Having strong leadership skills is essential if you want to succeed as the head of a business – especially as your team grows. But great leadership is about more than simply knowing what to do and telling people to do it.
Choosing the right leadership style for your business’ stage of life
When I made my first hires, I wasn’t interested in leadership as a concept. I had high standards and big ambitions, and I got people to follow me through force of character and dedication to the business. It was a ‘lead from the front’ style – I thought if I could just work more, work harder, and drive people through role-modelling the behaviours I wanted to see, it would all fall into place.
The problem with this approach was that I was carrying everyone – even if they didn’t need to be carried. And after a while, with everyone on my coat tails, leadership started to get heavy. I was the brand, the culture, and the engine of the business, and this wasn’t sustainable, never mind scalable. Leading this way had got me to a single site with a handful of staff, that required me to be around on a full-time basis. It wouldn’t get me to where I wanted to get to in the future.
So I loosened my hands on the reins. I got the team out in front of me, pulling the business forward towards our shared goals. I started facilitating the team to develop themselves, playing to their strengths. And I focused on the parts of the business that I was best at, leaving them to do the bits that THEY were best at. I didn’t label it as such at the time, but this was a coaching approach to leadership.
A coaching approach to leadership
When we become a coach leader, we unlock people’s potential to maximise their own performance – we facilitate them to be the best they can be in their role. Think giving a man a fishing net and teaching him how to fish (not just giving him a fish).
You’re not just upskilling your employee in their particular role; you are helping them inhabit the power and the accountability they need to increase their capability. Do this right, and you’ll have staff who are self-starting, invested in the business, autonomous, and highly capable.
Being a coach leader means assertively and calmly taking up your authority within your focused remit, actively listening, asking the right questions, and guiding your coachee to their own objectives. It means putting aside your ego, your black and white thinking about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, your need to prove yourself and stake your claim on a situation.
Doing this isn’t easy – we need to own our patterns of thought and behaviours, coming off autopilot and being cognisant of how we relate to others, and the impact of our relational choices.
Here are some of the key tenets of taking a coaching approach to leadership.
- Potential instead of performance
Coaching isn’t about telling somebody exactly how to achieve what they want to achieve. It’s supporting them on the journey to gain the tools and capability they need to get there themselves.
- Development instead of instruction
As a leader, you’re an experienced subject matter expert who can give specialist advice. But you need to decide when to use this, and when it’s better to use your experience to help your employee to develop their own business and leadership skills.
- Listening instead of telling
The most important thing to remember about coaching: it’s not about you. Progress is about moving somebody from one position in their life to another; and you as the coach are there to help guide and facilitate that movement. So whenever you contribute, be it an observation, a sharing of your own experience, or a form of guidance or accountability, it needs to be relevant to the person’s journey.
- Empowerment instead of carrot and stick
As coach leaders, we want to have a lasting impact on our coachees’ development – we want to transfer capability from ourselves to them. To do this, we need to help them hold themselves accountable for their behaviour. So instead of using reward or punishment to incentivise, we need to instil a sense of empowerment that allows and encourages them to step into the driver’s seat of their own journey.
- Nuanced instead of reductive
It isn’t our job to have polarised opinions on people’s thoughts and behaviours. We can help the person think through their options and potential outcomes, but we’re not there to drive a black and white, right and wrong way of seeing the world. If we push our own opinions instead of helping them develop their own decision-making capacity, we’re disempowering them in their own growth.
- Collaboration instead of control
The relationship between you and your employee is a partnership. It’s not about you dictating, and them following; it’s about you both contributing your strengths and working together to support them to the outcome they want. You’ll need to lay your ego aside and have their objectives uppermost in mind through all your interactions.
- Learning opportunities instead of failures
When something goes wrong (and it will) or your employee messes up (and they will), your role is to be patient, not punitive. You validate their experience; then help them steer their thoughts to what they can learn from the situation – even if you’re impatient or irritated.
- Show instead of tell
If you think you have something of value to add or share, don’t present your opinion as an absolute truth. Use examples to illustrate your point, bringing the theory to life in a way that connects to people’s own experience. Your value as a mentor is considerable; just remember to be aware of the impact it can have, and leave space for other people’s agency and opinions.
- Validation instead of resolution
Your job is not to solve your employee’s problems – that would create a dependency on you which will be ultimately harmful to their progress. Instead, you can listen actively, validate their experience, and support them to find a resolution that works for them.
- Challenge instead of enablement
It’s not easy to have the difficult conversations – to call people out when they’re not holding themselves to account. But letting things slide (that they’re probably already peripherally aware of) makes you an enabler of this counterproductive behaviour.
Coach-leadership: a caveat
This guidance comes with an important caveat: a coaching approach to leadership isn’t suitable for every occasion. Sometimes situations call for authoritative, role-modelling leadership; and you’ll need to step in and lead by example with less-wriggle room for autonomy in the team. As a general rule, the more unstable or urgent the situation is, and the more inexperienced or unsure the team is, the more you’ll have to lead ‘from the front’.
It’s also worth noting that while coach-leadership looks straightforward on paper, it won’t always feel easy (or be the right choice for some situations). Getting a handle on leadership isn’t a ‘one-and-done’ thing: it’s been 17 years since I started in this business, so I can attribute a lot of my leadership growth to the simple fact that time teaches you shit. I’m no shining example of perfect coach-leadership, but we can all get better as we get older, if we’re that way inclined. If we read enough books, talk to enough people, and develop ourselves appropriately, over time we just get ‘better’ at leading people – and ourselves.