Why a coaching leadership style is the leadership style for todays and tomorrow’s challenges
Business environment and business on its own changed drastically. Companies with great ideas and values do not seem to survive the next years: demographic changes, globalization, the possibilities of the internet, immigration, instant communication drive an incredible fast change not only in business, but also in the environment and personal lives. Even more than the mentioned factors, the COVID epidemic forced great changes in our daily private and business life. The rapid shift from working in the office or onsite to working remotely at home or, in the worst case, stop working for a certain time, forced us all to rethink. A significant paradigm change manifests and is rapidly ongoing (See: Whitmore, S. J. (2017), p. 23 f.):
Attributes of a high-performance culture (Whitmore, S. J. (2017), p. 24 f.)
Growth, quantity and excess loose value to sustainability, quality and sufficiency. Success is no longer the one desirable asset, but service. Experienced employees crave to set their own rules that meet their needs and their way of working together, creating a new collaboration culture of trust and co-creation. Today, shared, lifelong learning and mutual development create more value than playing the teacher in chief and imparting knowledge with an admonishing forefinger. And so on.
Each of us as an individual, member of a company, part of an organization observes this evolution in parts in his own environment.
Reflecting on myself as a coach and consultant, I realized that my focus has changed a lot over the last four to five years. Regarding my career, for example, advancement has always been important to me, but not at any price. Today, it is more important to me than ever that my career steps are based on sustainable added value for my customers, my company, and my colleagues, and not on short-term successes that no one will need tomorrow.
When leading teams, but also as part of a team, I have found that a trusting relationship not only raises the mood in the group, but also significantly increases and stabilizes their work performance. Jointly defined rules and values for cooperation enable everyone to articulate his or her needs and at the same time show boundaries. Mutual respect for these boundaries as well as joint reflection and open feedback create a resilient and secure collaboration culture. Thus, the sense of community and mutual responsibility can provide a medium-term balance in the face of fluctuating workloads, if the corporate environment (flexible working time models, agile ways of working, etc.) allows it.
Under these new conditions, leadership is undergoing a transformation. Traditional management cannot fulfill this transformation (See: Whitmore, S. J. (2017), p. 24 f.). Whereas,
„Coaching is the leadership style of a transformed culture“
the High-Performance Culture.
Coaching – Leadership style of a transformed culture
Enabler therefore is coaching. How does this evolve? Therefore, the Performance Curve delivers understanding.
Organizational culture is the key to business success. This is where the Performance Curve focuses on – the maturity of an organization’s behavior. Only very few organizations are proactive in measuring or actively shaping their culture, although this is it, which creates the conditions for performance. The main influence on the culture in a company has the leader’s staff. It is leader’s behavior that has the biggest impact on bottom-line, and thereby on performance, too.
Following graphic explains the Performance Curve approach evolving over four stages of organizational mindset, starting from the bottom with an impulsive culture, over a dependent, independent and finally, as the best performing level, the interdependent culture. Each mindset depicts and correlates to a certain performance level.
The Performance Curve (Whitmore, S. J. (2017), p. 27 f.)
With moving towards the right side of the scale, the performance increases systematically, measured by bottom-line results (See: Whitmore, S. J. (2017), p. 28). The trail of the Performance Curve is mainly influenced by interferences, that decreases performance (stages one and two) and nascent potential (stage three and four).
The “Inner Game equation” from Timothy Gallway ‘Performance = potential – interference’ shows that there are two ways to higher performance: First, increase potential and second, decrease interference.
By reducing inner obstacles, like doubt, fear, self-criticism or limiting-beliefs and assumptions, impediments can be limited and with that performance enlarged. These interferences are particularly created by the traditional command-and-control management style. This is forcing people to stick to rules and follow what they have been imposed, which leaves only little space for potential to emerge. (See: Whitmore, S. J. (2017), p. 33)
Let’s take a closer look on the interdependent – high performance culture.
The cultural mindset speaks “We are truly successful together.”, believing in a collective potential. Cultural characteristics are high awareness and responsibility for oneself as well as for others. The team feels a strong sense of ownership for high performance and believes this can only be achieved by the group. People engage with each other to understand diverse viewpoints and display high level of trust, care and collaboration. Principle-led adaptive systems underpin agility, continual, collective learning and support performance at every level. Aligning factors are a communicated shared vision, meaning, purpose and direction.
This is accompanied by a partnering and supporting leadership style. The leader takes a support/servant role, creating a coaching culture and inspiring high-performing, self-governing teams with focus on the common good. How does coaching improve performance in this culture? Focus is on coaching for collective performance, unity and social responsibility – taking time to consciously create direction of travel, continuously develop and improve while maintaining balance. (See: Whitmore, S. J. (2017), p. 29 ff.)
That is why by a …
„Was auch immer es ist – die Art und Weise, wie du deine Geschichte online vermittelst, kann einen gewaltigen Unterschied ausmachen.“
as it creates a culture of awareness, which leads to insight on what needs to change to improve performance and thereby to active change for the purpose of higher performance. (See: Whitmore, S. J. (2017), p. 33)
The previously shaped paradigm shift from an old to a new culture of high performance makes it inevitably to prepare the organization for this transformation. Each incremental step towards the interdependent culture yields in bottom-line results, essential for the success and continuity of an organization. (See: Whitmore, S. J. (2017), p. 27 f .)
This is the reason why the highest goal, when preparing for the future, is to implement a coaching leadership style and develop their leaders in their coaching leaders’ roles. As, “it is the leaders who are the gatekeepers to performance” (Whitmore, S. J. (2017), p. 27). They need to analyze their teams and employees, check whether stage they are working in and starting to coach them towards a higher level. Moving each team member higher on the Performance Curve, the team will increase its performance and with that achieve greater results on organization level.
But where to start?
With yourself. If we as today's leaders want to lead our teams into a successful tomorrow, we must start with ourselves.
What are my values? What do I need to be stable going into the future? What is my attitude towards my team, my leaders? How reflective and open am I? How ready am I for new ways of working, new ways of communicating and a new generation of employees (Generation Y, Z)? How can I handle upcoming challenges?
Read more in my next article on “Why I took a coach – and why others do”.
