BEYOND LEADERSHIP COACHING

A recurring theme in the early part of my leadership coaching journey was the dismay of academics and practitioners who felt too many people were becoming leadership coaches, having never led a team or organisation. A similar theme around executive coaching begs the question of how deep you can understand an executive's mind if you have never been one.

Coaching as a discipline is largely based on the Socratic method of asking good questions and questioning your answers. We come equipped with amazing tools such as radical enquiry, polarity thinking, the Johari window or the inner boardroom, amongst others. That pretty much covers the logical understanding of leadership. But what about the emotional aspects? How does a coach develop empathy if they’ve never been in the client's shoes?

My leadership journey has involved leading youth work teams in the community and sports. When I was employed, I led accounting and project teams, and even though I didn’t realise it at the time leading by influence across departments. As a cofounder in business, I have had to develop my leadership chops - I hired coaches and mentors to help me with this. And to get a real sense of what it feels like in the trenches for others, I have had roles as an executive chairman and various non-executive roles for both profit and non-profit organisations.

These roles gave me a front-row seat to some of the challenges facing my clients. It is one thing to know how to read a profit and loss statement and another thing entirely to be able to comprehend the impact of reducing expenses through redundancy. This is not to say you cannot become an effective leadership or executive coach without being in a leadership position. Still, given the responsibility and empathy required to be a vital sounding board, it definitely helps.