Examine the majority of leadership development in organisations and by providers, and you will find that most of them offer nothing but a token gesture towards coaching skills development. Half a day maximum is offered to training leaders and managers in it.
Many readers here will realise that this is not enough time, focus or practice to enable leaders to become coaching leaders, or leaders with quality coaching skills. To be able to embrace and confidently use coaching skills it’s about letting go of old habits and taking on new ones. It requires recognising inabilities around questioning, listening and structuring conversations, which need to change. Coaching needs practice, feedback and having the opportunity to reflect and learn from it. Good coaching skills require a mindset and behavioural shift.
Many providers do not build in the opportunity for meaningful practice, reflection and feedback, so how will the quality of the coaching be verified, and leaders own confidence increasing?
How do Abintus do things differently with leadership development?
At Abintus, our approach to this development is different. We bring leadership and coaching development together. We blend them. We give equal space and focus to them. We examine leadership requirements in the modern business world. We research the leadership knowledge and behaviours required for more creative and agile team working. We take a pragmatic and real approach to leading every day. Throughout all of this we develop coaching skills and use them to bring the leadership elements to life. The leadership elements represent the ‘what’ and the coaching represents the ‘how’. Leadership provides the opportunity to coach and coaching is the enabler of leadership.
So, for example, if discussing and exploring a leadership model, we then get delegates to consider how they might view and bring the model to life from a coaching perspective. Perhaps, how they can develop and use questions which enable employee engagement. Activities and exercises can use coaching practice to explore how people will use and apply their new leadership abilities to their teams. It all fits hand in glove. All parties having the opportunity to seek and provide feedback and insight.
Similarly, helping leaders use their coaching knowledge and skills to explore with employees how to utilise the collective team knowledge and experience to solve problems, work collaboratively, have team and individual accountability. This is not about leaders asserting their power, more them using the team ‘hive’ mind. Leadership and coaching working in harmony.
This is our point of difference. EVERYTHING on our workshops and programmes is leadership, coaching and application focused. There are very few training providers who do this…
Our indicative content and focus
All of the content in our programmes is indicative. Yes we have researched best practice, innovative ideas, contemporary thinking and we build this into our session content. We always want to bring the most relevant and meaningful insights to our delegates. We also want to make our content relevant to the organisations we work with. Their language, their ideas, reflective of what’s happening in their organisations. In many ways our content is co-created around the central themes of modern leadership and coaching.
Our researched content around modern leadership requirements, led us to focus our leadership development around the following titles:
- Foundations of modern leadership
- Building and leading adaptable, collaborative and creative teams
- Coaching for performance (performance management)
- Accountability, trust and engagement
- Transforming team communication
- The coaching leader and change leadership
These areas of focus provide a great foundation for conversations, reflections on own business, challenge and personal application. For leaders to develop their own personal leadership agenda’s or leadership operating models.
For organisations we build either complete programmes around these elements, or we offer them as individual workshops. The only caveat on individual workshops is that delegates must have had working exposure to coaching practice and skills.
Want to discuss more on how coaching based leadership might work for you? Contact Nick on 07867 785314 or nick@abintus.co.uk