With coaching to extraordinary leadership

By Claudia Scheelen Coaching has become a normality nowadays, a tool widely used by executives. And with good reason: Through deep reflection in coaching, executives become more aware of their own potential, it serves for personal development - or to regain strength and utilize resources. However, this is not enough for me. In my understanding as a coach, it must always go beyond personal aspects to focus on how this executive can be led to outstanding performance for the company standing behind the coachee. Extraordinary Leader: highly sought after What actually constitutes outstanding leadership performance? What specific abilities must leaders possess to become "Extraordinary Leaders"? And what outstanding goals can they achieve - after all, there must be a reason why the economy, why companies are looking for and needing such Extraordinary Leaders. This reason is always: better results. Better results mean: More revenue - with more satisfied employees. Big goals - with motivated people in the company. Higher profits - with lower turnover and appreciative interaction. Developing a sustainable vision - and actually achieving the interim goals. Meeting the constant external pressure for change - while ensuring the company's future viability. Self-critical executives These are high demands that create pressure. And yet, German executives tend to evaluate themselves rather critically: Around 80 percent of executives surveyed in a study conducted by Nextpractice GmbH under the Initiative New Quality of Work (INQA) - funded by the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs - were totally dissatisfied with their leadership work, their own standards, and their own capabilities! And the study was actually intended to identify not critical points in leadership quality and self-perception of executives, but best practices, in other words, positive examples! Determining factors for leadership performance Certainly, outstanding leadership is a complex concept that encompasses many very different groups of factors. For example:

• Individual characteristics of the leader on intellectual, psychological, emotional, and physical levels
• The organizational context, such as the culture, history, and structures of a company
• Structure of employee potentials: Were the employees led collaboratively or confrontationally? Is it an experienced and cohesive team, or newcomers due to high turnover?
• Market dynamics such as competitive positioning, growth, economic development factors that form the fundamental framework for leadership activities

And then there is also the question of measuring the performance of the leader: How can the influence of the Extraordinary Leader be precisely measured and quantified? These and other factors work together to determine the success or failure of a leader. To do justice to this complexity, we - the Scheelen AG - have developed a scientifically based approach to Leadership Coaching based on numerous studies and a unique database. Over the past more than ten years, Dr. Joseph Folkman, a partner of Scheelen AG, with his team, has built and analyzed a fundamental database of around one million 360-degree feedback reports, correlated with approximately 100,000 managers from whom they were collected. The results of this research have also flowed into our - my - approach to Extraordinary Leadership Coaching. This coaching develops the crucial core competencies Some results from the research based on the data: To be an extraordinary leader, an "Extraordinary Leader," does not mean being pretty good at 34 things, but being exceptionally good at three or four things. Our research has clearly shown that strength in a relatively small number of competencies has propelled individuals to the top levels of companies. The implications of this almost banal-sounding discovery are revolutionary: First: Executives achieve a significantly higher ROI when they develop only a few, already well-developed competencies into absolute core competencies, rather than investing a lot of time in improving their weaknesses. A small personal note on this: Wherever we present these results, managers approach us and are thrilled: "This result means I have a chance to get where I want to go. Because I don't have to be Superman, I just need to develop three or four exceptional core competencies." And secondly: However, it cannot simply be "any" competencies for... You can read the complete article here: