How does Leadership Coaching Help Deal with Team Performance Challenges

Managing team performance issues is one of the most common concerns senior leaders often face. And leadership coaching has been a proven key tool not only to tackle these challenges but also to offer insights, real-time examples, and skills for senior leaders to lead and build high-performing teams.

I will discuss how leadership coaching enables senior leaders with powerful strategies to efficiently deal with these team challenges and build high performing teams.

1. Helps in Identifying Performance Challenges

Before we get to figure out the solutions to team performance problems, we need to find out what’s causing them. The most common reasons I have noticed in most organizations are poor communication, lack of clarity about goals, and lack of required skillsets. 

Leadership coaching helps leaders identify these root causes using tools like 360-degree feedback, thorough team assessments, and performance metrics.

Fixing these issues helped realign their team and improve performance.

2. Makes you look at internal communication

Good communication is the key to resolving over 50% of the team performance issues. 

When teams start practicing clear communication for stating goals, presenting problems, listening to the senior and junior team members, and being receptive to feedback, you start noticing more trust and engagement in the team. 

Clear and open communication leads to lower employee turnover rates and high morale.

3. People’s Psychological Safety 

Trust and psychological safety play foundational roles for high-performing teams. It is important to create an environment where every team member irrespective of seniority and capability feels safe to share ideas, communicate doubts and concerns, take risks, and admit mistakes without being judged.

The best outcome of investing in the psychological well-being of teams is more innovative and resilient teams.

I recollect an incident when a Fintech organization CEO noticed that team members were hesitant to discuss inputs and new ideas. Leadership coaching enabled the CEO to create a more inclusive culture that encouraged the employees to have open dialogue and value diverse perspectives. 

4. Helps Aligning Team Goals with Organizational Objectives

Performance can be seriously compromised when team goals don’t match the organization’s goals. The lack of alignment can result in delays and unmet targets. 

It is a leader’s role to align their organization’s vision and mission with the teams’ efforts to ensure that everyone is on the same page and same energy. Leadership coaching equips a leader to make important and timely decisions that improve project completion rates and overall team efficiency.

 

5. Helps Putting Emotional Intelligence a High Priority

An emotionally unsure or drained person can not be an efficient team member or performer. We are all driven by our emotions. And Emotional intelligence is an important area of development in organizations for managing team dynamics and solving performance issues. Leadership coaching helps leaders develop EI. 

Emotionally efficient leader understand and manage their own emotions and those of their team members well. Moreover, senior leaders can use leadership coaching to develop more empathy and self-awareness. 

According to TalentSmart, 90% of top performers have high emotional intelligence. Leaders with high EI are better at handling interpersonal issues and creating a positive team environment.

6. Helps Building Individual and Team Accountability

Having a strong sense of accountability and trust between teams and leaders helps leaders set clear expectations and measurable goals. Teams perform well when team members happily hold themselves accountable for their work.

I have observed that leadership coaching for senior leaders and project managers has helped them arrange regular check-ins and employee performance reviews, which improved not only accountability and project timelines but also internal engagement and trust between the teams.

Handling team performance challenges can be more challenging than we think for every organization and it varies with industry. 

Investing in leadership coaching for senior leaders and HR managers helps them with multiple approaches, tools, and strategies to be able to improve communication, align goals and vision, build more trust and accountability, leverage the strengths of people, and build high-performing units capable of achieving great results and sustained success. 

Thanks for reading my thoughts and experience around building high-performing teams and how leadership coaching can be a great tool to make this happen.

Feel free to discuss your team performance concerns or goals with me. 

Leadership Coach

Sailaja Manacha