Leadership development Archives

Discover how coaching fits in a leadership model.

– 3 mins read –

Douglas Conant, former CEO of Campbell Soup Company, has defined his seven essential practices of leadership in the ConantLeadership Flywheel. These seven practices make up a flywheel, shown in the diagram below, and he summarizes them as “tough-minded on standards and tender-hearted with people”.

We love how Inspire Trust is the foundation practice, at the centre of the flywheel, and that the number 1 pillar is Clarify Higher Purpose – a meaningful journey is key to a fulfilling life.

The ConantLeadership Flywheel

So where would you assign a coaching approach in this wheel? Our answer is that it fits across ALL areas of the wheel, and supports every aspect.

Looking at Build Vitality as an example, the coaching approach acknowledges that vitality is within each human being in the form of power sources and strengths and these are unique to each individual. With the right tools and environment, people can tap into these to build vitality.

The coaching approach explores these power sources and strengths to raise awareness and to collate a pool of resources the individual can draw upon as and when they need. In this way, we are tapping into potential that allows for the person to come from a place of strength and energy.

Creating an optimal environment, for example with the right amount of support and challenge, celebration of achievements, constructive feedback and focus on strengths and power sources will enable people to thrive and create a high energy culture.

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Our experience tells us that a coaching approach supports and enhances all of the seven practices in the wheel. Should we be lobbying for coaching to be foundation practice number eight? Can you be a successful leader without it? At Performance Consultants International, we believe that the best leaders have a fully integrated coaching approach in order to deliver the very best from both them and their employees.

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How can you bring coaching into your organization?

Sir John and his colleagues at Performance Consultants were the first to take coaching into the workplace and coined the term “performance coaching” in the early 1980s. We continue to lead the field in performance improvement through coaching leadership training.

Select one of the options shown. Or get in touch and one of our world-class leadership development consultants will work with you to create a tailored programme that meets your specific needs.

Attend a Coaching Course – experience the benefits of coaching first hand. See our Global Training Calendar to find the right course for you
Transformational Leader Pathway – learn how to be a leader–coach with a coaching leadership style that creates a culture of high performance for you, your team and entire organization
Performance Coach Certification – become a coach or take your coaching skills to the next level so that you can practise transformational leadership coaching
Individual Coaching (1:1) – take your leadership to the next level with a tailored, fast-track professional development coaching programme
Team Development – unlock the next level of potential in your team with team coaching

The Performance Curve | Performance Consultants International

David Brown explains how transformational leaders create high-performance cultures.

– 5 mins read –

David Brown is CEO of Performance Consultants International, the company he co-founded with Sir John Whitmore, the father of coaching in the workplace. David has been instrumental in shaping the global performance, leadership and coaching industry for over 20 years. He was awarded the rarely bestowed Igniting Social Progress Award by the ICF Foundation in recognition of the global impact of his vision for raising performance in the workplace, and his belief in the power of individuals and organizations to create a better future.

What your grandmother could teach your organization

I invite you to think of a person you loved being with when you were young. Not a parent but perhaps a teacher, grandparent, friend of the family or other adult who positively influenced you. If I ask you to remember how you felt when you were with that person, the chances are that you’ll recall feeling listened to, that you had their full attention. You would say that although you were young this older person believed in you and treated you as an equal, and if they challenged you it was with trust and respect. To quote Maya Angelou:

We’ve run this exercise all over the world and we’ve found people everywhere have broadly the same response. And the result is they felt their potential to be limitless.

This is what high emotional intelligence feels like. It’s the ability to relate to others from a paradigm of trust rather than fear. How does this compare to the leaders in your organization? If you are one of those leaders, how do you measure up?

