By Victor Aluise and Camille Barbone
What weighs most heavily on the minds of today’s business leaders? Covid-19 pandemic, supply chain disruption, global inflation? Surprisingly data reveals that worries about the lack of leadership skills and talent development within organizations top the list. In fact, the gap between leadership position requirements and the skills of existing employees is widening and impacting company profitability and employee retention.
While providing leadership development through talent and human resource management organizations can be effective, it often employs a conventional model of pulling leaders away from their day-to-day work to provide “training” or hands on supervision. This model also has trade-offs because it is topic-driven and focused on “covering material,” when it should be inquiry-driven aimed at workplace challenges. Under the conventional model, leaders and “reports” often backslide into old habits once training is complete.
Such leader-centered paradigms also skew the management bar, portraying managers as all-knowing, heroic, and single-handedly capable of powerfully impacting and influencing the organization and the world. Success in business depends on the knowledge, skills, and experience of its employees, not on heroism or the false belief that leaders can answer all questions. Rather than force feed solutions to their team, a leader must engage and empower the team to co-own, investigate, develop, and implement steps that lead to achieving the stated objective or goal.
It is time to embrace a new approach to middle- and senior-level leadership development, one that provides all levels of management with the ability to define goals, accept responsibility, create viable plans, and implement those plans for the desired outcome — in real time and on the job. The new model is job-embedded leadership coaching, which transforms managers into true leaders and innovators. The model, based on the real-time needs of the leader, is grounded in day-to-day business practice, and is designed to build a shared, supportive, and interactive relationship between leaders and their teams. The manager or leader owns this process and is responsible for delivering organic growth in self-knowledge, performance, interactive skills, and leadership.
The primary differentiator between job-embedded leadership coaching and conventional management approaches is real-time feedback and hands-off guidance from leaders and managers. Change and innovation become commonplace and part of the job experience.
Fueled by the pandemic, businesses must adapt and respond to change with flexible solutions; this crystalizes the power and potential of embedded leadership coaching. The art of active listening and critical questioning ensures effective, two-way communication as well as the evolution of viable action plans, which are at the core of effective leadership. An analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and external threats related to the person or business deepens the effectiveness of the action plan.
Potential barriers, root causes, and ultimate solutions are transformed into learning experiences and viable plans for the future. Accurate, unemotional, and honest self-assessment occurs in an emotionally supportive environment. Transparency is embraced by both the coach manager and team as influencing skills, teamwork, communication, and other transferrable competencies are addressed and improved.
Researchers and practitioners alike earmark self-awareness as an essential component of leadership development. Self-awareness has been defined as the extent to which individuals are consciously aware of their internal states and their interactions with others. In other words, it is an individual’s understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, and impact on others as a core leadership capacity. The scholars and practitioners of today have begun to emphasize self-awareness as an essential component of successful leadership.
In addition, reflection, which is synonymous to critical thinking, places the focus on one’s behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, experiences, strengths, development opportunities and hopes for the future which, according to Dr. Suri Weisfeld-Spolter and also Roberts (2008) and Tryan (2017) is crucial to leadership development. Job-embedded leadership coaching helps to facilitate reflective practices that promote inward reflection as the tool to clarify personal values, goals and opportunities as well as looking outward to see how they connect to a larger whole (Roberts, 2008; Moen and Brown, 2017).
Job-embedded leadership coaching is redefining the relationship between managers and their teams. It provides guidelines to synchronize and codify departmental and company-wide goals. It creates an environment that supports and facilitates good decision making and innovation in response to operational challenges. This type of leadership coaching is progressive in nature, enabling practitioners to leverage and build on existing strengths that are often unused, misused, or misunderstood. Working relationships grow and deepen as individuals, working together, achieve what they want and need. This is an essential component and a powerful catalyst to career success.
