You are an experienced leader and have been successfully leading and coaching direct reports for many years. As you’ve advanced in your career and moved up in the organization, your role has evolved from managing individual contributors to managing the managers of individual contributors. As we all know, that can be a difficult transition as you are now another level away from the “real work” of physically making products or delivering services.
This week, I had the opportunity of working with a group of leaders of leaders and we were exploring some of their current leadership challenges. One of the more interesting topics we focused on was the changing needs of first-time coaches. The consensus of my group of experienced leaders was that today’s first-time coaches need foundational coaching skills. There are many reasons for this most of which are related to the changing work environment, matrixed organizations, less structure, and a more conflict averse coaching layer of managers. To the experienced leader managing new leaders, this can be very frustrating.