COACHING TRAINING FOR LEADERS CREATED BY SIR JOHN WHITMORE

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“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Maya Angelou

Leaders set the tone

In organizations, the leaders set the tone for everybody else. Studies by the Hay Group have shown they are the greatest influence on an organization’s culture and bottom-line performance, which they can affect by as much as 30%! Meanwhile, according to The Conference Board CEO Challenge:

“the cultural DNA of an organization is critical to success, from operational efficiency to better customer service, to greater talent attraction and retention, to higher levels of business performance and breakthroughs in innovation.”

So it seems crazy how very few organizations take a proactive approach to creating and measuring their culture.

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The Performance Curve

The Performance Curve focuses on the collective prevailing mindset of the culture and how this creates the conditions for performance. It provides a useful tool for organizations or individuals to gain an immediate idea of where they are operating, either from the perspective of “this is the culture of my organization” or “this is the culture I create”. Of course, different parts of an organization can operate on different parts of the curve! You can use this awareness, to see what needs to change in order to improve performance.

The leader who is emotionally intelligent will create a high-performance culture through their way of being. A high-performance culture is often described as a “collective mentality” where there is a strong community spirit and collaboration around a shared sense of purpose. This interdependent culture, where people are able to grow and fulfil their potential, is the most highly evolved as seen on The Performance Curve.

If you’re very lucky you may have experienced this culture, but the chances are greater that you are more familiar with the other prevailing mindsets identified by The Performance Curve: impulsive; dependent; independent; inter-dependent. Each of these stages follows the process of individual psychological development which sees a reactive, short-term “Whatever happens, happens” way of being (impulsive) progress through dependence and “following the rules”, typified by behaviours such as judgement and blame, to independence which can be high-performing but carries the risks that it is too individualist. The ultimate stage is interdependence, a collective mentality supported by the leader I have described.

There are challenges to changing culture, even if there is a clear view of the benefits of a more mature and evolved state. It can push people out of their comfort zone, especially as giving people trust and ownership can feel like losing power for leaders, however they soon find they get this back in multiple from a team that is empowered and responsible and operating in a more agile way that is responsive to customers.

Coaching is bigger than coaching

A coaching style of leadership is the enabler for a high-performance culture because it shifts the organizational mindset to interdependence.

As Stephen Covey said in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People:

Something your grandmother or that wise older person knew all along.

“Whether you are the president of the company or the janitor, the moment you step from independence into interdependence in any capacity, you step into a leadership role.”
Stephen Covey

Coaching for Performance book for high-performance cultures

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“Chapter 2: Creating High-performance Cultures”, Coaching for Performance, Sir John Whitmore and Performance Consultants

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How can you create a high-performance culture in your organization?

Select one of the options shown. Or get in touch and one of our world-class leadership development consultants will work with you to create a tailored programme that meets your specific needs.

Attend a Coaching Course – experience the benefits of coaching first hand. See our Global Training Calendar to find the right course for you
Transformational Leader Pathway – learn how to be a leader–coach with a coaching leadership style that creates a culture of high performance for you, your team and entire organization
Performance Coach Certification – become a coach or take your coaching skills to the next level so that you can practise transformational leadership coaching
Individual Coaching (1:1) – take your leadership to the next level with a tailored, fast-track professional development coaching programme
Team Development – unlock the next level of potential in your team with team coaching

Discover how to face up to the cultural challenge, and how organizations are risking their future.

– 5 mins read –

Observing the speed with which an organization of Kodak’s history and calibre is overtaken by disruptive innovation, and reading research by Innosight that estimates “three-quarters of today’s S&P 500 will be replaced by 2027″ (reported by @HBR), it’s no wonder big organizations are scrambling for answers to these new threats.

I was reflecting on this after speaking at the Corporate L&D Summit hosted by Luxatia International – a great opportunity to connect with fellow senior professionals to share ideas and concerns.

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The boom in executive coaching
– Financial Times

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I talked about The Performance Curve which we use to measure company culture and bottom-line performance. It maps culture states from Impulsive to Interdependent, showing how the quality of interactions between leaders and their direct reports releases untapped potential, in the right-hand quadrant. Our experience working with leaders using a coaching style of management, as pioneered by Sir John Whitmore, has shown how this can be achieved.

