Lewis Hatchett (Coaching)
Lewis Hatchett is a Mindset Coach, Podcaster, Ex-Pro Cricketer, Founder of Sport Yogi and a Performance Psychology Student. He has spent most of his life working on developing a mi...
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Why is leadership coaching important?
No one is ever really born a leader. I don't believe that people have just been given this God-given right to be a leader. People are taught how to be leaders. Now, whether that's through their experiences in their upbringing that they've just naturally had, maybe someone in their family was a leader at the time, and they've emulated that or they've learned those traits of them, the idea is that they've genuinely learned how to lead. So leadership, training and training to be a leader is really important. If you haven't had that, it's too difficult to think that you can just become a great leader when you haven't been given any parameters or guidance in how to do it. It's kind of like saying, I'm just going to become a great guitarist and not have any lessons or learn how to do it. You need to learn it as a skill. Leadership is a skill, and like anything else, it takes practise, it takes guidance, it takes time, and it takes some failure as well. So that form of training should be a priority for someone who is a leader. The trouble is people that get put into leadership positions sometimes allow their ego to cover that so much that they don't feel like they need training. They feel like I am a leader, therefore I don't need training. I'm already in this position. But actually, when you're at the top, that's probably when you need training the most. You need someone to bounce ideas off. You need someone to hold you accountable. Every leader, I believe, should have a coach and mentor and a guide to help them out. And if you're not doing that, that's not really what a high performer would do. Any athlete has a coach. Any coach has someone that they've learned of a mentor. So leadership training, it is a fundamental part of a good functioning leader.
What are the benefits of leadership coaching?
I had probably say one of the main benefits of leadership coaching is accountability. As a leader, you sit at the top of an organisation, a team, an environment, and you are the one that's setting the standards. And you want to have someone in your life that can hold you accountable and help you, guide you through maybe inside you're actually quite anxious about the decisions you're making. So having someone to guide you through that, to just bounce ideas off, not necessarily teach you new knowledge because you've got the skills, you've harnessed those skills. You've maybe trained those skills before, but just to have those ideas bounced off or to have someone hold you accountable for decisions that you are about to make or want to make, that's really important. And it will allow you to just take time to recognise and figure out is what I'm about to do the best decision for me, the environment, the group, or am I maybe doing something too quick and I haven't thought this process out? So being able to have someone to work with to do that process will be really helpful and beneficial for not only you, but everyone that is underneath you and you working with in your organisation, your team, your environment.
How can I improve team cohesion through mindset?
So team cohesion has essentially many different definitions, but the one that I like to sit on gives it two aspects, and that is task cohesion and social cohesion. So our task cohesion is our cohesiveness of the team in order to have processes and outcomes towards our goals and what we're working towards. And then the social cohesion is how well the team as a social group are cohesively bound together. So those two sides of it create cohesiveness in a team. And if you are to improve someone's mindset, which is a very individual thing, you're improving their ability to work within those two aspects of cohesion. So if someone's in a better frame of mind personally and professionally, then there's a higher chance of them working better as a social cohesive team and also working better on their tasks and individual, and then essentially working towards those common goals that the team has. So it is a long roundabout way of saying if you put someone in a better frame of mind personally, then they're going to work better in a team.