Optimizing the Team Ecosystem – Building a Foundation for Success – Executive Coaching | Leadership Coaching

You want leadership teams that can function concordantly as a well-tuned orchestra and create magic for your organization. Otherwise, what can arise is disc(h)ord and disharmony (puns intended :)), which can trickle down the organization structure, causing infights, affecting customer service, and slowing growth for your company.

Leadership team ecosystems need a healthy balance of competition and collaboration that drives enterprise goals successfully.

Challenges faced by leadership teams

Unfortunately, many leadership teams get stuck in destructive loops that keep playing out. Some challenges commonly faced by leadership ecosystems are

● Leaders with different personalities, perspectives & value systems

● Lack of trust among team members

● Individual goals hinder organizational goals

● Dominant leaders control decision making

● Department heads protect their turfs

● Interpersonal dynamics affect decision-making

Leadership coaching can overcome these challenges and transform leadership teams into high-performing, highly agile ecosystems.

What is leadership coaching?

Leadership Coaching is a creative process where an individual works with a coach to build themselves across a spectrum of abilities to perform better as leaders and become grounded, authentic individuals. Leadership coaching aims to enhance a leader’s current strengths and work on their weaknesses so they can lead their teams and their organizations with greater confidence, clarity & conviction.

Get further acquainted with leadership coaching and its benefits.

Are you looking to develop lean & mean teams that accelerate growth for your organization? Here are some things you can do as leaders to calibrate your team ecosystem for success with the help of leadership coaching.

How to use leadership coaching to optimize team ecosystems

Increase your self-awareness

Do you know yourself well? Do you know how others perceive you?

Leadership coaching can help you understand the foundations of your actions and others’ reactions to what you do. Leadership coaching shines the light on your motivations, prejudices, weaknesses, and strengths. And beleive us, often leaders ignore their own motivations, prejudices

A leadership coach helps you discover who you think you are, who others think you are, and who you truly are. This heightened clarity and self-awareness can help you respond appropriately to people and situations.

Build trust using emotional intelligence

A team is not a group of people who work with each other. It is a group of people who trust each other. – Simon Sinek.

Most leadership teams underperform because many members do not feel safe enough to contribute to discussions or share ideas. What can you do to establish a foundation of psychological safety?

You build trust between team members.

Leadership coaching makes you more tuned to others’ emotions & motivations.

Is a leader too assertive or dominating?

Is a leader too reticent to share?

Are there personal equations between leaders that may affect team functioning?

Move your team from the ‘I’ to ‘We’ Mindset

Leaders often make the mistake of working in silos or bringing personal/departmental agendas into the collective decision-making process. Especially difficult are decisions that involve losing the battle to win the war.

Leadership coaching enlarges the canvas for leaders, prompting them to work from the ‘We’ mindset that keeps organizational goals the topmost priority.

Subash CV, (ICF-MCC) is a seasoned executive & leadership coach and Founder of Regal Unlimited. Subash recollects coaching the leadership team of an automobile firm.

The sales head wanted to expand sales and boost growth. But the customer service head stonewalled, saying that his department did not have the bandwidth. At a critical juncture for the company, he was willing to sacrifice organizational goals to save his job and department. The team was at an impasse.

Subash coached the customer service head to identify his vision for the organization. The leader realized that expanding sales was the best way to achieve his vision.

Then they looked at customer service issues and discovered their cause – low sales numbers! This fact changed the customer service head’s attitude. He agreed to go ahead with the sales expansion plans.

Use coaching to achieve goals

How do you get the team to work a particular way or towards a set goal?

Do you tell, do or show them? Or do you coach? Coaching is more effective than the aforementioned traditional methods.

Leadership coaching enables team members to come up with the answers independently. This creates a sense of ownership that boosts motivation and drives performance.

Resolve conflicts holistically

Impasses, cold wars, all-out wars – every team has them.

The trick is to get things under control fast. Leadership coaching can help you understand the root causes of conflicts & manage them with foresight and detachment.

Decide on a definite process of conflict resolution with your team. Coaching itself can be used as a tool for the same. For this, you need a deeper understanding of the leadership coaching process and competencies, which an ICF coach certification can provide.

Encourage intrinsically driven accountability

We all need a nudge from time to time to stay on track. But to have someone ‘mother’ or ‘headmaster’ us? Not cool at all!

So how do you keep your team accountable without being judgmental taskmasters? Well, you coach! Coaching ensures accountability through intrinsic motivation rather than external pressure.

Coach your leaders to develop high-performing teams

Leadership coaching can move leadership teams towards a collaborative coaching culture where individual goals are met in the process of achieving company goals.

Leaders who have been coached by leadership coaches or who are leadership coaches themselves coach their teams more effectively.

Do you want to introduce the benefits of leadership coaching to your organization? Then invest in leadership coaching for your executives and leaders.