Article in brief:
The book Trillion Dollar Coach exploring the coaching career of the late Bill Campbell by Alan Eagle, Eric Schmidt, and Jonathan Rosenberg provides a number of insights on the benefits of coaching.
Here are our top 3 takeaways:
1. Empower yourself to be a great leader
Leadership is one of those skills that is refined for years. Having a coach helps you cut the learning curve and have new eyes that allow you to learn through their experience and acquired knowledge.
2. Trust your team
Delegating is hard for the leader as they take responsibility for the company/team’s success. With coaches, they push you forward to believe in your people, because trust builds the foundation of strength for your team.
3. Build genuine relationships with people
Executives are prone to be too focused on the business that they forgot how to connect with the people around them. Coaching helps you to improve, set, and achieve desired goals but most importantly, to care and love your people deeper, as one of Bill Campbell’s executive teachings.
Seeking coaching is not a weakness but rather a vital component allowing you to unlock the greatness in yourself.
There’s a good reason for having an executive coach
According to an Executive Coaching Survey from Stanford Business, “nearly two-thirds of CEOs do not receive outside leadership advice. “Lonely at the top” resonates for most of them.”
Oftentimes, coaching is seen as an activity or form of development taken for poor performers in an organisation. That impression takes place in most of us, especially on the top management.
“Even the best-of-the-best CEOs have their blind spots and can dramatically improve their performance with an outside perspective weighing in.”
Stephen Miles, CEO of The Miles Group.
Relatively, throughout the years, most of the influential and powerful personas in today’s world have had coaches and mentors guiding their businesses and lives. From Steve Jobs at Apple, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Sundar Pichai at Google, Brad Smith at Intuit, John Donahoe at eBay, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, Dick Costolo at Twitter, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. These executives benefited from Bill Campbell’s coaching where they all attribute him as a vital component of their success.
If you are an executive, manager, leader, or aspiring to be one, here are 3 reasons why you need a coach as part of your career.
1. It empowers you to become a great leader
“Your title makes you a manager. Your people makes you a leader”
Oftentimes, importance is sought through job titles. It is imprinted’s like a badge of authority to a person. But as an executive or a leader, it’s important not just to have the title but to embody and practice great leadership within your people.
Leadership is learned and honed over the years. With the help of a coach, they will push you beyond your current limits. Sessions and conversations that encourage vulnerability about your weaknesses without embarrassment in order to assess, dive deep into the growth, and give you a different perspective on how can you manage your company and people well.
Coaches speak confidence in you and give you courage.
2. It enables you to trust your teams
“Build an envelope of trust, listen intently, practice complete candour, and be an evangelist for courage by believing in people more than they believe in themselves.”
Trust and delegation are sometimes some of the toughest things to do because they will base the team’s overall success.
Wins and losses would be the responsibility of the leader in charge. But to be successful, companies need to have teams that work together as communities. Companies that are at the top of their game have high-performing teams and are able to well and truly outmaneuver their competitors. The reason? Coaches encourage leaders to trust their team fully and as it says “People flourish in an organization when they have support, respect, and trust.”
At Performance Consultants International Gaskell says, “we believe it’s vitally important for leaders in today’s world to be values-driven, have a broad and deep vision, be authentic (be who they really are, and not be afraid to be so in front of others), be agile and be aligned. Coaching and other forms of self-development are great ways to explore and develop these parts of oneself.”
Coaches help you gain an external lens and look at the system of play and help people understand the problem they’re trying to solve and work together to achieve greatness.
3. It helps you to build relationships with your people
“There are things we all care about as people—love, family, money, attention, power, meaning, purpose. “
Different barriers that hinder an organisation to create great workplace relationships are positions, language, and lack of confidence are some to mention. As they say, workplaces are much stronger when people are connected.
“This combination of “sharp mind and warm heart” is unusual in many corporate circles, where cold people are seen as competent and warm people as incompetent. “Love is a word you don’t hear a lot in business settings,” the authors observe. “Love is part of what makes a great team great,” they emphasise,” Rao says.
Bill Campbell states that great coaches and leaders can break down the walls between professional and human personae, and embrace the whole person with love, getting to know people behind their professional roles according to the author.
Coaching enables leaders like you to unlock and unleash your full potential. Helping you bring greater value and abundance to the people and entities you serve.
If you’d like to hear a little bit more about how a coach could help your team and your organisation then you want to reach out to us here and let’s grab a coffee!