A leadership coach is an individual that works with clients to help them achieve their professional and personal goals. They can help people in leadership positions achieve their goals by identifying and working on their strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, emotions, feelings, and more.

Leadership coaching is the conscious process of developing an individual's competencies and talents to make them a more effective team leader.

It's common for leadership training to incorporate business coaching, effective communication skills, and a knowledge of the wide variety of leadership styles.

Self-awareness is a key quality that all good leaders should possess. It refers to your ability to recognise your own emotions, behaviours and the way you think. The more aware you are of your behaviours and biases, the more you’ll be able to take this into account when making decisions. For this reason, you’ll be able to form deeper professional relationships and create a culture where employees feel listened to and respected.

You’ll gain a much deeper understanding of your own skills and what it is that holds you back. This will help you to improve your process of delegating tasks whilst ensuring you give yourself more time to work on any areas of weakness. Greater self-awareness will allow you to recognise the strengths and talents of those in your team, giving everyone a chance to do what they do best.

When it comes to leadership, confidence is crucial. As a leader, you’ll need to make tough decisions, have difficult conversations, and communicate with a wide range of people – all whilst showing confidence.

Your employees need to be guided by a leader who has confidence in what they do. When employees sense feelings of uncertainty or self-doubt, they’re less likely to feel confident in the business and the strategies they’re following.

Leadership coaching is a great way to learn to develop your confidence. Your experienced coaches will use tried and tested techniques to give you the confidence to motivate and inspire your team. Your coach will work to establish any underlying issues that could be affecting your confidence and will create new, tailored strategies to push you towards your goals.

Coaching empowers leaders to do exceptional work. Coaches establish an advantageous relationship that uncovers hidden strengths and weaknesses within the leader. Goals will be created to enable leaders to pinpoint their weaknesses and track their progress. Reflective sessions with a coach empower a leader to fully recognize their improvements and appreciate the work they have done to meet those goals.

Leaders gain new perspective on everyday responsibilities from their coach. The coach pushes them to step back and reflect when a leader is having a bad day or week, often uncovering a deeper problem. Together, they discover new insights into the leader’s reaction by analyzing the problem and creating a plan for similar situations in the future.

Coaching reduces narrow-minded thinking in leaders. Coaches encourage the leader to open their thought patterns and consider other points of view by asking questions. This benefits the leader by provoking free thoughts and encouraging flexible leadership. The Center for Management and Organization Effectiveness calls flexible leadership a “business necessity” as it allows for quick, creative, and precise decision making under pressure.

Targeting coaching to a leader’s problem area makes a huge difference in attitude and abilities. Coaching allows the leader to learn and implement new leadership techniques tailored to the leader’s weaknesses. Techniques include the leader avoiding the terms “but,” “no,” or “however” as they accidentally discourage ideas or answering questions with questions as they tend to supply all the ideas for their team. Individuals that were difficult to reach before will respond better to their leader’s new approaches.

Coaching enables leaders to realize that their communication isn’t always as clear as they think. Coaches will highlight areas of communication that need improvement and practice those areas with the leader.

Coaches can also teach leaders how to communicate with individuals of different personality types, cultures, or ages using their past experiences as examples. Good communication skills allow people to connect with one another. A coach who can guide an individual to communicate effectively will improve their credibility and overall leadership abilities.