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Do successful leaders need coaching support?

Can you provide effective coaching to leaders of teams? Do successful leaders need it anyway and if so how can it help them?
We need first to look at the nature of effective leadership, what it is and how people acquire it. One organisationally based definition of leadership is “the ability of a person to get things done willingly through others”. In the context of a business it means effectively achieving or over achieving on the business’ plans, targets and objectives. To do this requires a certain level of behavioural skill which is often described as a package or combination of certain behavioural competencies.
We believe that Leadership is analogous to a puzzle, because while great Leaders demonstrate some common characteristics, each leader is different; they have to interact with their environment in their own way, and have therefore become effective for different reasons. Leadership is therefore not simply about being ‘born’ or being ‘made’, it is also about personal choice, the choices and decisions that a leader makes, and at the very heart, whether or not they have the desire to take responsibility and choose be a great leader.

The Leadership Puzzle

What are the key ingredients of effective leadership?

This takes us back to the “nature-nurture” debate in psychology about whether these characteristics of good leaders are inherited and handed down in a person’s genes or whether they can be learned or acquired characteristics

Our experience and research from working with numerous successful and less successful leaders in various organisations over the years suggests that in addition to particular knowledge, skill or expertise in their chosen filed that these are the sorts of characteristic possessed by effective leaders.


We believe at the very heart of a great leader there are six key ingredients that need to be in place. These are as follows:

 Choice – An individual’s ability to choose their response, to make intelligent judgements and decisions and to take the leadership path.
 Integrity – Having a conscience and sound ethics. Having clear principles and willing to stand up for them.
 Will – The desire and determination to lead and succeed.
 Confidence – The appropriate self awareness and display of self belief.
 Influence – The ability to encourage others to follow, to lead by example as well as by persuasion.
 Survivability – The resilience to keep going despite obstacles and to see things through.
These six ingredients are the ‘backbone’ of all great leaders, and as such are also the ‘backbone’ of the The Leadership Puzzle.

Essentially, these ingredients are personal attitudes and traits, and therefore are particular and specific to each leader. They are difficult to teach, but can be learned and developed. They can also be assessed in a number of ways:

 By the end product that someone achieves – assessed against the size and nature of the challenge that a person takes on.
 By the behaviour (and words and congruence) that a person demonstrates in the process of leading.
 By what they model to us and to others – particularly by what their team think of them/how they respond to them.
 By how they act at times of critical incidents or activities or crises.
 By how well they use their intelligence and the judgements and decisions that they make.
 Through psychometric profiling.

What other components are there to effective leadership?

We believe that in addition to the ‘backbone’, there are eight further components to effective leadership. These are as follows:

 Authenticity - Acting naturally, being true to oneself and ones beliefs.
 Communication -. Ability to listen and understand others. Ability to be understood by others both, verbally & in writing.
 Challenge - Not accepting the status quo. Taking on the difficult things, and encouraging others to do so.
 Collaboration – Working effectively with others, team, peers, boss, stakeholders.
 Flexibility - Adjusting and adapting to changing circumstances. Learning from mistakes as well as successes.
 Growth Learning, developing oneself and others.
 Motivation - Ability to get others to want to do the things that need to be done well.
 Vision - Capability to imagine the future. To communicate a compelling future state, better, bigger, more exciting, and inspiring.

In the main the above characteristics are skills and competencies that can be taught and readily developed. For example communication skills, motivation skills.

Some are characteristics which depend upon the inter action with and the response from others and which therefore require a level of intelligent judgement and interpersonal skill to produce an effective outcome e.g. growth, motivation, challenge, collaboration, influence.
It is here that the coach can be the most valuable of allies to a successful and effective leader. The coach can provide a number of key support and challenge inputs to help the leader to maximise their effectiveness and performance.
We will consider what these inputs are and how they can help a leader in the next article.