What is required?
Planning, organization, classification, reporting, responsibility for results, coordination, decision-making, management … we all agree: all of this and much more, are classic management tasks. But what about the managerial responsibilities? Master the coaching leadership style? Show leadership qualities? What is required now? What’s the difference anyway?
What is a Leader?
Leaders stand in front of and behind the team. They are the charismatic, visionary frontmen and frontwomen who know how to motivate. They succeed in team members showing and achieving the best of themselves. Among other things, by images of the future, strategic models, by energizing and appreciative communication. Leaders go their way as role models, as guiding figures followed by team members out of intrinsic conviction. Leaders gather employees behind a vision and understand how to take their fellow campaigners with them along the way. To accompany you through ups and downs and to ensure that the best possible result emerges from the cooperation of all. We call those outstanding personalities “born leaders” who have the ability to empower employees, to make them networking and to open up perspectives.
And how does the coaching leadership style work?
The coaching leadership style is also about accompanying, empowering and opening up perspectives. Coaching is not about guidance from an omniscient expert, but rather development support from a professional. Coaching executives perceive on multiple levels: needs, environment, radius of action, questions, development phases, limits, concerns, knowledge, blockages, ideas, impulses, emotions and thought patterns of the employees, but also of themselves. In the coaching leadership style, the executives also receive regular feedback about your learning curve, your progress, blocks, development phases and much more. That creates a togetherness at eye level. Anyone who receives feedback by constantly improving knowledge, skills and behavioral patterns also understands how to promote the best possible results from everyone’s cooperation through motivating feedback for others.
Who is in the center of attention?
In the company, of course, the one called profitability. Because: is it all still affordable? Coach employees, coach managers? People often ask who is actually still working there? The counter-question is: Is it still affordable not to accompany employees and managers? Can we actually still think about profitability without employee loyalty and modern corporate management? In times of a shortage of skilled workers, steep demographic curves and increasing numbers of absenteeism due to overload syndromes, certainly not. Managers are also co-workers. And if we want employees to be co-thinkers, co-developers, enthusiastic co-creators and co-responsible persons, then they must be the center of attention. Everything else is a calculation that does not work out in the long term. And to lead in a coaching way does not mean leaders stepping into the background or a loss of leading figures who promote the economic success of companies.
So is it task to be a leading coach or a coaching leader?
Ideally, executives combine both: The ability to use their charismatic-visionary qualities to motivate and support teams and to prove themselves to be energizing, constantly developing companions for team members. To pay attention on multiple levels both to the individual person (including oneself), who as part of the whole influences and at the same time is influenced by the whole system, and thereby the holistic environment.
Isn’t it long and charging to learn all of that?
In contrast to planning, organization, coordination, division and much more those are not management tasks that are tedious to study. There is no question of “you have or you don’t have!” It is an attitude, an inner condition and it is easy to change because the facts are convincing. And all that is needed is a little thought-sorting in terms of tangled terms. After that the first, clear, concrete successes will quickly show up!
If you want to find out more about how leadership and coaching management style can be designed in a contemporary way in your company and how surprisingly little effort it takes to implement it, please contact me.
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