Happy New Year and welcome to Executive Foundations for Leaders. 2016 is my year of the Coaching Culture and my posts and video modules will teach you how to be a great coach and how to build a coaching culture in your organization.
The buzz is now impossible to ignore and the trend is gaining traction. Coaching cultures and coaching as a leadership style are now here to stay and for good reason: coaching is applied leadership, coaching is leadership in action. It works and I am here to help you make it work for you.
The root of being a great coach and leader is the ability to assess your personal foundation and your self-knowledge, body, mind and Spirit. That is a tall order but as you stick with it you will learn to use coaching as your foundation for your choices and actions in life.
As a leader you are responsible for influencing the entire spectrum of stakeholders and it is impossible to influence others without a profound self-awareness and the skill to understand others. Knowing who you are is the pathway to achieving higher levels of success.
Can you answer this question? : Who do you need to be as a leader to build the workforce that can consistently and flawlessly deliver your brand promise? You need an answer and building your foundation as a coach means that you go deep and search for the answer to “Who do you need to be?” and not to confuse it with “What do I need to do?”. Being a coach is the aspiration, not ‘doing coaching’. This year’s blog and video series with clarify the distinction.
At the essence of coaching, the word Coach and Leader are interchangeable. The basis of success as a leader is capacity to BE who you really are. This deep knowledge allows you to clarify and articulate your vision. It allows you to establish and peruse strategic goals for yourself as well as for your teams and company. You must know your strengths, gifts, skills and talents as well as your limitations and blind spots. You must know your deepest values as a human being, what you want and need before you even begin to set and communicate strategic plans to those who must bring them into reality.
As your coach, I encourage you to gain clarity and put language around your personal values and principles that will serve as your beacon of light as you translate those to professional standards and expectations. Move away from DOING Leadership. DOING leadership is how bosses use their role authority to get employees to obey and is a major cause of a disengaged, unproductive, and weak workforce. BEING a leader is dependent on a deep and ever evolving knowledge of yourself, body; mind and Spirit, of who you are as a human being.
As you master this in yourself, you become capable of drawing it out of others. As you awaken you permit those around you to awaken…. And there my friend, you breathe new life in your company, as you continue on this path you will bring yourself to life and your workforce will follow. This is the first step to leading a workforce that is alive from 9 to 5. This is the first piece to understanding what I mean when I say, for your company to thrive, your people must thrive…..starting with you.
Before you go, let me know what you think. Leave a comment, like and share.
When you are ready, try out the free, no obligation, ‘assessment of your executive coaching needs’ that I created to help you get started on building a coaching culture: https://corryrobertson.com/
Corry I loved your video powerfully introducing coaching culture. Very inspiring!