Leadership, coaching, and management sound like they are one of the same things, but in reality, these three aspects of business authority figures are very different. However, when they come together, the result has been shown over and over again to be absolutely incredible for businesses’ productivity and employee motivation.

Learning to be a good coach involves changing your mindset, and then helping others to reach their full potential. A good manager is responsibly, can organise a team to get the best out of everyone, and has people who will work for him or under him of their own free will.

When a person can embody all of these different skills and mindsets, they have the real power to make a big change within their business.

Becoming a Great Leader Coach

We’ve pulled together three tips from across the business field, on how to become a great leader coach.

Ask Open-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions are questions that cannot be easily answered with a yes or no answer. These types of questions allow the person you are coaching to discover more about themselves than they thought they knew. Therapists call it “talking yourself through it.” There is an important distinction between an open-ended question and a leading question, and we must always make sure we use the former and never the latter.

Here are some examples of open-ended questions:

Where are the top priorities of your business at the moment?
If we were meeting five years from today, what needs to happen for you to feel good about [discussion topic]?
What challenges do you see to making [those opportunities] happen?
What’s the biggest risk of you not making progress on this situation?
What is the motivation behind taking on this project?

Empowerment

Coaching is all about allowing others to see their own potential; a good leader coach should always be focused on helping lead others in a positive way through a good coaching session.

This could involve helping the person you are coaching to speak their mind, share their opinions, and even open up about difficult situations. Helping your mentee grow in confidence is the cornerstone of a good coaching relationship, which Professor Erik De Haan calls micro-moments.

Understanding without judgement

It’s vital that, as leader coaches, we listen to our clients and do so without judgement. Humans are inherently judgemental creatures, it’s a survival instinct to ‘go with your gut,’ but the problem with this mentality is that we risk missing the nuances that make life interesting and the little nuggets that shape everyone’s story differently.

When we sit back and listen to people speak properly, we may be inclined to cut in, but listening first is a great skill to develop. People will often end up telling you incredible stories and give you insight into both their lives and of the wider human psyche.

Reserving judgement whilst people speak is a vital courtesy that we can give our clients as it allows them the freedom to express themselves without fear of reprimand whilst they sort through their thoughts.