WHY IS BUSINESS LEADERSHIP COACHING ESSENTIAL TO YOUR BUSINESS?

Why is business leadership coaching essential to the health of your business? 

In today’s video, we’re going to explore what business leadership coaching can do for your organization and we’re going to focus on three key areas-  goals, insight, and expertise. 

Business leadership coaching or training is really essential because it will help you achieve your organization’s goals more quickly, more rapidly. 

Now there’s a couple of reasons why this happens: 

1. When you get outside help, when you have a coach or consultant, come in and provide that kind of business leadership training, it’s going to be giving you greater clarity of your goals. It’s going to help you have a structure to achieve those goals and greater follow through. 

Let’s break it down. Now what I find with most businesses that aren’t achieving their goals as effectively as they want is they lack clarity. They lack clarity at one of many levels, right? They might have clarity of what their goals are on a day-to-day basis, or even on a weekly or a monthly, or quarterly basis. Or some organizations have a hard time really clarifying their goals on an annual or three-year or five-year basis. 

So what a business leadership coach will help your organization do is dial in and have clarity first and foremost on the vision. Where’s your business trying to go? What’s the finished version of your business look like?

A blueprint, much like building a house. You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint of what it’s going to look like when it’s done. So many business owners and business leaders that I see, build their business without an idea of where it’s going, what it’s evolving towards. Business leadership coaching will help you have clarity of what that final vision is.

Once you have clarity of a vision to break it down to five-year, three-year one-year goals, quarterly goals, weekly goals, the beautiful thing is once you have those what a business leadership coach will help you do is develop a structure, a structure to help you consistently move towards that larger vision but ultimately by breaking it down into smaller digestible bite-sized pieces, right? So you’re not just trying to, as they say, eat the whole elephant, you’re eating one bite at a time. That’s just the worst metaphor ever. Who wants to eat that elephant, but you get the idea to break it down, just stay the course.

You know, it’s interesting. I think about different organizations that I’ve worked with that will do a fine job, creating a strategic plan. And that’s really what the vision is, right? And that’s that kind of structure that an organization or a business leadership coach will help you do is have that strategic plan. I’ve seen organizations do that, but then because of the nature of their, of their culture, and the personalities of the executive team, they quickly lose sight of it and get pulled down into the day-to-day, down into the weeds. And what I find is that so many organizations are really good at getting a really existing one level down from where they need to be in the organization. They roll up their sleeves and they’re getting the work done, but nobody’s piloting the show. 

That’s why it’s essential to have a business leadership coach in your organization to have clarity of what the vision is, and then move through that strategic planning process and recognize that planning process is an ongoing process that continually happens when you’re continually readjusting your goals to make sure you’re moving towards the vision in much the same way if you’re sailing. You don’t just set the sail and go. You have to accommodate for the changing wind and the changing tide and the currents. So you’re continually shifting the sale and tweaking the sale.

The same is true, and that’s what a business leadership coach will help your business do is to continually tweak those goals and to reset them so that you’re always in alignment organization-wide with that larger vision. It doesn’t do any good to have the executive team aligned with the rest of the organization it isn’t either. 

So that’s one of the things that a business leadership coach will bring to the organization is clarity of the vision, clarity of goals, and a structured process to move towards that vision.

And then finally, most importantly, accountability and follow through to make sure that a strategic plan doesn’t just become the flavor of the week, but there’s a real concentration in commitment to following through, to measuring, to following through on the goals and to make sure that the organization is celebrating each step it takes in accomplishing those goals and moving towards the greater vision. That is one of the huge benefits that getting involved with a business leadership coach can do for your organization.

2. Now, the second contribution that a business leadership coach, a good business leadership coach, one worth their salt, the second contribution they’ll bring is insight. Now, organizations become rather insular, they don’t know what they don’t know, right? The organization becomes its own little culture and its own little world view exists within that organization. There’s a certain culture that exists and people look at problems within the context of that organization.