When I took the opportunity to poll the audience to gauge where delegates felt their organizations were on The Performance Curve, the vast majority of people in the room felt that their companies had a Dependent Culture. This tends to be characterized by a “command and control” paradigm. Dependent Cultures are typically the second phase of organizational maturity where the introduction of processes and systems to curtail inconsistency and mitigate risk, simultaneously stifle innovation and autonomy with employees expected to “follow the rules.”

While there is a rational justification for a Dependent Culture, the risks of limiting employee performance and organizational progress are obvious.

Change needs to come from the top down however, conventional leadership mindsets are the key challenge for today’s organizations – a view echoed in the conversations that took place at last week’s Summit.

Enabling leaders to empower their teams can only happen by shifting mindsets, which is where we see the power of Coaching for Performance. The motivation has to be intrinsic and systemic; meaning everyone, from the CEO to the new hire, recognizes the power of coaching practices in unleashing potential for both people and organizations.

It’s frequently neglected but an essential part of all transformations whether these are Agile, Digital or Innovation. The alternative for organizations is a slow decline and eventual irrelevance in a market where change is accelerating and disruption is constant.

If you’re looking to improve your business culture and performance, or would like a copy of my presentation, get in touch – [email protected].

Finally, I highly recommend Luxatia International’s Corporate L&D Summit. The quality of content and conversations was exceptional and the event provided a refreshing mix of interactive presentations, exercises and case studies.

The author Tiffany Gaskell is Performance Consultants’ Global Director of Coaching and Leadership.

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How can you bring coaching into your organization?

Select one of the options shown. Or get in touch and one of our world-class leadership development consultants will work with you to create a tailored programme that meets your specific needs.

Attend a Coaching Course – experience the benefits of coaching first hand. See our Global Training Calendar to find the right course for you
Transformational Leader Pathway – learn how to be a leader–coach with a coaching leadership style that creates a culture of high performance for you, your team and entire organization
Performance Coach Certification – become a coach or take your coaching skills to the next level so that you can practise transformational leadership coaching
Individual Coaching (1:1) – take your leadership to the next level with a tailored, fast-track professional development coaching programme
Team Development – unlock the next level of potential in your team with team coaching

Tiffany Gaskell describes the most powerful way of investing in learning and development to create transformational leaders and maximize productivity in a fast-moving world.

– 8 mins read –

The latest research shows over 80% of organizations use coaching and believe in its benefits.¹ However, there is still a broad lack of understanding of what coaching is and how to use coaching to maximize results – another recent study found that only 30% of people surveyed actually understood what coaching was.² Even those organizations already embarked on creating a coaching culture acknowledge the opportunities for development are huge, with growing awareness of the different types of coaching and most effective applications.³

Among the growing awareness and interest in coaching, organizations are missing a trick. It is well-known that the greatest influencers of an organization’s culture are its leaders: studies show that leadership behaviour impacts bottom-line performance by up to 30 per cent.⁴ External executive coaching is rightly seen as one of the most effective forms of leadership development,⁵ with many organizations choosing to invest in it, however helping leaders to develop a coaching leadership style is overlooked.

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“It is a weight off my shoulders, my team is more self-sufficient.”
“People come up with solutions that are wildly different. And they have full ownership and are acting with commitment.”
“They figure out through the process what they want to do and then have the excitement and energy for next steps.”
In-house Coaching for Performance participants

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What is transformational leadership?

A “transformational leader” is a leader who can engage and inspire by using transformational soft skills that create high performance in themselves, their teams and their whole organization. Transformational leaders are the leaders of tomorrow and will enable their teams and whole organizations to rise to the complexity and multiple challenges of today’s business world.

If, instead of coaching an individual leader to improve their own performance, coaching skills are leveraged to create a transformational leadership style and taught to leaders, the organization will achieve a maximum return on their investment in coaching.

