“My best skill was that I was coachable. I was a sponge and aggressive to learn.”
-Michael Jordan
Did you know that most large companies utilize leadership and management coaches for their executives? From the development of interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, and team building to identifying and overcoming challenges hindering growth, an executive leadership coach can benefit leaders and aspiring leaders at any level in an organization.
I often correct the misconception that executive coaching is reserved for people at large corporations; the leadership skills honed by working with a coach are fundamental in creating meaningful relationships, growth, and achieving personal goals for people at any stage in their career.
Here are 5 ways an executive leadership coach will benefit you in 2021.
Gain a Clear Outside Perspective
Many of us have a distorted view of ourselves, whether positive or negative, and individuals in leadership positions are no exception. In fact, many leaders are less in touch with recognizing their weaknesses than professionals who are less experienced and self-assured.
The outside perspective brought by an executive leadership coach can assist leaders (and aspiring leaders) with accurately perceiving an area of opportunity for growth or identifying what may be holding them back from achieving their full potential. Whether that be removing the blinders on how you communicate, how your team perceives you, or your own capabilities, getting clear on obstacles and areas of improvement is critical in the pursuit of success; an executive leadership coach helps you pinpoint those areas.
Establish Competitive Advantage
Working with an executive leadership coach is an opportunity to strengthen your competency as a leader, and those who don’t are likely overlooking areas for personal and professional improvement.
Coaching allows you to develop your leadership skills to the point of competitive advantage by helping you grow your skills and competency and capitalize on opportunities often missed by individuals who are too close to a situation with no outside perspective.
Build Effective Teams and Relationships
A leader’s most important role in an organization is to cultivate an effective and prosperous culture and to maintain that culture by hiring and developing the right team members within it.
Healthy relationships, interpersonal skills, trust, and emotional intelligence are key to unlocking a team’s potential. In most cases, failure in an organization or team is a product of poor leadership. Poor leadership can mean many things: poor communication, too much or too little management, a lack of empathy and connection among teams, an inability to maintain commitments or a myriad of other things may be to blame. An executive coach can teach you how to build trust between yourself and your reports and how to trust your team. Micromanage is the most apparent indication of trust issues, and leaders need to realize that their success is not contingent on their own accomplishments but on the accomplishments of their direct reports.
An executive leadership coach can help you and your team succeed by helping you overcome the impulse to micromanage and teaching you to relinquish control and maintain a balance between management and micromanagement.
Receive Continuous Support and Accountability
An executive leadership coach gives you an emotional, strategic, and mental support system for overcoming obstacles and tackling new challenges. But perhaps most importantly, they help hold you accountable. In formulating goals, staying on track, pushing past roadblocks, measuring success, and pivoting as needed, an executive leadership coach is with you every step of the way.
Goals require hard work, perseverance, and commitment, and because results don’t come overnight, many people lose motivation and give up. By leveraging an executive leadership coach, you give yourself an accountability system.
Achieve Goals
Some leaders have difficulty zooming out from the daily minutia and articulating their vision for long term accomplishments. An executive coach can help you identify your vision and the resources you’ll need to achieve it, then break it down into obtainable steps.
About Dr. Wilkerson, PD, MBA, PCC.
Do you want to increase your impact? Do you want to increase profits under your leadership? Do you want to develop and use your abilities to the fullest to better connect with and lead others? Executive Leadership Coaching covers these bases. Dr. Jerrund Wilkerson, PD, MBA, PCC, has more than 30 years of successful executive leadership coaching in the United States and internationally.
As a licensed pharmacist, he is particularly passionate about helping develop effective leaders in the healthcare community. Dr. Wilkerson has coached and trained thousands of managers and leaders. He is a certified coach and member of the John Maxwell Leadership Team.
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