Tag Archives: listening

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Becoming a Coaching Leader

We hear so much about coaching these days. Leaders need to coach more. Employees need more coaching. High performers need coaching. Low performers need coaching. As leaders, how can we know we’ve done enough? And what does a quality coaching conversation actually look like in action?

Over the years, I’ve adopted a simple definition of coaching: “To coach is to develop another person by listening and asking questions to clarify ideas and commit to action.”

If you look closely, you’ll notice five key characteristics. I’ve listed each of them out below:

Business Conversation

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Don’t Sabotage Your Own Success

When you’re new to the workforce, enjoying leadership success can be a far off goal. The main focus is finding the right role and doing quality work. I know that was the case for me. But with time and experience (and a lot of hard work) come new opportunities to lead at higher levels. You go from joining a team to leading a team to eventually leading a department or major organizational function. Each time the strategy shifts.

A couple years ago I was privileged to have Mark Miller guest post on my site about surviving success. We all need a game plan to kick off a new opportunity. But our behavior needs an adjustment as well.

In his bestseller What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith shares twenty habits that can be largely overlooked at lower organizational levels, but have the potential to absolutely derail a senior leader who doesn’t change course. There isn’t room to share them all in this post, but I’d like to highlight five extra critical ones. Fail to implement them, and your best people may go looking for a new leader.

Man Stuck on Ladder

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What Coaching Leaders Do Differently

“Coaching” has been trending corporate buzzword in organizational leadership for well over a decade. We’re all familiar with athletics coaches. But when someone asks us to coach someone to learn a new skill or solve problem, it’s usually in a professional work context. What do coaches actually do – or do differently?

The interesting thing about coaching is how dynamic of a leadership role it is. Supervisors can coach. Mentors can coach. Peers can coach. Executive coaches can coach (obviously). Just about anyone can coach at one time or another.

Whether you have the opportunity to be coached or to be a coach, let’s take a look at six things coaching leaders do that set them apart.

Business People Talking

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How to Ask Great Questions

Question Marks

This post is excerpted from Nathan’s book Ignite Your Leadership Expertise.

What if I told you you don’t need to have a solution for every single problem that comes your way in order to be a competent and mature leader? That’s exactly what I’m about to propose. Hopefully it’s as refreshing to you as it is to me. And the best part about it is that it can dramatically improve your leadership influence as well. What’s the alternative to responding with advice? Asking great questions.

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What I Learned at Leadercast 2014

For the third year in a row I had the pleasure of attending the Leadercast leadership seminar at a local simulcast location. This year I attended in Daytona Beach, FL with about 80 other local leaders. The event was fantastic, as usual.

I don’t get to attend as many leadership events as I’d like to, but I always take something away from the ones I do. This year’s Leadercast was no exception. These were the highlights for me.

Leadercast 2014 Banner

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Everyday Sales Leadership: Stop, Collaborate and Listen

Today’s post was written by a former colleague of mine, Jess Titchener – an     adrenalin-driven management consultant living, working and serving in London.   You can follow Jess on Twitter as well as on her new faith-based blog at        thistrainisboundforglory.com. To be featured on this site, click here.

As I reflect on the three years that I have worked in corporate sales and negotiations in the communications and media industry, I have been thinking about what we can all apply from some fundamental “sales” principles into our daily working routines – whatever area we may work in.

Business People WalkingI think my lessons can be distilled into these three priorities.

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Listen Your Way to the Top

Listening Kid

This post is excerpted from Nathan’s book Ignite Your Leadership Expertise.

In recent years, we’ve seen a new emphasis placed on the art of listening. It can’t be because listening is all of a sudden more important than it ever was before. Maybe the nature of work in the information age means the the cost of misunderstanding is higher. Or perhaps the experts have been burned by poor listening one too many times and decided to produce more thought leadership on the topic.

At any rate, study after study demonstrates the importance of listening for communication, leadership and influence. We are apparently able to listen about three times faster than we can speak, but we also forget most of what we’ve heard. Listening been identified as one of the top qualities employers seek. And the ability to listen well has been tied to the ability to lead. Leadership is impossible without communication and communication is impossible without listening.

Everyone wants to be hired, to lead well and to be understood. So how can we learn to listen more effectively? The first step is to distinguish between the various listening levels that exist. Here are five of the most common ones:

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How to Establish Yourself as a Leadership Expert, Part 2

In my last post, I shared several reasons why you don’t have to wait until later to be a leadership expert. You can begin right here, right now, no matter who you are. If you’ve bought that idea, then let me share several practical ways you use your leadership expertise to benefit others.

Expert3

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The Three Leadership Questions I Always Ask

QuestionsHow do you talk with other people about leadership?

Unless I’m already a trusted leadership advisor, most people don’t just come up and ask me to help them evaluate their personal and organizational leadership effectiveness. (And when they do, it’s a little more organic than that!)  It’s true the more responsibilities people acquire, the more complicated their leadership situation gets. Executive leaders usually have access to budget, resources and personnel to address the leadership challenges they face. Everyday leaders often have to figure things out on their own. You may be able to help, but how do you get the conversation started?