Leading people when they know more than you do!

Does this sound familiar? People perfect their areas of expertise, perform well as individuals and get rewarded with promotions. And for some, they may reach a point, where their expertise is not what they are paid for anymore – instead they are there to lead others, sometimes in areas that are outside their area of expertise. So now, these leaders might have direct reports who ask them questions that they cannot answer – or worse still – may not even understand!

Understanding, and then accepting what it takes to be an excellent leader of others – can be challenging for many. The things that made us who we are, that form a key part of our identity, may not be what is critical to success in our new leadership role. In fact, the things that made us successful before, might be the things we need to ‘let go of’ to be successful in the next passage of leadership. New skills need to be developed and some of the old ones need to be left behind.

Click here to access our blog with a link to this HBR article, and our info-graphic sharing the 4 skills to develop.

The better the leader is at coaching - the more committed employees are

In March 2015, HBR released some astounding results about the importance of coaching skills in managers.

These conclusions come from evaluating nearly a quarter of a million subordinates’ ratings of their managers.

When a manager has ‘very strong’ coaching skills, the percentage of highly committed employees was 67%. If employees think their manager ‘needs improvement’ with coaching, the % of highly committed employees was only 2%.

‘To say the better a boss is at coaching, the more committed the subordinates is a wild understatement, as the relationship goes beyond linear to exponential:’

Click here  to access this blog post.