Leadership & Executive Coaching – See the Future, Create it Now

A leader’s communication abilities are critical to a team’s success. To understand why, you need to think about the role leaders play: They motivate others to follow them and work toward shared goals.

The ability to effectively communicate affects the efficiency of the group and determines how tasks are accomplished. To ensure these tasks are done effectively, you must ensure that you are exhibiting the effective communication skills necessary to align your team goals and the plan to achieve them.

Communication is made up of several discrete skills. Some of the most important communication skills for leaders include:

• Adaptability: The ability to adapt your communication style to different situations and audiences.
• Active listening: The ability to remain engaged and attentive during conversation, paying attention to verbal and non-verbal forms of communication.
• Transparency: The ability to communicate your company’s goals, opportunities, challenges, and strategy in an open and transparent way.
• Clarity: The ability to simplify a message by providing the right level of detail for a given audience to motivate them to act.
• Inquisitiveness: The ability to ask open-ended questions that spark thoughtful discussion.
• Empathy: As mentioned above, the ability to recognize the emotions of those you communicate with and using that understanding to adjust your communication style.
• Body language: Presenting open and comforting body language that builds rapport and makes others feel comfortable sharing opinions.

Skills that enable you to use critical thinking to solve complex problems and plan for the future. These skills are essential for accomplishing business objectives, overcoming obstacles, and addressing challenges—particularly if they’re projected to take weeks, months, or even years to achieve.

Strategic thinking skills include:

• Analytical skills: To ideate a strategy that helps your organization reach its objectives, you must be capable of analyzing a variety of inputs—from financial statements and OKRs, to market conditions, emerging business trends, and internal resource allocation. This initial analysis is crucial to creating a strategy that aligns with the current reality facing your organization.
• Communication skills: Putting a strategy into place for your company, regardless of its size, requires solid communication skills. The ability to communicate complex ideas, collaborate with internal and external stakeholders, build consensus, and ensure everyone is aligned and working toward shared goals are all central to strategic thinking.
• Problem-solving skills: Strategic planning is often used to solve problems or address challenges, such as missed financial targets, inefficient workflows, an emerging competitor, or global crisis. Implementing a strategy that addresses the central challenge you face requires you to first understand the problem and its potential solutions. From there, you can craft a strategy that moves your organization closer to solving it.
• Planning and management skills: Strategy isn’t just about thinking of a solution—it involves implementation, too. Once data has been analyzed, the problem is understood, and a solution has been identified, you need strong planning and leadership skills to bring everything together.

As a professional, you are being judged not only on your performance but also on your presence. People form an impression of others within seconds of meeting them. The real question, then, is not whether you’ll create an impression, but rather, will you create the one that you want?

• Rely on feedback: Actively solicit feedback on your presence from your manager, direct reports, colleagues, and mentors.
• Tune into how you communicate: Everything you say and do sends a message. Beyond the words you choose, consider how you use your voice and your accompanying non-verbal behaviors.
• Experiment with new behaviors: Based on the feedback you received, choose just one or two presence-building behaviors to practice.
• Be present: Multi-tasking, mind-wandering, or thinking about work that’s piling up as you attend a meeting or interact with others will detract from your presence.

Is ‘one where coaching is the predominant style of working together and where a commitment to grow the organisation is embedded in a parallel commitment to grow the people in the organisation.’* A coaching culture improves not only the way employees interact with each other, but also the interactions they have with customers and potential clients.

A coaching culture enables radical organizational transformation by building conversational and coaching skills on a daily basis. A coaching culture creates a climate where people can freely:

• Creates a climate where people can realise their potential
• Give and receive feedback
• Support and stretch each other’s thinking
• Challenge each other with support, and stress-test ideas where appropriate
• Engage in development conversations that are short in length, but strong in impact

* As defined by Clutterbuck and Megginson