According to the recent survey by the Leadership Institute at the London Business School, today’s leaders find themselves fire-fighting and unable to spend time on strategy and planning. In such an environment, leaders need to be supported to break the pattern and, instead of solving problems for others, develop others to solve their own problems. Leaders who are able to do this will find themselves freed from fire-fighting to attend to those overarching strategic opportunities where they can make a difference.

“If leaders manage by the principles of coaching, they get the job done to a higher standard and develop their people simultaneously. It sounds too good to be true to have 250 days a year of getting the job done and 250 days a year of employee development per person, but that is precisely what a coaching leader does get.”
Sir John Whitmore, Co-Founder, Performance Consultants

Transformational leaders achieve a triple win

A leader leveraging coaching skills to create a high performance culture creates 250 development days per year for employees:

It is clear that transformational leaders achieve a triple win. The leader develops themself and gains the skills to develop their teams; groups of leaders from the same organization undergo the same leadership development, focused on finding their personal connection to leadership. This creates a shared language which they take with them into the workplace. They in turn develop others. This is what we mean by transformational leaders.

The return on investment is significant, with transformational leaders reporting an average 800% ROI. For one cohort of 17 leaders, this represented US$1,245,000 which came from improvements in bottom-line profitability and cost reductions. One participant reported that by delegating more and trusting in his team, the culture of the team had strengthened. This in turn impacted productivity which he estimated to have improved by at least 10% or US$350,000 per year.

Leaders with coaching skills create a high-performance culture

With organizations typically missing out on approximately 60% of the talent available to them,⁶ a coaching leadership style enables leaders and organizations to harness the full potential of their employees by inspiring and engaging them in a way that shifts the relationship and moves the culture to one of high performance. To help leaders and organizations reflect on the culture being created in their organization, we developed The Performance Curve model which we published in Coaching for Performance, Fifth Edition. The four stages of The Performance Curve are described by our CEO David Brown in his thoughts on Creating the Conditions for High Performance.

By leveraging coaching skills to create a high-performance culture that is led by transformational leaders, the investment in coaching benefits everybody, not only the few, and organization most of all.

Never has this new leadership been more relevant with leaders and organizations challenged to evolve by society, including employees who want to find fulfilment and purpose in their work. Equally, customers demand that companies act with integrity. Meeting these extended demands requires leaders today to be able to inspire and engage, with results that are truly transformational.

TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP COURSE | TRANSFORMATION AWARENESS FOR LEADERS AND COACHES

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The author Tiffany Gaskell is Performance Consultants’ Global Director of Coaching and Leadership.

¹ Leadership Institute, London Business School (2017) Leadership Survey 2017 – Navigating Uncertainty: Global leadership challenges, London Business School.
² The International Coach Federation (ICF) 2017 Global Consumer Awareness Study showed consumers struggle to differentiate between coaching, consulting, mentoring, counselling etc. 66% indicated they were aware of professional business and/or life coaching, however when presented with definitions for five personal and organizational support professions only 30% understood what coaching is, many getting it confused with mentoring.
³ Mann, Clive (2016) 6th Ridler Report: Strategic trends in the use of coaching, Ridler & Co.
⁴ Hay Group and others.
⁵ Leadership Institute, London Business School (2017) Leadership Survey 2017 – Navigating Uncertainty: Global leadership challenges, London Business School.
⁶ Research by Performance Consultants International.

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How can you develop transformational leadership in your organization?

Select one of the options shown. Or get in touch and one of our world-class leadership development consultants will work with you to create a tailored transformation programme that meets your specific needs.

