Thousands of leaders attend leadership training every year to glean insights into how to lead better. At the end of the training, most of these leaders will resolve to become more effective by using these new insights; hopefully with the guidance of a personal executive coach. Unfortunately, few of them will implement these good intentions. Yet, they need to pay attention to their intentions in order to get to where they want to be.
Although the executive education debate still rages on whether leadership is learned or innate, there is no doubt that the subject is being taught. Back in October 2003, BusinessWeek reported that 134 companies from 20 nations spent $210 million to enroll 21,000 employees in executive leadership programs. Since leadership development is not an event, that's a significant investment in classroom activities that may or may not produce company leaders or even better managers.
In "Leadership Sustainability: Seven Disciplines to Achieve the Changes Great Leaders Know That They Must Make," authors Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood help leaders learn how to sustain the changes they know they should make in order to be stronger, more effective, and more inspiring leaders.
Resources: Support desired changes with coaching and infrastructure.
The most important resources for leaders to access are human resources, both for themselves and for their organizations. It turns out that when desired behaviors are reinforced by personal coaching and institutionalized in human resources (HR) practices, they are much more likely to be sustained.
Coaching sustains change because it personalizes and reinforces a leader's intent for the future. In the last 20 years, as leadership coaching has mushroomed, the range of coaching expectations and services has exploded. To use coaching to sustain change, leaders should answer these four questions:
What outcomes should I expect from coaching?
Who can I work with as my coach?
What should I do to receive good coaching?
What skills should I expect from my coach?
To lead to sustainable change, coaching needs to be based on a more rigorous typology of outcomes. Leaders sustain personal behavior change when they identify specific behaviors that can and should be changed: coaches provide feedback and advice about how to make those new behaviors consistently happen. Leaders sustain change when their coaches help them to see the valued corporate outcomes or personal results that come from the change.
Self-Coaching. Leaders coach themselves by being self-aware of their behaviors and desired performance. Self-coaching occurs when we self-monitor and recognize how our intentions are not aligned with our actions. At some level, self-coaching is the most ideal and efficient.
Expert Coaching. A leader hires a professional coach who has credentials and experience to inform behavior and improve results. The choice of an individual coach is always a complex decision. Coaching certification ensure that the coach has basic knowledge, not that the coach will be successful in a specific relationship or even in general. This is the same situation other professions face.
Expert coaches can help leaders to sustain changes in both behavior and results. They may explore candid (and at times brutal) information about the leader's behavior and performance. They may make suggestions about how to improve and challenge the status quo. They may help the leader to create a personal leadership brand by combining behavior and results into a leadership identity.
When leaders use coaches to help sustain their behaviors, their chosen behaviors will be more likely to endure over time.
Source: Dave Ulrich: Leadership Sustainability: Seven Disciplines to Achieve the Changes Great Leaders Know They Must Make