We believe that coaching is an important skill for leaders and managers.

To create a ‘leaderful’ organisation people need to co-create the ‘plan’ and in particular you need to enable yourself by adopting a ‘coaching’ style with your team. You will co-develop goals and objectives that are fully understood and have been built through a shared exploration of options. Once you have the plan you need to let go of some control and support and coach people to deliver results.

If you immediately think - “yes but...I just don’t have time, my team is under pressure, we’ll do this later” - think again!

People give all kinds of reasons: I feel underappreciated, I’m misunderstood, I don’t learn, grow and develop, I’m fed up with being micromanaged. Managers and their direct reports are usually frustrated by the same things - from different angles.

The conditions people have faced over the last year have also affected their expectations of you as their leader.  As the workplace changes so do people’s daily experiences and their expectations of you as their line manager, leader - and all indications suggest that the skills of an Empowering Enabler have never been more important.

The social sector is ideally placed to benefit from the shift towards ‘leaderful’ workplaces, somewhere where people are trusted to take the actions needed to deliver on the mission.

The more you empower your team the more time you will have to focus on the future.  

To anticipate the future needs of your clients, the focus of your organisation needs to serve the mission and to develop the right conditions for people to learn and be able to ‘lead’ from wherever they are. Your job as their ‘leader’ is to: 

• Ensure that people know what they’re doing
• Understand why they’re doing what they are doing
• Develop each individual’s capacity to develop the skills and capabilities to have the confidence to figure out how they enact their tasks

Coaching skills are the key to unlocking the potential of your team. 

Your team needs to understand what needs to be done and how to figure out how to do it.  Your job is to support them.  You need to listen, ask questions, be curious, support and, where necessary, move obstacles out of the way. Your people know what is in the way, you have the power to enable them.

If you're looking to develop your coaching skills, take a look at our 4-week Leader as Coach course. This short course will help you understand the key aspects of coaching to help your team lead social change.