6 Core Skills of a Leader who Develops Talent
Leaders face turbulent situations, diverse personalities, and multiple opportunities all while developing talent.
Talent development is the best development.
Coaching-leaders passionately develop talent and deliver results at the same time.
Coaching:
Powerful conversations are the coaching-leader’s path to remarkable results.
Coaching-leaders focus on developing strengths and maximizing capacity.
6 core coaching skills:
- Self-awareness and energy management:
- Develop awareness of your energy state.
- Notice the impact of your energy on others.
- Manage energy before conversations. How are you approaching this conversation?
- Monitor and manage energy during conversations. Watch for joy and frustration during powerful conversations.
- Curious questioning:
- Invite input and expect differing opinions.
- Seek to understand the values, assumptions, and goals of others.
- Pursue new ways of seeing by inviting others in.
- Open listening:
- Remain respectful when others speak. Reject personal assumptions and expectations.
- Listen for aspiration. What motivates them?
- Watch body language and monitor emotions. How do they feel and what does that say about this topic?
- Appreciative discovery:
- Look for untapped talents, strengths, and capabilities.
- Explore new options and opportunities for service.
- Generate enthusiasm by connecting with aspiration and motivation.
- Catalytic feedback:
- Talk about what’s working and what’s getting in the way.
- Set achievable goals and celebrate small wins.
- Reinforce positive behaviors with praise.
- Heightened engagement:
- Stay focused on results while building relationships.
- Define success together, agree on next steps, and how progress will be reviewed.
- Review progress, identify relevant learning, and celebrate achievement.
(Adapted from, Coaching for Engagement.)
Surprising strategy:
Begin with self awareness and end with heightened engagement. Approach the six core coaching skills as a sequential trail to a mountain peak.
Which coaching skill has been most useful to you? How?
Which coaching skill is most challenging? How might leaders develop it?
Appreciate discovery and I I think it’s been useful because I have a talent for recognizing and praising talent. Service that talent and be enthusiastic about it all the time i.o. to assist my team members. It works…often, enthusiasm is key element and truly contagious.
I think last one is challenging because often good leaders are either building relationships or focusing on results…be distracted and forget about the other. I believe balance is important so that it can be avoided and reaching balance by taking time for yourself, become self-aware again and have quality time for yourself. ME TIME i call it. Thanks Dan.
Thanks Dennis. I feel the contagious enthusiasm in your comment. Sadly, some of us are some consumed with fixing problems that we forget that the best way to solve problems is to develop talent who is able to solve problems without us. Thanks for the reminder
Wau! That’s true.
Dan,
I have found “open listening” has helped me the best, not being so quick to judge, allow the speaker to get their full message out and actually digest what they are saying! Listen before you leap!
Thanks Tim. “listen before you leap” translate into, listen before you leap to conclusions, for me. Just take a breath. 🙂
Appreciate Discovery…w/Open Listening
As the chair of the women’s ministry at my church, in its establishment I had to use or rather operate in all of the above mentioned categories. In this second year, I have taken on a more appreciative discovery approach w/Open listening. I came to realize that many of us women in the church have no idea what our gifts are let alone how to operate in them.
So my eyes and ears have become open to the women’s body languages, attitudes, passions, and gestures. We chose this year to be’ Women of Increase.’ And we can’t be that if we do not know who we are and our purpose.
Dorothy
*Everyday is a Good Day for Change*
Thanks Dorothy. I really enjoyed getting to peek into your story. I think your transparency is an asset on your journey. It makes you approachable.
We all want to be around a person who is looking for ways to appreciate our current strengths and helping us find ways to leverage new ones.
Dear Dan,
Self awareness has been the most useful to me. It provides the diagnosis of individual in terms of passion, skills, interest, potential and capabilities. These are very important to develop as a leader. They also provide strong ground to understand others potential and capabilities. Self awareness makes people emotionally intelligent and it is very much required to become successful leader.
Appreciative discovery is very challenging and perhaps crucial. Good team complement the skills of each other. And it is important for leaders to understand the inclination and interest of each member. It takes listening skill, feedback and questioning. Once this process is successfully done, I think talent development starts taking place.
Thanks Dr. Gupta. Your explanation of the benefits of self awareness is very helpful to me.
The idea that appreciative discovery is part of working on teams takes this idea to a whole new level. Just this morning I asked a small team about the activities that energized them. I wanted them to learn about each other so they can work together skillfully. I also wanted them to see my commitment to maximize their strengths. These types of conversations energize teams.
Wow, Dan. This is another really powerful piece that lands on my desk on a propitious morning. Only yesterday I finished crafting the syllabus for a course I am teaching later this spring and plan to integrate servant leadership into the approach in order to level the vast differences in levels of experience across the students. These concepts help to put meat on the skeleton that I outlined. I would like to say that one or more of these skills particularly resonates for me, but each has a power all its own. I would also like to say that I was already skilled at these six practices. I am genuinely excited to integrate these into my own work. Thank you, good sir.
Thanks Steven. Great see you again. It’s been too long. 🙂 It’s a pleasure to be useful. Special thanks to Bob Hancox and the other authors of Coaching for engagement.
Best wishes for your training.
nice
Interesting – we need to keep growing as well, but never be threatened if someone grows beyond us. There’s a cascading impact too. I once knew an employee (A) who aspired to manage as well as a boss at a previous company. In turn employee (B) aspired to be like employee (A) and left for another position. So the unknown boss inspired at least two people in two separate companies to seek excellence.
For me Self Awareness is critical. Coaches really need to remember the session is about the coaches and their aims and not the other way round. So I guess it’s also linked to open listening because if you don’t you are highly likely to miss that one vital comment that opens the flood gates of ideas. Great article thanks !
That shld say coachee!
Excellent ones. My present research is on Emotional intelligence (EI) and most of the things highlighted here are part of human EI not the cognitive abilities. Excellent work.
Great list. I need work on all of these, especially to open listening. I love read posts like this as it reminds me of development areas that I need to work on.
interesting topic.a great source of information especially to those who deals coaching.thank you for sharing
Thanks for the insightful piece. My personal discovery is that leaders need to become “fans “of their direct reports (aka subordinates). Know what energises them, what puts them off, when do they walk the extra mile and invest in honing their skills particularly those that are adding value to the organisation. Great leaders invest in people and not necessarily in tangible.
Skill 6 (Heightened Engagement) “Define success together, agree on next steps, and how progress will be reviewed.” is an area I need to improve upon – especially the the first part about ‘defining success together’. Too often I define success (read: the desired result) with little or no input from my teammates about their version of success.
Thanks Joe. Defining success together feels painfully slow if you’ve already defined it on your own. 😀
In addition, sometimes we are busy but don’t really know what the win looks like.
Thanks again for your thoughts.
Curious questioning seems to be pretty effective. It is definitely a good way to come up with solutions that you may not have thought about, resulting in the perfect solution to the challenge. I would say the Self Awareness and Energy management is the most difficult for me. I tend to let my emotions show and I am told I am very readable, body language wise. I think I could work on this by being more aware of my emotional state and not taking things personally.