Coaching is a crucial step in the journey of leadership development. It evokes reflection and self-awareness and helps leaders define the career path they want to embark upon. This further encourages them to achieve their goals in the long run.
Leadership development is an important exercise and a coach plays a very important role in it. Your leadership development coach would help you to identify development gaps and spot opportunities that are in tandem with your chosen career path. Coaching enables you to achieve what is important to you in the real sense. Using various tools like conversations and powerful questioning, your leadership development coach can help you achieve your goals faster than you could do it if you were doing it all on your own.
Here are the 4 things you could do, to get the most out of your leadership development coach.
Make time for it – Make your leadership development activity your priority. You need to fit it in your timetable in order to get results that you seek. You will need to become more strategic with your time and make your leadership coaching consistent and result oriented in the long run.
Make the effort – Make a list of what all would you like to accomplish and then work towards achieving those things. Leadership development coaching is very different from other learning and development exercises. Here you are in charge of defining your own learning objectives, planning session agendas and putting together the coaching schedule. This is completely your show, and you are the one who needs to take charge of it!
Accept feedback – Taking feedback is an important aspect of your leadership development journey. Your coach will regularly give you feedback on how you could improve as a leader. Apart from the coach you could also solicit feedback from the people you work with and for. Always remember, feedback is a gift, whether good or critical.
One small step at a time – Remember, Rome was not built in a day. There would be challenges on the road to leadership coaching. And the key to achieving results is to keep moving forward even if it means just taking one small step at a time. For example, your leadership development coach may ask you to experiment with a new skill or have a difficult conversation with someone. Take every single step as a progress.
The hallmark of a great leadership development coach is that he/she would challenge you, encourage you, confront you, affirm you and provoke you. The end goal of your coach would always be your growth, evolution, and development as a leader and a person.
At The Taplow Group, through our professional search, we help you source leaders who have a proven track record of successful leadership to help your organization become even more successful.To know more about our services like leadership consulting, professional hiring, management consulting, visit www.TaplowGroup.com