![](https://libraryofprofessionalcoaching.com/wp-app/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/fall-treewallwheel-850x491.jpg)
3. Coaching becomes a key leadership
competency
Ask people to describe the best leader they’ve ever had and you’ll hear comments like: “She’s a great listener. He asks a lot of questions. There’s authenticity. You walk away feeling like you’ve been heard, so that even if you disagree with the ultimate decision, you can support it.”
Coaching skills are being recognized widely as leadership skills. The old top-down, command-and-control management style of yesteryear is giving way to a more collaborative, interactive style of leading that utilizes coaching skills.
DDI defines managing as time spent planning and doing administrative tasks, and interacting as engaging in coach-like conversations. In surveys, leaders/managers estimate spending 41% of their work time managing, and nearly 20% of their time coaching. Given a preference, they would flip those numbers – doubling the amount of time they spend interacting with employees, and halving the time they spend managing them.
The term manager-coach is now in common use. The Conference Board defines a manager-coach as “a leader who works with his or her subordinates within the organization to create awareness and support behavior change [using] coaching knowledge, approaches, and skills.”
More organizations than ever now expect their leaders to coach their people effectively. In a 2015 ICF/HCI survey, 84% of respondents said that coaching is part of a manager/leader’s job – up 2% from the previous year.
Still, most leaders lack core coaching skills.
DDI has evaluated thousands of leaders in simulated work environments to assess their proficiency in such coaching competencies as active listening, responding with empathy, building trust, and providing support without removing responsibility from the coachee. The result: fewer than one in three leaders displays high proficiency in those areas. [DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2014/15]
Not surprisingly, this gap leads to the next emerging trend…
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Rey Carr
December 27, 2016 at 2:34 pm
With the increasing use of polls and surveys by different coaching groups or independent survey firms, it has become more difficult to integrate the different findings into a coherent picture.
Carol Goldsmith integrates the results from different surveys/interviews brilliantly in this article; and for those with a short attention span, she’s even included the top 10 in an executive summary.
Most of the organizations that conduct coaching surveys do not point out the limitations of their instrument or data collection procedures. However, when such surveys are combined, as they are in this article, the resulting data can be more credible.
Carol Goldsmith
January 2, 2017 at 10:33 pm
Thank you for the kind comment, Rey. Glad you found the article to be useful.
Be your best, Carol
Carol Goldsmith, PCC, NLPT
The Discovery Coach