Leadership and coaching are fundamentally two different things but to reap the benefit of the potential of the people within organizations leaders must become much better coaches.  Unfortunately leadership has become synonymous with rulership in which followers are told what to do and when to do it.  And then, occasionally, "leaders" would hand out feedback, performance reviews and compensation adjustments based upon their opinions of how the followers behaved and performed.  Instead, leaders must become coaches who interact daily with their teammates providing instruction, feedback and advice on how to improve their performance as well as hearing their input on efficiencies, innovations and improvements to create the right conditions for performance.  And this dialogue and interaction must be tailored to the needs to each individual on the team and delivered in the way they need to drive improvement in their performance.  Coaching is personal, it is intimate and it requires a deep knowledge of the coaching craft and the business subject matter.  Coaching requires a deeper understanding of human performance and the factors that affect that performance.  Which is likely why coaching is so rarely done within the ranks of leadership.  But this doesn't diminish it's importance or this as a key lever to drive step-change organizational improvements.  If you want a differentiated competitive advantage in your market place, invest in the transition to a coaching model of leadership.

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.   Charles Darwin

I believe that wherever there is mastery, coaching is occurring and whenever coaching is done, mastery will be the outcome.  Anonymous

We have done lots of research over the past three years, and we have found that leaders who have the best coaching skills have better business results. IBM