Insights & events

If you are the leader of an organisation, it is likely that you will have been through a fairly intensive career track to get where you are. You will have probably excelled academically, shone professionally, and taken every opportunity to add to your skills and experience as you ascended the organisation's ladder. When you arrived in the CEO office, it is hardly unfair that you might feel you've earned some respite from all of this development and career-focused training.

The truth, however, is that arriving in a leadership position is really only the first new step in a whole different development journey, one that you need to continue on if you aim to be the leader you feel you can be. Leadership requires new skills and experience; it needs practice and openness to new things.

One key aspect of this necessary leadership development you should be considering is leadership coaching. While you may well have benefited from coaching and mentoring throughout your career and, indeed, may well be a mentor right now, leadership coaching is a different proposition.

The concept of having a coach when you've already become a leader might seem odd. If you're the leader, you might naturally feel that your role is to answer questions and make decisions, rather than to seek advice and hear other opinions. However, this is exactly the kind of impact that makes leadership coaching so necessary.

For a start, leaders often find that moving into leadership leaves them with very few opportunities to ask questions and check their own instincts as they start making decisions. After a career of training, development, mentoring, and coaching, leaders can feel suddenly left alone with no help. Leadership coaching aims to cover some of this loss – providing a means to continue asking questions, reflecting on your actions, and hearing the opinions of another on how you've been operating as a leader.

Leadership coaching also provides access to advice that is:

• Experienced and industry-tested
• Unbiased and disconnected from office politics
• Honest and open, without the need to “sugarcoat things for the boss"

In effect, a leadership coach provides a leader with a unique perspective – one that holds no position within the organisation and has little personal interest in the intricacies of corporate decisions. Instead, a leadership coach is able to provide advice and opinion, unhindered by the weight of organisational considerations that direct reports or other senior leaders might bring to the table.

More than anything else, leadership coaching that is tailored to the needs of the MENA region's business leaders is uniquely placed to allow these leaders to truly reflect on how they are performing. It means poor behaviours don't become entrenched, and elevates great decisions and ideas to new levels of success. Self-reflection is critical – asking leaders to consider their previous actions from different perspectives, and challenging them to think about how future situations might run differently. The results should be leaders who are more empowered to make sustainable, astounding business decisions over the long-term.