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Is It Right for You Now?

Leadership coaching is a particularly powerful method for learning and change when it is used in the right circumstances and when appropriate lessons are sought. It is not the right solution for every kind of growth or development, but there are situations that seem ideally suited to this approach. To determine whether this is the right action for you to take at this time, think about your context and circumstances. You may be a successful leader who wants to set new goals as a function of continuous development. Other appropriate circumstances include increased complexity, organizational expectations, demands for behavior change, significant transitions, predicted changes, highly politicized environments, and moves from a tactical to a strategic role.

While many challenges are well suited for interventions involving leadership coaching, others clearly are not. Leadership coaching can be overkill when there are simpler, less expensive means of achieving desired results. Under the wrong circumstances, leadership coaching may not be particularly effective. The task is to identify the situations and opportunities that lend themselves most readily to this work.

The following examples are not meant to be exhaustive but to suggest that some kinds of growth opportunities are particularly amenable to success through the involvement of a leadership coach. Each benefits from the human capacity to use relationships for emotional and intellectual support.

The task is to identify the situations and opportunities that lend themselves most readily to this work.

Increased Complexity

If you are conscious of the expanding demands of complexity in your leadership challenges, leadership coaching may be the right step for you. Are you in charge of multiple functions that may or may not be related logically to each other? Directors are often responsible for both client-facing and operational elements of their enterprises, for example. If you’re asked whether you are responsible for managing people, managing processes, or managing projects, the answer to all three questions could very well be yes.

Complexity is also increased substantially by the expanding global footprint of many organizations. You may find that you have direct and indirect reports who speak different languages, live in widely dispersed geographies, and come from many cultural backgrounds. You may have to regularly conduct virtual meetings with participants who hold very different ideas about what constitutes courteous conversation and professional modes of communication, what makes for success, and what is the proper stance for leaders to take. This level of complexity is difficult for anyone to manage without the opportunity to discuss the dilemmas and work through solutions in a safe place. Leadership coaching is ideal for this kind of challenge because it gives you the opportunity to develop more effective approaches over time through iterative trials, refining practice and communications repeatedly.

You do not need a global team to experience significant complexity. Times of market chaos and episodes of enterprise or group reorganization test any leader’s capacity for flexibility, realistic appraisal of the situation, and search for paths through the storms. Additionally, changing circumstances in your personal life can have significant impact on organizational leadership because of their distraction and the persistent intrusion of emotionally powerful thoughts. These circumstances include personal problems, of course, but even very positive personal situations (marriage, birth of a child, move to a new residence) can make it difficult to keep personal and organizational life in separate focus. The relationship with a leadership coach can help you keep the focus in the right place in the moment, creating structure to permit addressing all the demands you are facing.

Organizational Expectations

Leadership coaching may be the favored developmental methodology for leaders at a certain level in the organization or because the organization is growing a coaching culture. In these beneficial circumstances, you are wise to take advantage of the opportunity. When the organization is willing to provide leadership coaching, those individuals who embrace the opportunity position themselves as ready for advancement and prepared for handling future challenges. Even if your initial impression is that coaching is not for you, it may be worth reconsidering if there is organizational support for this mode of development.

Demands for Behavior Change

A truism of leadership roles is that other people want you to be different and that nearly everyone has an idea of how you should change. Some of the time, the need to operate differently is driven by others who genuinely want you to be more effective. This can be your direct reports, your colleagues in various roles, and your boss. The question is whether you’re still hearing the same concerns raised about elements of your leadership behavior or organizational roles that you’ve heard in the past. If brand-new issues are being raised about behaviors that may be inhibiting your effectiveness, it’s possible you can deal with them yourself, without the assistance of a professional coach. If, however, you find the themes or concerns raised are the same as they were last year or ten years ago, your success in understanding and responding to the need for change has likely been limited by the absence of an effective, objective navigator. Think about acquiring a coach to help stimulate new approaches and new answers.

None of us can be objective about our own behavior, and few of us have the emotional distance needed to really understand the viewpoint of others who are affected by our limitations. The key challenge for the leader wanting to improve is the limited usefulness of the ways people ask for change. Every observer has a piece of the desired improvement, but an idiosyncratic way of describing the need because it comes from his or her individual needs. Often it is difficult to turn what others ask for into reasonable actions. Sometimes the feedback from different people is so different as to seem to require completely contradictory actions.

Considerable unnecessary effort is frequently expended as leaders who want to be responsive to legitimate concerns attempt to change themselves in unnatural or ineffective ways. Often, what they react to is not what the speakers intended or even knew they were saying. A well-trained, experienced leadership coach understands that verbal descriptions of behavior from others often do not translate directly into changes. Your coach can lead you into exploring dimensions of behavior that are not obvious and toward trying changes that have known impact. If you have received feedback that you, for example, have favorites or have difficulty getting everyone on board or need to communicate a more compelling vision, your coach can help you work through the data to understand what is driving the perception. The coach can help you make the changes that are likely to make a difference.