Leadership has never been the one-size-fits-all type of role. In today’s business world, leaders are running into challenges due to the rapidly changing landscape of the workforce and the varying expectations that teams hold for their business leaders. After the COVID-19 pandemic, new challenges, new circumstances, and new uncertainties in organisations emerged.
Even when all organisations have shifted back to in-person work, business leaders still have new responsibilities to adapt to and new challenges to overcome. While some business leaders might be doing good, most are struggling as they lack adaptability skills. Nowadays, adaptability has become a crucial requirement for business leaders because change is inevitable. Therefore, business leaders must know how to adapt to succeed.
If you are struggling to adapt to new responsibilities and challenges, you should consider taking executive coaching. Executive coaching has helped many leaders, managers, and CEOs of well-reputed organisations improve their leadership and adaptability skills. Working with a leadership coach will help you adapt to changing external pressures, adjust your leadership style to challenging situations, take changes as growth opportunities, and much more.
Read on to find an answer to your question, “How can executive coaching help me adapt to new challenges and responsibilities?”.
Tips for Improving Adaptability Skills By an Expert Executive Coach
Inflexible leaders will not only hinder their career growth but also limit the workplace adaptability of others. Resistance to new responsibilities and challenges may undermine critical projects or system-wide implementation, resulting in frustrated team members.
Executive coaching can help you avoid all of this by just developing a crucial skill – adaptability. However, if you don’t have the time and resources for executive coaching, we are here to help you. Simon Ellson, expert executive business coach at ActionCoach, shared the best ways how business leaders can adapt their leadership style to meet the demands of a modern business world, which are listed below:
Conduct Self-Evaluation
Executive coaching helps business leaders become more self-aware, as self-awareness is the first step to adapting to change. When you take executive coaching, a leadership coach will observe and evaluate your leadership style. Later, they will help you focus on the areas where growth is needed. However, if you don’t have a leadership coach, you can self-evaluate your leadership style.
List down your strengths and weaknesses. Later, ask a trusted colleague to write a similar evaluation for you, or you can conduct anonymous surveys where employees will evaluate your leadership style. Once all the feedback has been gathered, you can compare your self-evaluation to others and see if and where they are any discrepancies.
Smart business leaders will never feel discouraged because of highlighted discrepancies. Instead, they will focus on them and take their leadership style in a different direction. If business leaders are not self-aware, they will live with an assumption that there is no room for change and they are currently the best version of themselves.
Therefore, in order to adapt to new responsibilities and challenges, they need to become more self-aware to make changes where necessary.
Know Your Team
Your leadership style might also need to change and adapt depending on the people you are leading. For example, some team members might like to receive clear orders and then return to their desks to complete the assigned tasks. However, others might need constant reminders and pressure to do their best work.
Although a business leader should not constantly flip their leadership style, it is still important to know your team and how they like being led. Once you know your team members well, it will make your leadership job easier and more efficient.
Look After Yourself
Leading others can undoubtedly be a challenging job. There might come times when you feel overwhelmed by tons of responsibilities. If a business leader feels emotionally and physically drained, they will never be able to adapt to new responsibilities and challenges. Therefore, it is important to keep yourself motivated and avoid emotional exhaustion.
Executive coaching helps business leaders to manage stress efficiently. The less stressed a business leader is, the more flexible their leadership style gets. However, if you don’t take executive coaching, you can manage your stress levels by taking frequent breaks from work to relax, not replying to work emails and messages outside work hours, and much more.
Get Clear on Your Role
Executive coaching encourages business leaders to get clarity on their and their team members’ roles. Doing so will help business leaders manage resources efficiently and ensure they don’t have too much work to do. Business leaders can only adapt to new responsibilities and challenges when they are able to manage the resources well.
Working with a leadership coach will help you focus on the things that only you can do and delegate other tasks to the team. Delegating tasks will not only show you trust your team to get things done, but it will also help you free up your time for more important tasks to perform and challenges to overcome.
Be authentic
In order to develop adaptability skills, you need to understand that you don’t have to fit into a certain mould but just have to become the best version of yourself for your team and business. Therefore, executive coaching encourages business leaders to stay authentic and not try to be something they are not.
According to a research report, employees value authenticity. It is normal for business leaders to look for support when they cannot perform their new responsibilities and overcome new challenges. The more authentic you are, the easier it will get for you to adapt to new responsibilities and challenges.
Conclusion:
In the modern business world, it has become common for business leaders to find themselves in situations that require them to adapt their leadership styles to succeed. However, many business leaders struggle to adapt to change. If you fall into a similar category, take executive coaching. Executive coaching will help you easily adapt to new responsibilities, challenges, and roles.
