you’re in it, it seems interminable.

Once progress starts to be felt, the load gets easier and speed picks up. We get more excited, more ideas percolate, more hurdles appear, but are surmounted faster and the tiresome-seeming chore of persistence becomes easy.

Still we need balance. To push for progress too fast is exhausting and we need to marshal resources to last.

Too many people make a rush at new skills and never see them through once the initial motivation lags. We’ve all seen these set-backs. It’s not too much of a stretch to point out that we need to anticipate this will happen and be prepared, but undaunted in persisting until momentum begins to accumulate.

These are the same five skills that overall allow anyone to conquer any challenge. The useful reason for identifying specifically how they work as coaching tools is that these become the steps a leader takes with each person they’re leading and with any team they work with as a whole. This approach gains cooperation every time and ultimately ensures success. It works at a higher level with complete organizations, too, though that takes a bit more explaining than we have room for here.

These same principles can apply to help any person learn and grow at any task in any job or any personal challenge. They’re highly positive. People want to be coached; they long for it. So presenting leadership this way makes people eager to participate, which is already half the battle to getting cooperation. When they see that you really mean it and are truly helping, they are that much more motivated to get engaged.

Many hands, hearts and heads working together ultimately resolve any problem. It’s a wonder, when this is so simple, that we see organizations and individuals encounter so many set-backs, but that forms another story entirely.

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The Five Skills Applied to Coaching Leadership

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