A Successful Leader Coaches A Team

The most successful leaders continuously coach and develop their teams, individually and as a group. This proactive approach develops professionally-satisfied and challenged team players, as well as, a path to natural leadership succession in your organization.

How does a leader coach a team? Here are the essentials:

- Communicate the big picture perspective with your team, LISTEN to them, then ask coaching questions to get them on the same team goals, their individual learning needs and goals will come out too; address both to show that you value them and LISTENED to them, while bringing clarity and direction toward your organization's big picture goal.

- Be honest about your past successes and failures to give learning examples, to encourage creativity in trying new things without fear of failure. This develops trust that leads to mutual understanding and honesty from the team, plus continued learning and development of the team and leader when hearing the team's honesty.

- Once honesty and trust are established in a team, then positive accountability can be achieved in which proactive approaches are developed within the team, not reactive blaming for organizational problems. The leader can nurture this behavior by continually affirming the positive and acknowledging those who create it -- emphasize that everyone in the team/organization, regardless of position or title, can grow, learn and succeed professionally and personally.

- Encourage constructive conflict to achieve higher understanding of issues and create solutions with more productive results. It is only when problems arise that we develop a way to create a better process/approach/solution. Again, open and honest communication is the key to team success in dealing with team conflicts.

When a team is not functioning well together, the consistency of the leader's actions and communication can bring a team to more successful interaction and results. The commitment of the leader to the team and the team to the leader is vital to team success; proactive coaching and team development creates this environment.

For assistance in developing a coaching leadership style, contact us.