Leadership Coaching That Inspires Future Ready Teams

Want teams that are innovative and collaborative? The secret is leadership coaching that inspires future ready teams.

Great team have leaders with the ability to coach performance that inspires and engages team members to grow.

Recently I facilitated a 2.5 day senior leadership retreat with a group of 100 senior leaders in the agriculture industry. The divisional leader Paul was instrumental in setting the inspirational tone of the event.

Paul’s philosophy is  that every one of his senior leaders are ‘guardians of the culture’.

In the 2.5 days the topics included safety, empowerment and inclusive leadership. The outcome of the leadership conference was renewed energy, renewed focus and renewed inspiration.

Feedback from the leaders attending the event included comments of ‘needed the inspiration, ‘needed the clarity’ and ‘needed the renewed focus’.

My closing comments on the last day of the conference focused on inspiring the leaders in the room to make a new level of commitment to provide leadership coaching that inspires future ready teams.

Leaders can be so focused on projects,  meetings and deadlines and often neglect to give teams the tools and resources that they need to succeed.

Leaders need to empower their people. Leaders need to include people in decisions, direction and strategy which leads to higher levels of engagement.

There are five approaches of leadership coaching that inspires future ready teams:

1. Consistent coaching via weekly one on ones creates trust between leader and team member – increased trust means increased commitment.
2. Creative coaching that includes new ways of interacting or new approaches keeps team members connected to the goals – for example starting a one on one with a creative exercise such as come up with 5 things that co-workers have in common can set a new tone for the coach conversation.
3. Transparent coaching where you as a leader shares a vulnerable experience or shares a failure can create greater alignment – leaders who are transparent and ‘real’ have teams that are willing to ‘fail’ without fear.
4. Me to We coaching is when you help a team member to elevate beyond a focus on ‘self’ and to evolve more towards a ‘we’ or team attitude. For example at the 2.5 day leadership conference mentioned above I shared our ‘me to we’ model to help leaders identify the way he or she was ‘thinking’ and how that affected their leadership style.
5. Caring coaching where you spend time tuning in to and deeply listening to your team member to better discern the ‘feelings’ or ‘energy’ behind what is being said. For example a team member might say that he or she is doing great with a project however with deep listening you can intuit that the team member has stress or fear. Caring coaching goes a very long way in engaging and retaining top talent and often is the key as to why an employee will stick around with a leader.

In a fast paced work reality we as leaders often forget that although we work in highly technological realities that we are ‘human beings’ and that it is ‘human approaches’ that are going to pave the way to creating a successful future.

At NextMapping we provide top notch leadership coaching and leadership consulting. We would be happy to schedule a complimentary exploratory call to see if our programs are right for you and for your company.