Supporting leadership influence and impact (1)

We are creatures of our thinking. We can talk ourselves into defeat or we can talk ourselves into victory” (Gordon B. Hinckley).

Happy New Year to all our readers. May this year be filled with exciting things, and be most resourceful and prosperous for you in every way. If you are entrusted with any form of leadership, you may want to make a personal commitment to ensure that you can be trusted by the people that you lead through your honesty, integrity and stability. It is all about making sure that you embody the positive and desirable change that you want to facilitate and lead as a transformational leader.

The key to success as a leader is to be imbued with the powerful personal vision that will empower people around you, as they also grow to be trusted and respected leaders in their own right. That is the way to be truly successful as a transformational leader. To be such an influential and impactful leader, there is a certain leadership coaching framework that is very practical and useful to consider. There are four major parts in this framework. The four parts are: vision, communication, direction and succession.

For instance, a leader’s vision of the future for himself as well as for the people that he leads must be very clear, unambiguous and easily understandable by the followers. Vision in this regard refers to the ability of the leader to conceive and deliver future greatness for self and others. Vision is thus futuristic, but it also requires a lot of personal focus on the part of the leader, in order to assure its consummation.

Where both the focus and the vision of the leader are blurry or unclear, it would appear as if the leader and the people are “shooting in the dark”. Shooting in the dark, when you cannot clearly see the target is obviously risky. It is also quite dangerous and can be very frustrating, because the chances of achieving desired and sustainable success are radically diminished. That is why leadership vision cannot be by trial and error, or even left to chance and luck. Leadership coaching clearly eliminates such gambles.

It is for this reason that leadership coaching focuses so much on assisting leaders to set realistic goals and outcomes especially through the processes of questioning the client. Questioning in this context refers essentially to the major indexing questions of the coaching process. These concern the “what”, “why”, “when”, “where” “with whom” and “how” of the desired outcomes. Furthermore, the coaching process provides the opportunities to also challenge the conviction, commitment and consistency of the client (leader) with respect to the vision being espoused.

The coach in this regard remains a trusted sounding board, whose personal knowledge and experience can be safely drawn upon to develop practical roadmaps and milestones, as the vision is discussed and developed together during the coaching process. A leader’s strong personal vision therefore goes a long way to promote and support leadership influence and impact. This is firstly by proving the existence and power of leadership foresight. Personal vision is definitely the first real power that a true leader possesses.

As has been suggested above, it is the ability to see into the future and sense real greatness for self and others. It is also the ability to ‘birth’ that greatness in others by sharing the vision effectively. But the starting point is always to get the vision right. If the vision is not right or is not clear, change may occur, but it may be by chance, or a case of trial and error. Such changes are however not sustainable, hence the role and impact of coaching in facilitating and guiding the most practical route for desirable change.

Getting the vision right and being able to share it successfully with others is what leads to the formulation of realistic strategies for implementation. It is also positions a leader to be transformational in ideas, ideals and impact. Without a doubt, leadership vision is all about having ideas and thoughts that would create impact in the lives of others. Therefore, as a transformational and inspirational leader, you must test your ideas and see where they lead in terms of bringing about a desired change. The essence of this is that the ideas must also be innovative and creative for them to have lasting impact.

In reality, an idea does not become an innovation or a product of true creativity until it is acceptable to the people that must embrace and key-into such ideas in order to optimise and actualise goals. Therefore, for a leader to be said to be leading by vision, his ideas must be widely adopted and incorporated into people’s daily lives. To lead by vision in this regard means that the leader is both creative and courageous. Leadership coaching helps to facilitate this very effectively.

The practical role of coaching in this regard is to challenge your personal creativity and stimulate your courage through the provision of answers from within you to the indexing questions. But, before you can be creative, you must be courageous. Creativity is the destination, but courage is the journey. Leadership coaching ensures that creativity and courage to undertake the journey and reach the desired destination can be guaranteed. You can read more about the transformational power of coaching at www.ceedcoaching.com.

Emmanuel Imevbere