Attend a Coaching Course – experience the benefits of coaching first hand. See our Global Training Calendar to find the right course for you
Transformational Leader Pathway – learn how to be a leader–coach with a coaching leadership style that creates a culture of high performance for you, your team and entire organization
Performance Coach Certification – become a coach or take your coaching skills to the next level so that you can practise transformational leadership coaching
Individual Coaching (1:1) – take your leadership to the next level with a tailored, fast-track professional development coaching programme
Team Development – unlock the next level of potential in your team with team coaching

Discover the leader qualities needed for a modern CEO.

– 5 mins read –

What leader qualities do we ask of a 21st century CEO? The Harvard Business Review (HBR) has just issued an article entitled ‘What Leadership Looks Like in Different Cultures’. The article, authored by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Michael Sanger, considers what makes a great leader and focuses on how cultures react to different leadership styles: for example, passive-aggressive leaders are more widely accepted in Indonesia and Malaysia.

With all of the differences, are there similar traits that are desirable?

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The boom in executive coaching
– Financial Times

Join one of our webinars to find out more about a coaching leadership style

Find dates & sign up

Our experience of working with successful leaders shows that they are able to connect with their people at a deeper level. Leaders should have the ability to transform the way employees think and feel, how they behave and respond to challenges, expand their team members’ potential, raise accountability and create powerful shifts in corporate perspective, performance and possibility. Where humility might once have been perceived as weakness in a leader, employees today welcome it as a sign of strong leadership. And they want their leader to be authentic. Alongside this, leader qualities such as courage and adaptability are essential within a changing business landscape that requires rapid responses to global challenges.

Coaching is very much related to how we live in the world – the coaching approach is, in essence, a way of being. In our work to help senior leaders develop the best leadership style, while we are building competencies, in the end we are working with human beings and they should not be taken as just a productive entity. Instead, we work with them to foster the understanding of what is going on inside of themselves, enabling them to become aware of their own self and the world. So that in turn, they envision what they can do for their people as a leader, and they develop the necessary leader qualities to make it possible.

Read more about the work we do on transformational leadership and creating a coaching leadership style.

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How can you bring coaching into your organization?

Select one of the options shown. Or get in touch and one of our world-class leadership development consultants will work with you to create a tailored programme that meets your specific needs.

Attend a Coaching Course – experience the benefits of coaching first hand. See our Global Training Calendar to find the right course for you
Transformational Leader Pathway – learn how to be a leader–coach with a coaching leadership style that creates a culture of high performance for you, your team and entire organization
Performance Coach Certification – become a coach or take your coaching skills to the next level so that you can practise transformational leadership coaching
Individual Coaching (1:1) – take your leadership to the next level with a tailored, fast-track professional development coaching programme
Team Development – unlock the next level of potential in your team with team coaching

Discover how to develop millennial leaders.

– 5 mins read –

Generation Y, the millennials – those born between 1983 and 2000 – are often characterized as tolerant and socially conscious, but also overconfident and entitled. In reality they represent the next stage in our human evolution. They believe businesses should provide fulfilment of purpose, innovation, work-life balance and solutions to the world’s biggest problems. From a 2014 Deloitte survey in which they interviewed 7,800 millennials from 26 countries, it turns out that 75 per cent also believe their organizations could do more to develop future leaders. To find out how we help Brandwatch – the fast-growing social media monitoring company – develop its millennial leaders, see below.

Leadership is changing. Now that almost everyone in the organization has access to the same information, and can process it just as fast, it’s more about setting direction than being the ‘front of all knowledge’. In fact, the younger, tech-savvy employees seem to process information even faster. The question now has become whether they believe in the leader’s direction, and their pace. The Deloitte study also shows that one in four millennials are asking for a chance to show their leadership skills, which points to the next step in corporate evolution: devolved responsibility.

So how do companies maintain the commitment of this tech-savvy, sometimes even described as narcissistic, generation? Employers need to give millennials more opportunity to develop personally and professionally. And, as reported in the survey, if businesses fail to address these concerns, they risk losing skilled professionals in the years ahead as many of the most talented millennials decide to leave large organizations and work for themselves – roughly 70 per cent of these millennials see themselves working independently at some point.

