Whether you’re new to management or an experienced people leader, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and distracted. Needless to say, overwhelm and distractions can waste time, effort and minimise productivity. Hence, it’s useful to have a regular reminder to discipline ourselves to invest our time in the most VITAL aspects of management. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by problems, created by yourself or others, it’s time to transform your career, shift your focus and make some fundamental changes. Here are 6 reasons to work with an Executive Coach and pay it forward to your team, if you have one.
The Common Tale Of The New Manager
If you’re a manager, your story may read something like this. Perhaps your story goes something like this. As a high-performance team member, you were successful and happy. You achieved your targets and enjoyed the rewards. A management position opened up and you stepped into it eagerly.
Things started well. Your enthusiasm shone on the rest of the team, perhaps morale and productivity surged and then, after a couple of months, it began to decline. You worked harder and harder, longer and longer and still, performance was declining. Even more concerning, team morale was following suit.
You may even take a management seminar or two to improve your efficiency. Ironically, this just seems to make more room for work. There’s always more to do isn’t there?
Ever Decreasing Circles
To address these issues you work even harder, you allow work to flow into your weekends, this minimises your downtime and life at home begins to suffer. You become obsessive about how to solve all these problems and the pressure builds in your mind until you can only think about work.
Clarity begins to dissolve, overwhelm feels like normal and silly mistakes happen. It feels as if everything is getting away from you. You know that your boss has noticed. Your manager starts to ask for more reports, start to pay closer attention and involve themselves in more of your projects.
Does this sound familiar?
It’s Never As Easy As We Imagine It To Be
Learning to become an effective manager is one of life’s hardest apprenticeships. Nobody is born a great leader. To become one we must learn the art of management and control processes, people management and self-mastery. It’s a journey rather than a checklist!
In overwhelm state, EVERYTHING feels like a problem. Moreover, if we allow the feeling to overtake us we become paralysed. This can result in taking action too late, directing our focus towards things we can’t control or, worst-case scenario, taking no action at all.
Some days it will feel as if you’re hanging on for dear life, unable to move. You long for the old days when life was simple, easy and you were just a team member doing your job well.
Working With An Executive Coach Can Help
If you chat with friends you might talk about the avalanche of paperwork on your desk that never seems to get smaller. Or perhaps you feel as if all of your colleagues need something from you yesterday, and none of those things seems to relate to your job in any way. Maybe you seem to spend more of your time in meetings than actually doing anything, and when you do sit down to start your ‘to-do’ list you get immediately interrupted.
Then there’s your team. Those that require something else from you before they can start their job, or perhaps they ask the same question, again and again, never seeming to trust the same answer. What’s more, they’re everywhere, aren’t they? In the elevator, in the canteen, in the car park, in the toilet! Ha! Would it be easier to work from space?
The Risks of Micromanagement
Even more frustrating is when you watch your team finishing up and heading off to their home lives, happy and carefree. How is it possible that so many managers find themselves running out of time when their team members are running out of work?
Quite simply, there’s not enough space to think, not enough time to get everything done, and no solution in sight. Well, this is where the power of coaching comes in. If you’re at the end of your tether, it’s time to engage and here are 6 reasons to work with an executive coach.
Why? Because somewhere in the middle of this tornado of chaos is some very high risk behaviour. By refusing to learn to delegate effectively, or by holding on too tight, you’re putting your own job at risk along with your team’s performance.
6 Reasons To Work With An Executive Coach
1. Time
One of the purposes of coaching is to free up our time so that we can operate as managers, rather than doing the work of a subordinate whilst trying to juggle management tasks.
As managers, we aren’t in a position to delegate until we’re certain the project is on the right track and that their team members can handle the project by themselves.
Naturally, some can be delegated with ease and immediacy, whilst the complexities of others may require a greater level of training and guidance.
Either way, learning effective delegation is critical to becoming a better manager. It frees up time and mind space to work on planning and envisioning.
What’s more, it forces us to demand that our team members take ownership, hence developing them in the process.
