Leadership Coaching

Are you interested in developing your leadership skills for the future to ensure you are fit for a key leadership role in the next 1, 2, 3 years and beyond?

Scores of employee surveys reveal that staff need and want more from their leaders in order to perform at their best, help their organisation deliver its objectives and keep people in jobs.

With greater pressure than ever in both the private and public sector to achieve more with fewer staff, leadership to maximise the use of resources is of paramount importance.

Gone are the days when staff respond to being told what to do - not in the way they were in the past anyway.

To engage, motivate and enthuse staff and get them performing to their best, good leaders ask them their views and act on some of these.

Good modern leaders involve the idea generators and recognise and reward their success appropriately.

Different leadership styles and approaches are called for and there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach.

If you are ambitious and driven, to feel a sense of enjoyment and fulfilment at work - as well as work at the level you want - demands a high level of leadership skill.

More and more senior leaders are turning to one-to-one tailored leadership coaching to build their skills and achieve greater effectiveness and enjoyment in their work.

Do you feel you need to develop any of the following which are key business skills and approaches for successful leadership:

• Leadership styles and approaches to address current people issues - such as under-performance
• Personal leadership vision and values
• Managing change in your team or organisation
• Pre-thinking difficult conversations with customers, staff and other senior leaders
• Building and cultivating your customer relationships
• Work-life balance - in particular achieving better health and well-being
• Creativity and innovation in product or proposition development
• Improving key processes to achieve optimum staffing levels for your business
• Building a high-performing team
• Emotional intelligence - particularly your self-awareness

Developing a leadership coaching relationship is an enjoyable journey because you can focus on tailoring your coaching programme to the kinds of needs outlined above and your specific leadership requirements.

In particular, you will benefit from working with someone you can trust to help you along your development journey.

For example, most individuals start off with a regular monthly 2-hour coaching session for about 6 months, moving this to every 2 to 3 months after this period.

Leadership coaching should always be moving you forwards, helping you to learn at a faster rate and gain better results than you would be achieving on your own.

If any of the above strikes a chord with you, a good starting point would be to discuss your position with us through our website West of England Coaching and Counselling.

Alternatively, our own coaching relationships commence with an initial Complimentary Coaching Session so you why not get in touch so we can help you decide if leadership coaching is something that you would benefit from.

What Can Small Business Learn From Larger Progressive Businesses?

If you run a small business and are interesting in developing your business please read on.

Five years ago the private health care charity Nuffield expanded its business to providing customer-focused preventative health care, buying Canons gyms and transforming these into client- focused holistic health and well-being venues.

Nuffield decided that the challenge was to move away from the minimum customer contact which many gyms operate on to a paradigm of maximum contact.

As part of this, the organisation introduced a member 'MOT' which included measuring people up against a number of health measures as well as asking them questions about sleep and alcohol intake as a baseline from which to build upon their fitness.

The MOT is repeated every 3 months so customers can see any improvements which ties in with their idea that maintaining a customer's health and fitness is about being proactive and preventative in terms of ill-health.

The Nuffield approach also recognised that health and well-being is an ongoing journey in life rather than having a start and end point.

As a result, Nuffield train their staff to be good 'generalists' who know all of their services while at the same time developing a specialism, such as diabetes and fitness or understanding back pain.

Leadership in Nuffield is also about delegated authority so that senior managers do not have too much of their time taken up by making small- and medium-sized decisions.

All Nuffield staff are involved in one of the organisations's strategic projects which creates a shared approach to driving the business forwards.

Nuffield uses an Appreciative Inquiry(AI) approach to facilitating change by focusing on what works rather than on what does not work - solution rather than problem focused.

