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A stream of consciousness by Brian Light – a Pharos Leadership Coach
Leadership is something quite different to management.
A successful CEO needs, amongst other things, to create a vision, inspire people to work towards that vision and keep momentum up along the journey - I use the “VIM” acronym to remember it.
Leadership is primarily about the first two of these, Vision & Inspiration.
Management is about the second two; Inspiration and mostly Momentum.
People tend to rise to the top, particularly in this day and age if they are good managers - hitting targets that other people have set, budgeting well, dangling the carrot and wielding the stick. But that’s all about keeping momentum – not about being a leader and when they get the chance, most people don’t know what to do differently. That’s why there is a place for leadership coaching.
Helping people to realise that leadership is about doing different things that really inspire people – creating opportunities for others and not always taking the glory, setting a personal example that people aspire to, creating a vision that people believe in, being seen to do the right thing in a crisis.
Those things are inspiring. Incessant chat about hitting targets or things that are too detailed is not! Although obviously, for most people, they have to do a bit of both when they are the GM of their small business – manage and lead…
So what must a good leader have?
- You need gravitas so that your team believe that you can help them
- You have to have led people/be worldly so that they respect you
- You have to know what makes people tick so that you can figure out the best way to work with any particular staff/team member
- You have to be creative, so that you can really challenge your staff to do different things and take risks to achieve things – they don’t just want you to tell them stuff they can read about, they want you to suggest things that they can really try out, such as spending less time on a 20 page presentation and instead get someone to take video footage of clients/customers – to take some risks in order to really connect with people
- You have to have good listening skills
- You have to be non-judgemental, relaxed and patient, so that you don’t irritate your staff by judging their mistakes
I could go on, but this is a bit of a stream of consciousness, so I won’t. The most important thing is that some people are natural leaders. Others are not and never will be – but have different strengths (a wizardry with written text or numbers, or fantastic organisation/project management skills).
Your role as a successful leader is to figure out how to “bottle” their natural skills and develop them as strong individual and team players.
Leadership Coaching not Business Coaching
One hears about a few different types of coaching- “life coaching”, “leadership coaching” and “business coaching” primarily. Also there’s clearly coaching of a specific skill kind, like sports coaching or presentation coaching etc. I’m now not sure if I believe in business coaching - it’s too generic.
For me, there’s got to be a very clear aim for coaching to be successful – “I want to get better at tennis”, “I want to change my priorities in life and stop being a workaholic”, “I want to become a better leader” – “business coaching” could be anything and I don’t think it’s specific enough.