Leader coaching is an invaluable tool to grow as a leader of others. I find guiding clients through the process uncovers many “aha!” moments of self-discovery. Thanks to the highly effective assessment tools I utilize in my practice, there’s no excuse for not knowing your signature style of leadership. This month we covered the building blocks to becoming a better leader which I’ll expand on throughout the year.
Knowing Yourself as a Leader
Completing the DISC assessment helps to understand who YOU are in the workplace. Knowing your traits of Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance will guide your approach as a leader, a client, a co-worker and partner. Once you know your own behavior profile, you can transfer this knowledge to better understand and lead your team, peers and boss. I find it so invaluable that it’s one of the very first steps to start with my executive coaching clients.
Motivating Your Team
Next, learning the driving forces of your team gives you an inside look at their motivators. Through the 12 Driving Forces graphic, it’s easy to understand “why” someone does what they do. For instance, knowing whether you or someone you work with is “collaborative” vs. “commanding” in the force of Power will mold how you approach and work with them.
Having covered yourself and others above, it’s important to not forget emotional intelligence and more specificaly social intelligence. With social awareness, we use empathy to understand others thoughts, experiences and feelings. Social regulation on the other hand is about how you can influence situations and create environments that people want to be in. Knowing this information gives you more intel to be the leader others want to follow.
360 Feedback
One of the most enlightening steps in my coaching process is the 360 feedback process. It starts with leaders giving me a list of eight to ten employees they work most closely with at work...boss, peers, mentors and employees from their own team. I gather feedback from these folks about their boss’s strengths and development needs, then aggregate this information looking for trends. The trends are shared with the leader in an anonymous format. The power of this tool is that it identifies “blind spots” the leader doesn’t see in themselves. These blind spots can be strengths or development needs. We then work together to create a development plan to maximize strengths and manage and/or grow from the development needs.
Thank you for reading about one of my favorite topics and service offerings to my clients. With the first quarter at a mid-point, taking time to develop with a highly skilled coach can make a big difference in your performance, effectiveness and long term success. Contact me to share your leader development needs.