Want to be a better leader? Here’s how coaching can transform your inner game and accelerate your success as a woman in leadership.
Want to be a better leader?
Here’s how coaching can transform your inner game and accelerate your success as a woman in leadership.
Science has proved that coaching really works.
For some of us, building and leading a business is all that matters. For others, it’s about connecting who you are with what you do to make meaningful impact. At foundher, we are proud to coach and support amazing women leaders to push the limits of what they believe to be possible and create sustainable change in their work and life.
But, for those who have never explored coaching, it can be hard to understand. What does coaching for leaders actually mean? What kind of benefits does it offer women in particular?
Let’s break it down
Leadership coaching is a highly valuable tool that will allow you to build stronger relationships, improve your communication and increase your overall work performance and results. It gives you the focus and attention you need to create and, more importantly, achieve your short and long-term goals. In fact, empirical research shows that coaching for women is very effective at supporting goal achievement.
But how? An interesting 2017 case study by Sally Bonneywell published in the International Journal of Evidence-Based Coaching and Mentoring explored how coaching can support female leaders and their development within their organisation.
Bonneywell broke it down into two main areas: changes in relation to self and changes in relationships with others.
Changes In Relation To Self (At foundher, we call this awareness and identity)
Bonneywell’s participants reported an increase in self-awareness, self-confidence and self-leadership after coaching. The leaders gained a deeper understanding of themselves and who they are as a person, which led to more confidence within themselves and the decisions they were making. Through this increased understanding of self, they found that they had placed unrealistic expectations on themselves and started to work more from a place of compassion and acceptance.
Changes In Relationships With Others (We call this capacity and courage)
The participants found that coaching directly impacted their leadership style and they reported becoming more aware of their behaviours. This gave them an opportunity to assess their approach to their work as a leader and their relationship to others, including their direct reports.
Many of the participants also noted discovering that conflict with others was being avoided, underpinned by negative beliefs about what conflict is and means. Coaching helped them shift these beliefs to see the positive role conflict can play in an organisation. The study also found that the female leaders had quite strong negative feelings towards power and explored how coaching supported a change in belief and perceptions around power and how it can be utilised.
Most importantly, the study found that coaching resulted in a shift in work-life balance and how the leaders showed up in their personal life – the ripple effect of coaching went far beyond the 9 to 5.
This is how we do it
While it’s clear that coaching works, not all coaching is equal. It’s important to look for an accredited professional whose style of coaching resonates with you and your goals.
foundher’s Elana Robertson is a certified executive coach with the International Coaching Federation, the leading accrediting and credentialling body for coaches worldwide, and has studied with the Institute of Coaching at Harvard Medical School, the University of Cambridge and Queensland University of Technology.
Combining her dedication to sustainability and positive disruption, and ongoing education in neuroscience, Elana’s mission is to equip ambitious leaders of change with the skills to navigate complexity, build a foundational productivity rhythm that helps them continually recharge, and embrace collaboration over competition in our modern world.
What does coaching look like?
Allow us to introduce our approach: developmental coaching. This means we work towards creating enduring change by focusing on mindset, emotions and beliefs. We coach our clients to rewrite or evolve their actions and behaviours and examine the framework of personality that governs these parts of us.
Developmental coaching goes deep to create change from within, as opposed to tweaking and tinkering with external actions only. Our coaching style is about rewiring your beliefs and the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that are restricting you so that you can achieve things you never thought possible. Developmental coaching is designed to break through the stories or limiting beliefs that are holding you back. These are usually beliefs that you have accepted as fact, rather than as something that can and should be challenged over time.
When you expand your thinking, adopt new beliefs and then take action, it’s incredibly powerful. Creating lasting, meaningful change is the goal, and developmental coaching encourages you to embrace the inner work that drives these powerful outer actions.
That’s how you become somebody who will do something about that.
When you expand your thinking, take on new beliefs and then take action, that's incredibly powerful. Creating lasting change is the name of the game and to do that, you’ll need to start the work on the inside that will drive the change on the outer.
In 2023 we’re excited to share with growing community of clients and members the ability to engage with us specifically to utilise diagnostic tools that are world leading and becoming essential for founders, change makers and strategic leaders.
The Leadership Circle Profile™. The most comprehensive leadership assessment system available, that is the first competency tool to measure both the inner and outer attributes of leadership.
The Growth Edge Interview As the world grows more complex, those in organizations want their workforce to be able to handle complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty and change. But coping well with such issues is not simply a skill anyone can acquire, it is a way of seeing and living in the world. Our ways of making sense develop over time as we increase our capacity to take broader and deeper perspectives on ourselves and others, view authority in new ways, and see shades of grey where we once saw only black and white. Understanding the ways we grow and change as adults is fundamental to organizational development and leadership because it affects everything a person is able to think or do.
If you are a woman in leadership and you’d like to know more about what we do at foundher and how we can support you to connect your purpose and lead from your best self, head to foundher.co and explore our group and private coaching partnerships.