Accelerating Your Leadership Journey – Leader As a Coach

Leader as a Coach: Accelerating Your Leadership Journey is an Executive Education programme from IIM Bangalore designed for senior leaders, CXOs and aspiring business leaders who want to strengthen coaching capabilities, leadership effectiveness and organisational impact.

In the modern era, leadership has moved beyond the professional running of an organization. In today’s volatile, chaotic, complex, and networked society, where external business partners are growing and gradually outnumbering internal employees, leaders should bring new levels of expertise, credibility, trust, and values that go toward strengthening professional human relationships.

Modern leadership demands a broader appreciation that we are part of a complicated interconnected “network age” that needs increased interdependence among individuals, organizations, and nations.

As a consequence of this enhanced interdependence, individuals and organizations will naturally compete with one another. Modern leadership recognizes the need for rivals to move beyond competition and actively cooperate with others, whether as members of teams or as parties to strategic alliances.

The trend towards forming strategic alliances is increasingly seen, especially in global industries such as airline, automotive manufacturing, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals.

By believing in goals that benefit not only themselves but also others, visionary leaders can create such an atmosphere of cooperation. People want to work for a cause, not just for a living, which implies that our existence, work or otherwise, serves a useful purpose, and has value. Hence, the first question a leader should ask, in consultation with stakeholders, is “Who do we intend to be?” and not “What are we going to do?”

The Leader as Coach

To support leaders in delivering high performance in such environments, they must take a completely different and compelling approach that is aligned with coaching. By applying coaching techniques, they achieve a heightened level of self-awareness, improve critical thinking, learn to manage paradoxes, and develop a personal leadership philosophy.

When you coach rather than command people, you almost always win their hearts and minds, building loyalty, trust and confidence. When employees are heard, they feel valued and empowered. They develop greater ownership and commitment to actions they have identified as necessary.

Research shows that manager-coaching can improve productivity, engagement and customer service. Coaching can help transform underachievers into high performers and enable leaders to help employees connect their own purpose to the organisation’s work, leading to greater ownership and responsibility.

Great leaders bring about transformation by applying coaching at the right place, in the right manner and at the right time. Using coaching, leaders learn how to create an atmosphere of trust and self-belief that helps others overcome self-imposed limitations, strengthen emotional well-being and perform at their best.