What distinguishes a true leader? Is it their skills? Is it their natural abilities? Is there a secret to having great leadership skills?
In this interview, Erickson founder Marilyn Atkinson, a renowned leadership coach, discusses how a Solution-Focused mindset and coaching tools can assist anyone to develop their skills and become a great leader.
What is Solution-Focused Coaching?
MA: Well, Solution-Focused Coaching is the 21st Century’s magic potion for leadership so to speak. It’s a wonderful series of tools and technologies that allow leaders to get in touch with their strongest vision, discover methods to create results, the creativity that is needed in their companies and get inspired by the people that they’re serving so that everybody in the company gets magnetized by that leader's vision.
Want to learn how Solution-Focused coaching can help your organization? Attend our upcoming online webinar for leaders!
Why is Solution-Focused coaching important for leaders?
MA: Leaders are facing difficult times in the world today, more complex problems to deal with than ever before; lots and lots of turnover, managers who don’t know how to manage, people in the younger generation who don’t know how to be lead. There are all sorts of difficult new scenarios to keep up with company competitors. To work with the desires of people to really have interesting work. And at the same time, we’re living in the information age, so much is going on where companies need to turn on a dime and actually get solutions where it seems like they don’t have them.
Now Solution-Focused coaching makes all the difference to those leaders. It reduces stress, it enlarges inspiration, it allows them humor in difficult times, it assists them to really connect with their own people and to inspire people well.
Why is coaching becoming so popular all over the world?
MA: Coaching is coming in like a tide! Everywhere where one company starts to use it, productivity goes up. In fact, the statistics that keep being pulled out again and again on return on investment, show anywhere from four to seven times their return if a company uses strong coaching and Solution-Focused coaching is strong coaching. What happens is that people start to advance the technologies that need to be advanced, their creativity develops. They start to create new innovations and they start to find best practices for their teams. They start to really work together effectively as a team. All of this allows for the companies that are using coaching to forge ahead, so now of course everyone wants to use it.
Erickson is in 40 countries and more coming aboard all the time where companies say “Yes, we want this! This is what is going to allow us to succeed.”
Why is it so critical today for people to have coaching skills?
MA: Well, right now we’re living in interesting and difficult times. In the Fortune 1000 companies, there is more turnover than ever before. Companies are downsizing to meet the competition and at the same time, they need leaders with a strong ability to cohere a team to pull together the energies of the people. The 21st Century is a time for new technologies and coaching is the best. Now one of the key areas is, of course, working with ‘Millennials’, the youngest members of the teams who tend to be people with their own visions, their own ideas of progress and their own desire to have a career that works. If they’re working with an effective coach type manager, they still stay with the company. And what’s more, they’ll be a real benefit to the company. So managers with coaching skills begin to be able to keep some of the talented individuals they need to have the company succeed.
