The Leader as Coach – Do you think every leader should be a coach?
There is strong evidence that coaching works. In fact, many of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and Bill Gates have all used coaches.
Eric Schmidt, says the best advice he ever got was to hire an executive coach and Gill Gates said “everyone needs a coach” in his TedX talk.
There are lots of reasons to use a coach but for me I like this rationale from HBR
“The goal of coaching is the goal of good management: to make the most of an organization’s valuable resources.”
HBR
If our people are what make an organisation successful why wouldn’t we want to make the most of our most valuable resources?
In this article the authors suggest that successful executives must increasingly supplement their industry and functional expertise with a general capacity for learning.
They must develop that capacity in their people as well as no longer can managers simply command and control.
Leaders will not succeed by rewarding team members mainly for executing flawlessly on things they already know how to do.
They need to reinvent themselves as coaches whose job it is to draw energy, creativity, and learning out of the people with whom they work.
What do you think? Are you a leader who asks more and says less?
