28 Nov 2022

Developing a coaching style to support hybrid leadership

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When working in a hybrid way, how do you get the best of your people? How do you encourage them to use their talent and expertise when they are working from different locations?

For many of us, the Covid-19 pandemic has seen us required to consider how we can get our people working together strategically, bringing their individualism, and doing their jobs regardless of whether they are working from, the office, or elsewhere.

Developing a coaching style to support hybrid leadership assists leaders in unlocking potential and asking questions as opposed to telling people what to do. Essentially, a coaching style is about getting your people to be their very best and tapping into their knowledge, skills, abilities, and aligning their values with the organisation's values.

In this blog, we cover the what, the why, and the how of coaching styles to support hybrid leadership.

What are the benefits of adopting coaching styles in hybrid leadership?

Adopting and developing a coaching style to support hybrid leadership brings about many benefits. Below, we share just a few:

  • A coaching style fosters employee engagement, trust, and motivation?- many organisations are struggling with trust. Often this is because they are telling their people what do to, how to do their job, and giving them directives. Upon adopting a coaching style, many leaders can foster employee engagement, trust, and motivation better.
  • Coaching encourages creativity and improves problem-solving?- when we encourage people to come together and bring their whole selves to work and share their ideas, leaders are much more likely to see outstanding results even when the whole team works remotely.
  • Adopting a coaching style increases retention and attraction of talent -?recruitment challenges are currently being faced by organisations across the world. By adopting a coaching style and considering employer branding, we are more likely to retain our top talent.
  • Coaching styles support the delivery of a coaching culture and the core business strategy?- developing a coaching style to support hybrid leadership can support the delivery of your coaching culture and the core business strategy.

How to develop a coaching style of leadership in your organisation

Knowing where to start when it comes to developing a coaching style within your organisation to support hybrid leadership can be challenging. Below, we share some of our top tips.

Assess what you are already doing

It can be tempting to dive in at the deep end and try and implement new strategies as quickly as possible. When it comes to developing a coaching style of leadership, you must assess what you are already doing within your organisation first.

By assessing what you are already doing, you can determine whether your people are on board, what needs to change within the organisation, and what is currently working.

Define your coaching strategy

After assessing what you are already doing, you can begin to define your coaching strategy. It can be helpful here to start with the end in mind.

Where do you want to be? Why do you want to develop a coaching style to support hybrid leadership? What's important for you, your people, and your organisation?

As many people are still somewhat hesitant about coaching, upon defining your coaching strategy, it's helpful to develop a business case study to show the organisation that a coaching style is beneficial. Here you can touch on the expected outcomes of developing a coaching style to support hybrid leadership.

Engage with leaders and stakeholders

How often do you hear people saying that they are unsure of whether they see the benefits when it comes to coaching? How many people have you seen shy away from coaching and instead manage or micromanage?

When it comes to understanding how to develop a coaching style of leadership in your organisation, engaging with leaders and stakeholders is key. By engaging leaders and stakeholders and sharing the benefits of adopting coaching styles with them, you can support them in seeing the bigger picture. But this alone is often not enough.

To help your leaders and stakeholders, offering them the opportunity to experience coaching comes highly recommended. If your people experience coaching, they can witness the benefits first-hand. In turn, they'll be more likely to advocate coaching in the workplace. After all, if we don't know how something can support us, we can't promote it to our people.

Equip your leaders and managers with coaching skills?

How much training have your people had? Are your leaders and managers familiar with coaching skills? To what extent do your leaders already employ coaching styles in their day-to-day roles?

Asking yourself the above questions will enable you to understand what skills your leaders and managers already have. From here, you can support their development by equipping them with practical knowledge that they can use now and in the future.

Developing a Coaching Style?

Training your leaders and managers to use leadership coaching in their hybrid roles is essential. In most organisations, there's usually some sort of coaching going on. But this is not always consistent and it's not happening everywhere.

When coaching is employed, we usually see things like formal coaching happening. This could include external executive coaches coming in and conducting one-to-one coaching sessions. If this is happening in your organisation, does it happen in terms of performance reviews or is it just something that happens once a month when it's ‘coaching time'?

When we start to think about how we can develop and employ coaching differently, we often question how we can bring coaching into our everyday conversations. Though this might be overlooked in your organisation now, we want coaching to be part of our everyday informal conversations.

Whether you've just had a chat with an employee on Zoom or Teams, you tend to get the hang of using coaching styles when you use them in all our interactions (where appropriate). When using a coaching style to support hybrid leadership becomes the norm, you can begin to review how you use them with suppliers, clients, and others you interact with.

Contact Us Today

At The Leadership Coaches, we are on hand to support you in developing a coaching style to support hybrid leadership. To find out more, contact us via email, telephone, or our contact us page.