Coaches perform an indispensable service when they first act as a sounding board for the anxiety that comes with change’s uncertainty and risk and then challenge their clients to steer a clear, coherent, and viable path forward. This requires coaches to support leaders in accepting the discomfort of not knowing while simultaneously articulating the surety of where the organization must go despite uncertainty.
The coaches surveyed identified two top needs related to this challenge:
• Coaches must model the ability to deal with ambiguity, providing the right balance of inquiry and discovery with advice and guidance.
• Coaches also must challenge leaders’ mental models and assumptions, exposing beliefs and patterns that no longer serve them and those they lead while introducing new mind-sets.
Research on leadership development suggests that skill or competency building—horizontal development—is necessary for leadership effectiveness but is insufficient in meeting the challenges of emerging complexity. To increase their capacity to respond to changing realities, leaders must continually adapt their ways of thinking, doing, and being. Coaches must introduce the transformational dimension—vertical development—to challenge leaders to expand how they see their role, themselves, their context, and their options. Some of the coaches surveyed cited two developmental frameworks—adult stage development and Korn Ferry’s “learning agility”—as particularly powerful approaches to cultivate new mind-sets and subsequent shifts in leaders’ practices and effectiveness.
Adult-stage development suggests that, as leaders mature, they expand their capacity for making sense of what is happening. With this larger range of perspectives on a situation, they have more options for response and are more likely able to grasp the complexity of a situation while also steering a clear path forward. Studies have linked this ability to successful leadership practice and outcomes (Joiner and Josephs 2006; Rooke and Torbert 2005).
The learning agility framework offers coaches a tested model to identify new behaviors and mind-sets that enable leaders to adapt to the new and complex. Learning agility, defined as the willingness and ability to learn from experience and apply that learning in new or different situations, has been empirically linked with success after promotion (Dai 2014) Several coaches noted this framework as an important addition to their tool kit for supporting leaders in complex and uncertain times.
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