Leadership and Coaching

MIC specialises in developing, delivering and evaluating accredited and non-accredited development programmes for 'managers' at all levels in areas including:

• Coaching and Mentoring
• Leadership and Management
• Selection and Recruitment
• Managing Performance
• Strategic Management
• Competency Framework Development
• Assessment and Development Centres for Recruitment and Selection and Promotion
• One-to-one Coaching

We provide this learning through blended solutions including workshop, one-to-one, video, DVD/CD, e-learning and distance learning offering maximum flexibility to our clients and their people.

What do I need?

The following are based on extracts from the CIPD

What is Coaching?

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) contributes to this discussion through a number of leading articles on the subject. The following is an extract from Institute’s fact sheet, updated August 2006:

“Although there is a lack of agreement among coaching professionals about precise definitions, these are some generally agreed characteristics of coaching in organisations:

• It is essentially a non-directive form of development.
• It focuses on improving performance and developing individuals’ skills.
• Personal issues may be discussed but the emphasis is on performance at work
• Coaching activities have both organisational and individual goals.
• It assumes that the individual is psychologically well and does not require a clinical intervention.
• It provides people with feedback on both their strengths and their weaknesses.
• It is a skilled activity.”

What is Leadership?
 
At some point in our lives, most of us are leaders whether in family situations, in sport, difficult situations and work. Leadership is not just about the qualities of an elite few, although the leadership skills of chief executives and their teams are of fundamental importance. In the context of work, what is leadership, how does it differ from management, and are leaders born or can they be developed?

UK Leadership
 
A survey carried out in 2005 for the CIPD1 compared UK leaders with those elsewhere in the world. It suggested that:

Leaders in the UK often lack dedicated attention from their superiors to help them develop in a planned fashion through continuous learning, both from job experiences and more formal training activities.

They tend to arrive in leadership positions less well prepared than their counterparts elsewhere and inspire less confidence in their ability to execute strategies successfully. Fewer places in the UK are filled by internal candidates, also suggesting a problem in leadership development and HR professionals elsewhere in the world are quicker to express confidence in their leaders at all levels, and particularly first-line managers, than are those in the UK.
What is leadership?
 
There is no single definition that satisfies everyone. But most people would say that even successful leaders they have known, do not behave in identical ways. They may, in fact, act very differently even in similar situations and they may have quite different personalities. Moreover, different leadership qualities may be needed in different circumstances. The classic example is perhaps Churchill, who was a great war leader but less successful in peacetime. Similarly, CEOs who excel in turning round ailing companies may perform less well when things are on a more even keel. All this may lead to the conclusion that there is no single template of leadership behaviours, which in turn poses the question of whether leaders can be developed: what are the qualities (or competencies) of leadership, and how can they be brought out? 

However, before people can become successful leaders, they do need certain attributes:

• General intelligence, although not necessarily being very much brighter than the people they are leading.
• Technical or professional knowledge and competence in their particular fields – how otherwise would leaders be respected
• Personality: leaders should be energetic and committed, maintain contact with their people, and understand their strengths and weaknesses.
• The ability to inspire, although this quality may be rarer than some of the others and is perhaps the most difficult to develop.
• Listening, sharing and delegating skills (and not interfering unnecessarily), because in groups of more than around five people it becomes impossible to know all the necessary detail.
• Self-knowledge, to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, which in turn will enable them to turn to others in their group to compensate for their own biases or deficiencies.

All these attributes will help to develop trust, without which leaders will not command loyalty. The last four, ‘softer’, non-technical attributes might be summed up as ‘emotional intelligence’, a subject which now seems to be gaining a place on management and leadership development programmes.

How Does Leadership Differ from Management?

The idea of management was originally based on administration functions such as planning, organisation, co-ordination and implementation of strategies, tactics and policies imposed from the top in an impersonal and apparently rational manner.

It was realised that there was more to managing than simply administering. The idea of influencing people by virtue of personal attributes and behaviours gradually grew so all managers, including first-level supervisors, need to be leaders and to understand the concept of leadership. The higher up the organisation one goes, the more complex leadership becomes and the more it is concerned with broader and long-term aims. But of course it should be borne in mind that while some organisations may have visionary leaders in their lower and middle ranks, their chief executives and management teams may be still following the traditional managerial model!

So leadership is now a fundamental part of management and people who are not nominally managers may also function as leaders, influencing others, even if in an informal manner, by their personalities and behaviours. It is worth remembering that in some organisations – hospitals and research organisations are good examples – many people may be senior professionals such as doctors or scientists but not managers (at least in terms of the formal organisational hierarchy). It would be foolish, however, not to think of them as leaders or potential leaders.

But taking the formal organisation, it is useful to distinguish three levels of leadership, as follows:

Front-line or Team Leadership - in which one person (the leader) is responsible for creating specific outcomes usually within a given timescale and with given resources through their own actions and those of their immediate followers .

Operational Leadership - which is to do with day-to-day operations within the organisation and is a major determinant of its culture and climate.

Strategic Leadership - about ‘big picture’ issues such as change, vision, translating that vision into purpose, effective communication, and the behaviour of the CEO and senior management team (also see below).
Like Adair’s three circles, these levels relate to each other, as figure 2 shows.

Leadership Development
 
People vary in their capacity for leadership. A few have innate capacity (but even born leaders will need to be developed further), some have none, but most potential managers have it in some degree. Selection of the right people, whether from inside or outside the organisation, is a good part of the battle, but then they will need training. This may be only a small part of their development but it is important to get it right. Adair says the seven hallmarks of successful courses should be ‘simple, practical, participative, variety, enjoyable, relevant and short’.2

Then comes perhaps the most important part: development through experience. This is where management development, succession planning and leadership development overlap.

Many organisations now run what they call ‘leadership programmes’. To the extent that they emphasise the idea of leadership through having the word in their titles, this is a good thing. However, how far they actually differ from what might have been called until recently ‘management development programmes’, is open to doubt, as a glance at some of the headings and descriptions in a survey by Incomes Data Services (IDS) confirms.4 The difference may be that leadership now receives somewhat more emphasis than it did previously, and IDS says that most of the programmes ’we looked at included sessions on personal audit, work-life balance, self-awareness and contrasting leadership styles. Few of these elements would have been found on development programmes ten years ago.’

It can be difficult for people to distinguish between coaching, mentoring and counselling. In practice, ‘mentoring’ for example is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘coaching’. Traditionally, however, mentoring in the workplace has tended to describe a relationship in which a more experienced colleague used their greater knowledge and understanding of the work or workplace to support the development of a more junior or inexperienced member of staff. Counselling generally is used to relate to circumstances which require some degree of psycholoigical and therapeutic input.