What a business leadership coach will do is bring in an objective perspective. They will be able to see things outside of the sociopolitical context of that organization. They see some things that individuals in the organization won’t see. And I’ve been in that situation many times, the consultant myself, when I enter into organizations and I will see things that the organization doesn’t see, simply because they’ve been used to it and it’s the way it’s always been. 

It’s like, you know, we moved into our new homes here, my family, and we have all these projects we want to do out of the gate because what I know to be true, you know, this as well, right? But if you don’t address them after a while, it becomes normalized. And then you don’t even notice the stuff anymore. The same is true with our homes, the same is true with organizations. You stop noticing some of the things that may be real inefficiencies or really bring your organization down.

So one thing that a business leadership coach will bring is that objective perspective. 

Now, the objective perspective isn’t useful without candid feedback. That’s a second element of that insight that the business leadership coach will bring is that candid feedback. So when I look at organizations and work with organizations, in fact, I was just working with one yesterday and it’s interesting, cause I laid a question out there and everybody just got silent. Now it was a pretty sensitive question, but I just threw it out there, figuring people would jump in and answer it. But because of the political considerations and the family nature of the people who are working together, nobody dared put their opinion out there.

My job as a business leadership coach is the same. The thing nobody else will say. It’s like the court jester of days gone by right back in the kingdom. There was somebody who needs to say that thing that nobody else will say back to the emperor has no clothes. That’s what a business leadership coach will do regarding insight is to provide that level of feedback. 

And it’s interesting in organizations, the feedback will roll downhill. People at the frontline have structured feedback processes. The executive at the top often doesn’t get the kind of feedback. And it’s actually kind of a lonely place at the top because they have that 360 view. You have the 360 view and there’s no one to really share the struggles with. Part of what a business leadership coach will bring Is that candid, candor feedback in that open dialogue to see things more clearly than you would see without somebody there, right? Somebody who can just call it the way it is. That’s the second, the second of real critical contribution of a business leadership coach behind achieving goals more quickly is that kind of clear candid insight and that objective perspective that gets pulled into an organization that can absolutely be critical for the organization’s growth. 

3. The third element that a business leadership coach will bring behind goals and insight is expertise in effective leadership. A business leadership coach is going to have a window into the world of multiple businesses, many at the same time, so they can bring best practices into your organization and provide strategies to improve.

Rubber meets the road strategies, not just questions to get you to reflect, but actual strategies to create accountability, to create a structured process, to help your business move forward. That’s how the business is achieving its goals more quickly, through that kind of leverage the expertise and outside perspective that a strategist or a business leadership coach will bring to the game.

So when you’ve seen previous videos of mine, you know, I break down leadership into four distinct levels. First of all, lead yourself. A good business leadership coach will be able to provide you with candid feedback about what you’re doing that’s working and what’s not. And give you strategies to be able to be more effective and help you stay accountable to those strategies. Because as they say, what you’ve always done, what got you here won’t get you there. So it’s a continual process of growth at a personal executive level.

Second, a business leadership coach is going to be able to have strategies to help you understand how to create those dynamic relationships that elevate the engagement in your organization, that create a culture of engagement that help people bring their heart and want to bring their heart to the game, their hearts and their minds so they bring their best effort. A good business leadership coach is going to have strategies to help you do that. And they’re going to have an insight and the lens to look critically at your organization to see what’s working and what’s not working. And as I said earlier, they’ll be able to provide feedback that’s very candid around what some of the issues might be that are loading your business’s ability to create that kind of engagement.

Now, the third area I talk about is around creating teams. A good business leadership coach is going to be able to help you understand what team dynamics are, how to look at a team as a singular entity in and of itself not as a bunch of individuals coming together. And to recognize that a team will have its own culture that will behave a particular way. Most businesses,in fact, every business I’ve ever worked with, didn’t see it that way, right? The leader entered into an engagement with the team, but really just worked with the individuals and not the team itself.

And there’s a difference. There’s a difference. The team will have its own culture that drives how it solves problems, how it resolves conflicts, and then there become factions in an organization. And often I’ll see if the team is not really functioning as a singular entity bidding after the meeting, it can become a political entity.