Executive coaching supports in letting go in a way that allows us to trust the process. Coaching gives us the opportunity to get others to look after and develop projects, even if they have are challenging.
2. Perspective
Executive Coaching breaks us out of our thought limitations. To put it another way, it forces us to consider our assumptions differently and open our minds to new possibilities.
Since a key aspect of management is guiding others to grow their perspective, it’s useful if ours is at least two steps ahead of the mindsets of those we’re guiding. Moreover, if we’re engaged in finding solutions, it’s often to find solutions at a different level to the level at which problems are created.
Additionally, executive coaching gives us a greater focus on our work values and the ability to play to our strengths. The more we play to our strengths, the more we begin the see the value in developing our team in such a way they can each play to theirs.
What’s more, as our perspective grows, our confidence builds. As our confidence builds we see the real power of teamwork. We appreciate that we want team members who disagree with us, who challenge us. Multiple perspectives deliver a greater chance of success.
3. Focus Forward
Executive Coaching supports us in building our resilience, in our mind and behaviour. Rather than laying blame, coaching supports us in unpicking processes for redesign and reapplication.
We’re only as focused as our mindset allows us to be.
By purposeful placing our focus forward, we adopt the testing and feedback mentality. Specifically, this allows us to learn from past experiences and apply them more effectively in the future.
What’s more, by approaching business in this way, our thinking becomes more innovative and creative, directed by our curiosity, rather than fear of getting things wrong.
As we lead our teams from the front, by osmosis, they learn resilience. That is to say, they learn to pick themselves up after a challenging day or a bad week, look to the future, and try again.
4. Beyond The Comfort Zone - Ownership & Accountability
Letting go of control and trusting others to do things that we are responsible for can be difficult. However, part of owning the position of management is allowing and encouraging others to take ownership too. Where we make others accountable, we empower them with autonomy and support them to find their solutions.
The more we take on team tasks, the more our team start to believe we either don’t trust them or we want to complete those tasks. In doing so, we’re responsible for training our team to push tasks in our direction rather than think and act of their own volition!
This is a powerful skill to learn. Not only does it prevent us from ‘rescuing’ others by fixing problems (otherwise known as micromanagement), it frees up our time to focus on the role of management. This act, in turn, allows us to direct our urge for control towards cost control and financial management, increasing productivity and revenue.
5. Confidence Building
Fear is the most common barrier to our success. In fact, when we have fear it’s almost impossible to muster feelings of optimism and possibility, let alone trust.
Executive coaching provides the support to grow our self-confidence and self-esteem. During sessions, you can clarify the source of doubtful feelings or lack of confidence and see beyond them towards resolution.
Maintaining a positive mindset, like any behaviour, is a habit worthy of cultivation. It takes time, objective support and space to fall and pick ourselves up again.
Finding our unique path to lead ourselves to resilience is an invaluable experience that servers us in every area of our lives.
6. Paying It Forward
When we work on developing our own growth, we learn through the experience. This process of learning by doing gives us powerful tools that teach us how to coach and develop the individuals in our own team. Specifically, we can teach others to grow their perspective, ask powerful questions, manage their time more effectively and develop a profound sense of ownership and accountability in their work.
This process not only benefits the entire team, we are also developing the career path of those who work alongside us. We are preparing them to step into their own management role. Who doesn’t want to work for a manager who is committed to developing their team?
In fact, when we focus on training a replacement for our own role, we naturally forge a path to promotion. It’s a win for all concerned.
Find Out More About Working With Fire Dragon
Looking for more than 6 reasons to work with an Executive Coach? No problem. We accept all levels of convincer strategy! Get in touch and we’ll give you even more reasons.
Find out more about Executive Coaching here.
Discover how you can upskill quickly with our Core Skills Training Courses.
Learn more about our approach to Bespoke Training Design.
Click here to find out more about Certified NLP For Business Training.
Specialising in Solopreneurs, Entrepreneurs and Growth Businesses, we know how to support you in mastering your mind and behaviour for exponential development and success.
Looking for more support tools and resources? Click here to access our You Tube Channel.