Essential Leadership Competency: Coaching and Empowering your team | Ashok Thussu | Director & Co Founder | LMI India

A recent survey found that:

• 81% managers said that coaching is a number one leadership competency that they want to improve
• And that 75% said that their current methods were inadequate

There are many coaching certifications out there, some are good, and others are just low cost ‘coaching stamp’ factories. Having said that, all of them want to build you to become a professional coach running your coaching consulting practice.

This is not the same as workplace coaching. Here you must be a manager who coaches the team effectively. Normal managers using traditional approaches get into the telling mode, whereas actual coaching is only successful if the person coaching is mostly in the asking mode.

There are huge gaps, normal coaching certifications are not actually suitable for becoming a manager-coach. And the other is the telling-asking gap. Lastly, they do not have a clearly defined process to follow. Also coaching is not training. Oft used, the Train the Trainer implies just that! The telling session becomes high, interest wanes and motivation levels dissipate, and desired purpose defeated. A survey found that Teaching managers result in a negative 14% impact whereas the Asking coaching managers generate a 45% positive impact.

The purpose of workplace coaching is empowerment, and certainly telling never ends up empowering.

There may be a lack of understanding of what workplace coaching actually entails. Managers might confuse coaching with managing or mentoring or directing, leading to ineffective practices.

Why workplace coaching?

From greater adaptability, resilience to improved communication, collaboration, better employee engagement, retention, job satisfaction to building better leaders, getting succession plans right and finally generating higher white-collar productivity and enhancing performance. The imperative for the Manager to become a coach who empowers has never been greater.

Most coaching certifications are designed to train coaches to take up a coaching consultant career. They are not designed to empower managers with coaching skills designed to grow your people, build empathetic relationships, influence in the right directions and create impact by using the coaching for empowerment approach.

Leadership Management International Inc, LMI has just launched its Effective Coaching & Empowerment (ECE) with a carefully designed methodology that addresses the gap using the copyrighted C.O.A.C.H model which bridges the gap between conceptual to practical. ECE is based on leading edge research. The program helps open black boxes and blind spots and helps the Manager – Coach lead people to change in a hugely positive manager producing high impact. It is highly application oriented.

Finally mental health is something that has gained attention these days. Coaching for Empowerment provides an additional benefit due to the sharp enhancement of psychological safety of the people coached using the LMI’s ECE methodology.

It is time to remove the buzzword that is Coaching with a process that is designed to work to create effective Manager Coaches.