And what a business leadership coach can do is help break down those barriers and really say that thing that nobody else in the organization can say to begin to break down those barriers, to create a real cohesive unit leading the organization forward that is the leadership team. 

And then lastly, at a business level, a business leadership coach is going to have a cadre of options and strategies for being able to grow your business in every area from sales and marketing, to finance, to technology, to HR. A good business leadership coach has been across industries and seen best practices in all different businesses and they’ll bring that to your organization. So one thing that a good business leadership coach will bring to your organization is real rubber meets the road strategies, not just good ideas, not questions to ponder, but strategies to help you grow your business forward.

Now, the second thing regarding expertise, a good business leaders coach is going to bring his instruments, not drums and trombones, but instruments to help you gain a deeper awareness of how your organization is functioning currently. This is one of the things that’s a very dear passion of mine, is being able to help organizations look at themselves through the lens of a Myers-Briggs and BTI you’re familiar or the disc or, or the Hogan, or there’s so many different instruments that helping an organization to reset, to understand the personalities around the table and to leverage them fully so that we were going to the organization can start to see the actual human beings for who they are and not try to treat everybody the same. 

What I find and I’ve worked with so many organizations that were falling apart at the scenes. And when I was able to bring in an instrument, because I’m thinking of one specifically a healthcare system I brought into Myers-Briggs and we helped everybody debrief and understand their personality, not only their personality, but then to be able to have options of what they could do differently because what we were able to find is that the strength of the individuals and the physicians and nurses and the administrators in that system, their strength was also their Achilles heel, but without a structure to understand that they had no options to do things different. And in fact, they were predetermined, destined to do the same thing over and over and over because they didn’t know what the options were. Having an assessment or instrument to be able to help them understand what their natural tendencies are, gave him the opportunity, a duty to do things differently.

And then the beautiful thing is after they understood themselves and had an easier selection of strategies to behave differently, they were able then to understand others more effectively. And it really did start to tear down the walls that had formed in the communication and the conflict that happened. And, you know, it’s interesting when we feel conflictual, people will start to often shut down. We either recede, we aggress, you know, we fight or flight when we’re frustrated. And that’s what was happening in this particular hospital system. I’m talking about when we laid out the Myers-Briggs and help people understand their personality through that lens, it radically transformed how the business was moving forward, how it was operating. And it really set the organization up to align at a deeper level to create those high-performance teams and a culture where people actually wanted to be there. And then they were able to achieve the goals more effectively, more readily. And everybody was excited about the strategic plan.

So regarding expertise, remember a good business leadership coach is going to bring a cadre of strategies to help you grow at every level in your organization. They’re going to bring instruments for deeper analysis to understand that of the human element in your organization. 

Finally, the last thing is they’re going to be able to help you manage growth and change. Most effectively, humans often resist change. We all think we change, it’s always somebody else. But in every organization I’ve gone into, everybody is the issue. It’s a cultural issue. And how do you get the culture to change? Cause culture must change if you’re going to grow your organization. And that is one thing that a good business leadership coach is going to help you do. It’s going to help individuals get out of their own way so they can align more deeply towards a greater vision in the organization. That kind of change is a game-changer. That’s really transformative. And that is so essential if you’re going to create a business for the future.

So remember what a business leadership coach will bring is expertise, expertise, including strategies, expertise regarding instruments, and the ability to manage growth and change.

So remember a good business leadership coach is going to help your business in three key areas. One is around goals. You’ll have greater clarity of your vision, and you’ll have really clear goals moving towards that vision with follow-through on board. A good business leadership coach is going to help you have alignment towards that in a way that helps you achieve the goals more quickly, it gets the hearts and minds of people on board.

A good business leader coach is going to help you gain deeper insight into what’s working and what’s not working, they’re gonna bring objective perspective, they’re going to bring candid feedback and they’re going to bring best practices from different industries.

And finally, a good business leadership coach is going to help by bringing a deep level of expertise into your organization. They’re going to make strategies for growth. They’re going to bring instruments for deeper analysis, and they’re going to bring ability and expertise around systems change.