How Good Leadership Can Be Enhanced with a Business Coach or Mentor
03rd May , 2017
Good leadership rightly continues to be one of the “top of mind” awareness topics amongst business owners, CEOs, directors and senior executives. All businesses need good leadership, and striving to be a better leader needs hard work and continual reassessment to keep you up to date with changing work environments, new ideas, and new approaches to leadership. While business coaching can provide valuable assistance in this area, you also need to be aware of what good people and leaders expect and deliver in terms of leadership.
A Simple Definition of a Leader
An effective leader is a person who creates an inspiring vision of the future before motivating, driving and inspiring their people to engage with it, improve it and deliver it. Concepts of good leadership vary widely according to culture, religion and political ideology, but in a pure business context, the definition and execution is unsurprisingly similar.
One aspect of leadership is the question of whether good leaders are born or developed. This is an old debate. The truth is, both factors are right to some extent. However, businesses can practically improve their leadership potential and capability of their organisations with measured approaches to leadership education and training, including assistance from a business coach. This enhances and develops leaders through a structured approach that shares with them real business and management job experience.
When a Business Coach is Necessary
It’s disappointing when leaders who have been trained are not as effective as they should be. A prime example of this is when owners or leaders are newly promoted or find themselves in different roles, or the business or roles have significantly changed. These leaders are not necessarily fully-equipped for these transitional circumstances, and they usually know that they could do much better. At International Business Mentors, we can help unlock their potential with Australia business coaching.
In these instances, a well-matched business coach or mentor can greatly assist, as they can complement the leader with their own business knowledge and experience. They are also passionate about passing this on to help develop the mentee’s leadership and performance capability. The business mentor or coach comes with wide leadership and business experience, and they’ll also have developed their own excellent leadership skills in business.
How Business Coaching Can Help
Identifying critical areas for development for a specific business leader is an integral part of the business coaching or mentoring process. Some of these target areas may or may not be obvious to the business owner or leader until the right time in the mentoring process.
What must be crystallised in leadership business mentoring is the type or style of leader being targeted. For example, different industries require different types of leaders with a focus and a blend of styles, e.g. focused on authoritative, charismatic, collaborative, transactional, analytical, systematic, or transformational. Family businesses may also need to include a family diplomatic style.
There are many theories about leadership styles. Some give the basic three: autocratic, democratic, or Laissez-faire. Then there are also the emotional leadership styles, all of which have strengths and weaknesses in different situations: visionary, coaching, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting, and commanding. Each style can affect the performance and significantly tap into the positive emotions of your employees or team members. Choosing the right blend of leadership styles for the right situation and the right leader are very much the key to success.
What Makes a Successful Leader?
Successful leaders need to understand their strong supporters, followers and the broad base of their employees and staff. Corporate culture is set from the top with strong leadership, feedback and interaction with the people in the organisation. Leaders need to perform well in setting the culture to fit the business for its future strategy. When done well by leaders, the staff will support the changes needed and will be motivated to perform and deliver on the business vision.
Most importantly, an effective leader knows how to react when there is a crisis or when things just get difficult. A business coach can help you prepare for and deal with these situations by tapping into their experience. That is a fundamental benefit from an Australia business coaching relationship.
Other critical aspects of good leadership include good communication and behaviour. These may seem obvious, but unless a leader communicates well to his employees and behaves in a proper manner that reflects the target culture needed for the business to succeed, he or she will not get that vision across and could lose respect.
Good leaders also always remember that their best people are the best assets of the business. As a result, great leaders look after their best people and tend to lead and perform very well.
Benefit from Business Coaching Today
Give your leadership skills a boost and increase your confidence to be an even more effective leader with the help of International Business Mentors. We can provide you with a business coach or mentor who can assist you to improve your leadership in the business and help with core leadership techniques such as how to use a wide variety of leadership styles, how to improve your emotional intelligence or EQ, and how to lead effectively when things get difficult. When equipped with these skills, you’ll become a highly effective leader!
If you want to enhance your leadership with Australia business coaching, contact International Business Mentors today.