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The boom in executive coaching
– Financial Times

Join one of our webinars to find out more about a coaching leadership style

Find dates & sign up

Google, always perceived to be at cutting edge of innovation and top of the world’s ideal-employer ranking for today’s young talent, has run Project Oxygen to research the attributes of its best managers. After extensive research, it came up with 8 Rules on How to Be a Good Boss. We are delighted to see that Be A Good Coach tops the list. It is clear that these Generation Y professionals need – and want – to learn how to lead, not just from a technical skills perspective but also from an interpersonal perspective.

“One of the biggest missing pieces in the corporate world globally is adequate grooming and development of pipeline talent for succession into the most senior roles. This keeps on coming up in research as one of the most pressing strategic issues for CEOs and companies.”
John Collingwood, Director Global Organization Development, Medtronic

Creating a Coaching Culture at Millennials Employer, Brandwatch

The good news is that Being a Good Coach can be learned. Performance Consultants International is working with the social intelligence software company, Brandwatch, based out of Brighton, UK, with offices in the US and Germany. This Silicon Alley venture is growing very rapidly and has decided to create a supportive and empowering culture to manage the productivity and wellbeing of their existing employees and new hires.

Sebastian Hempstead, EVP The Americas, a forward thinking young leader, chose us after an extensive search for the right coach training company. He wanted to add coaching skills to his management and leadership style with the aim of being a better coach to his teams. After he attended our public course Coaching for Performance, Level 1, in New York with two of his colleagues, each at a different managerial level of the organization, the company decided that this learning should be distributed throughout the organization, which employs mostly millennials. They took advantage of the Corporate Discount Card described below to send additional managers to the Level 1 public course in London and New York. The aim is for them to learn coaching skills to create a coaching culture throughout the company.

“Company culture is very important at Brandwatch. We see ourselves as an innovative, creative, and honest company. We have built an employee roster of brilliant individuals that encompasses all of that. By emphasizing coaching as a managerial strategy, we’re investing in our own team,”
Hempstead

Corporate Discount Card: Flexibility and Cost Savings on Public Courses

The Corporate Discount Card allows companies to receive a substantial group discount for training their managers and leaders without having to organize an in-house group event. Instead, by buying bulk attendance on any of our public courses, the client will not only receive a significant per-head discount but will also be able to choose which of our global public workshops each manager attends and when. This flexibility allows attendees to choose the time and place that best fits their location and schedule, and also means that employees can split up and decide whether or not to be in the same workshops as their managers or direct reports.

If you would like to know more about our Corporate Discount Card, or any of our other coach training and leadership development services, please email our Chief Operating Officer James Neville or call him on +44 (0)20 3903 0011. He will be delighted to talk to you.

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meeting your needs

How can you bring coaching into your organization?

Select one of the options shown. Or get in touch and one of our world-class leadership development consultants will work with you to create a tailored programme that meets your specific needs.

Attend a Coaching Course – experience the benefits of coaching first hand. See our Global Training Calendar to find the right course for you
Transformational Leader Pathway – learn how to be a leader–coach with a coaching leadership style that creates a culture of high performance for you, your team and entire organization
Performance Coach Certification – become a coach or take your coaching skills to the next level so that you can practise transformational leadership coaching
Individual Coaching (1:1) – take your leadership to the next level with a tailored, fast-track professional development coaching programme
Team Development – unlock the next level of potential in your team with team coaching

In this article:

The ConantLeadership Flywheel

In this article:

What your grandmother could teach your organization

Leaders set the tone

The Performance Curve

Coaching is bigger than coaching

In this article:

What is transformational leadership?

Transformational leaders achieve a triple win

Leaders with coaching skills create a high-performance culture

In this article:

Creating a Coaching Culture at Millennials Employer, Brandwatch

Corporate Discount Card: Flexibility and Cost Savings on Public Courses