I often hear people saying things like “I don’t need coaching, everything is going great.”
This misses the point of coaching entirely. Coaching is not remedial, in that it is not a practice that directly supports healing or solving problems, even though problems will be solved and healing will occur.
This article in Forbes does a good job of explaining xplaining why leaders benefit from coaching, but I think it misses some key points.
Here are some other reasons why leaders benefit from coaching:
1) Leadership is lonely
As a leader, everyone looks to you for answers, guidance and mentorship, but often the leader has no one to go to for their own support. Simply having someone impartial to listen and bounce ideas off of is a huge benefit to leaders who have to make decisions that impact not only themselves and their businesses, but sometimes millions of people.
2) A good coach will say things no one else dares to say
Leaders often find that no one in their teams is ever truly honest with them. They can be surrounded by ‘yes’ people, which can cloud the leaders experience of their own leadership. This is known as the ‘halo’ effect.
A coach asks ‘dumb’ and provocative questions, and a good coach will say the thing that could jeopardise the relationship if it is in service of the leader’s development. Virtually no one else in their life is willing to do that, and it has priceless value.
3) what got you here, won’t get you there
The skills, qualities, attributes and knowledge that for you to your current level of success won’t get you to the next level. All leaders that I know of know they are capable of more, more impact, more fulfilment, more income. So how do you get there?
Good coaching not only helps you identify areas that you need to develop to attain the next level of success, but also what you need to STOP doing, who you need to hire, learn from or heal with, so you can move from the person who got you here, to the person that will get you there.
4) It doesn’t matter how successful you are, you still have blind spots and cognitive biases
There are certain things I know about humans. We all put our pants on one leg at a time. We all struggle in at least one area of our lives, and we all have contexts for how the world IS, and how we ARE.
Your context is the story that you hold as fact about a certain subject:
Relationships are hard
Money is the root of all evil
I am a good person
These are all contexts, and we all have them. When I operate from a context of ‘good people are hard to find’ then my reality will organise itself around that truth, and good people will indeed be hard to find. Coaching helps leaders discover those blind spots and write a new story.
Are you a leader who has had coaching? Are you a coach?