Taking the changes Nuffield has made as an example, my advice in terms of learning from them about how to develop your business would be to:

• Explore ways that you can get closer to your customer thinking
• If you are not doing so already - ask your customers what you can do to improve the services you provide to them
• Think about staff training and developing individuals understanding of all of the services you provide so they can tell your customers about them
• Think about developing staff expertise so each has a specialism since customers want specialists and staff like developing their expertise
• Think about delegating your various tiers of decision-making to the appropriate levels
• Think about involving each staff member in strategic projects - people close to the shop floor know how to make things work
• Consider using an AI approach by seeking out what is good and amplifying it

If you have found this blog to be useful please leave a comment or if you would like us to help you develop your business through business coaching please get in touch via our website at West of England Coaching and Counselling.

What Can Small Businesses Learn From Visionary Larger Businesses?

Are you running a small business and wanting to find new ways to increase sales?

What are savvy larger businesses doing during these tough economic times which smaller business owners like yourself can learn from?

I think it's an interesting period for businesses generally and the whole concept of increasing organisational effectiveness through innovative means is capturing my own and other's attention right now.

More than ever, intellectual philosophising management gurus are speaking about listening to staff and engaging them through getting them to consider, develop and then help to implement their ideas to improve the businesses and organisations they work for.

Yes - leadership is about having a vision and values that inspire your workers but it is also about interacting with them by listening to their ideas and putting some of their suggestions into practice.

If you don't know how to go about engaging with your staff then you might want to ask yourself the following questions which will help guide you through the process and benefit from their ideas:

• What do you really want from your staff and have you let them know?
• What communication channels exist for you as a leader in your businesses to truly maximise the capabilities and potential of your staff?
• How are you motivating staff and getting them involved in improving your business strategy, its delivery processes and operational action plans?
• When was the last time that you asked your staff what motivates them at work and what can be done to meet their needs for job fulfilment and enjoyment?

A simple way to open up the communications channel necessary to make staff engagement possible would be by introducing a 'Tell the MD' programme encouraging staff to share their ideas for improving the business -  especially focusing on the customer and improving the business to customer relationship.

You could also use this programme to ask staff what motivates them, what would be happening if they were optimally motivated and how they think that might be achieved.

One of our propositions right now is working with small businesses and teams within larger businesses to improve their performance - including building their business through introducing a 'High Performing Team' benchmark to measure themselves against and take steps to address any gaps in performance.

Please let us know how you get on with making positive changes in your business and if you would like to know more about the High Performing Team model we are using please get in touch in the usual way via our website at West of England Coaching and Counselling.

All Senior Managers Need A Personal Coach

Are you a Senior Manager in an organisation?

If you are, you may or may not be aware of your significance in terms of organisational performance.

I think, of all the layers within an organisational hierarchy, senior managers impact the business more than any other tier.

Senior managers influence the strategic direction of the business as well as the performance of more junior managers and staff.

Senior managers are being made more and more accountable for results - often in the form of key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics such as, revenue targets, budget targets, people targets and so on.

Being a senior manager in today's high change transformation organisational agenda will feel at times stressful and onerous whilst often satisfying as it can help you achieve your ambitions.

Senior managers supported by an executive coach give good gearing for their organisation in that their performance impacts the performance of many others, including, line managers, staff and more senior directors or partners in the business.

Unless you are perfect - and few people are - the likelihood is that you will have development needs identified through your performance management infrastructure which would benefit from a bespoke individual programme best met by working with an executive coach (as opposed to going on a generic training course).

In particular, the non-technical part of your development - your personal competencies - are best met through a combination of coaching, group support and self-development - such as relevant reading.

Leadership coaching is on the increase and covers a multitude of skills including the following areas:

• Vision and goal setting
• Influencing and negotiating
• Decision-making
• Managing poor performance
• Handling conflict
• Delegation
• Assertiveness
• Confidence
• Presentation skills

If you are an ambitious senior manager, who also recognises your scope for further development, and are keen to explore this we would like to sign up for one of our complimentary 'Better Results Today' coaching sessions.

During these sessions we can discuss and explore your strengths and areas for development and you can sign up by simply filling in the online form on our Complimentary Coaching Sessions page on our website.

Alternatively, you can get in touch with us via email at enquiries@westofenglandcoachingandcounselling.co.uk or via our website at West of England Coaching and Counselling.