Can a Business Coach Help You Become a Better Leader?

How can a business coach help me?

Leadership development is a key part of business growth. You drive your business’s growth. You cannot take it to the next level without getting to the next level yourself as a leader. Any good business coach will tell you that. A great coach can actually get you there.

A good business coach includes leadership training in their coaching because they know how critical it is for the business’s success. They coach you not just in growing your business but also in becoming a leader capable of handling a bigger business.

A lot of businesses fail more often than not because of poor leadership. A good business coach can help you avoid that fate by coaching not just you to become a better leader, but also your team to become the next-level leaders in your business.

Leadership struggles of a growing business

Trying to handle everything yourself

Most owners don’t know what a leader’s role is in their business. They still have their hands in most parts of the business. So the more the business grows, the more they have on their plate.

Not developing leaders within the business

Even after the business is grown, leaders still make or approve most of the decisions in the business. Instead of developing next-level leadership, they act like ATMs dispensing orders and decisions, adding even more to their plate, and not truly empowering other leaders by delegating..

Saying yes to too many things

Owners grew their businesses by saying yes to different opportunities because they had to keep the lights on. They often find it hard to break out of that habit after their business is grown because it was so critical in the early days. At a certain point, they end up saying yes to things they should have said no to, and now that becomes the biggest limiter to growth and leadership direction.

Not communicating plans to the team effectively

Communicating vision and plans were organic and spontaneous in a growing business when the team was small. It’s not a good system when a business has grown. Owners and leaders often don’t have a plan or struggle to communicate it effectively with their team.

Avoiding difficult conversations

A big part of a leader’s role is solving problems. That involves having difficult conversations with team members and other stakeholders. Leaders often struggle with this. Avoiding these conversations and letting these situations fester often leads to much bigger problems and chaos that sometimes can last for literally years and have material financial impacts on the business.

Case study of a $20M business

XXX is a fast-growing $20 million dollar business. They had grown fast and saw a lot of success and profits. However, they were also seeing a lot of waste and loss through mistakes. It was eating into their profits. The worry was that more growth would only exacerbate the problem.

When they came to Exit Momentum for coaching, we first looked at their culture and saw a lot of very common problems growing businesses face:

• Employees were always showing up 30 minutes late.
• They were throwing money at problems instead of taking ownership and solving them.
• Leadership would just make decisions, and people didn’t really know what was going on.

We worked closely with the leadership team to change the fundamental culture and leadership style in the organization. The results were phenomenal.

“Now, we’ve had employees go from always showing up 30 minutes late to showing up 30 minutes early and kicking butt… This program has helped us tighten up on production, cleanliness, safety, schedules, and every part of our process… People are now able to solve problems at a managerial level… Since moving to this new structure, we’ve become much more efficient and productive. We’re making fewer mistakes, which saves us a lot of money and puts more right into our bottom line.”

The leader is everything

The success and failure of your business lie with you—the leader. So a good business coach should look not only at your business but also at your capabilities as a leader. A small business cannot grow beyond the leader’s abilities. To grow your business, you need to grow as a leader. Every good business coach knows this.

So a part of helping you grow and streamline your business is to help you become better leaders. This also means developing a second line of leadership within the organization to support your growth.

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT At Exit Momentum

At Exit Momentum, our work with clients isn’t just about helping them develop a business strategy. We’re helping you develop a strong team of leaders who can own their roles in your business and create space for you to focus on achieving the grandest possible vision for your business—including eventually building the next generation of leaders to manage your inevitable growth.

Why is coaching so important in leadership?

Stuck in implementation

Leaders often get stuck in focusing on the wrong things in their business. Especially when things go wrong. You have grown the business by being an integral part of everything you’re building. Continuing to operate that way is massively stunting your growth.

You know this. You have tried to move on to a more strategic role, but everything starts falling to pieces every time you do.

A good coach helps you see where you are needed. Identify the roles you are meant to hold and the areas you need to focus on. They also help you create a sustainable delegation plan to remove yourself from the implementation without everything burning down.

Throwing money at problems

This is the second most common way in which fast-growing organizations and leaders solve problems that come up. Investing in tools, hiring people, and bringing in pricey consultants are all short-term solutions. These problems will keep coming up over and over again without the right systems in place to address the underlying issues.

The most common way, unfortunately, is ignoring the problem altogether.

As leaders, you are forced to do that because you are simply exhausted every day from the chaos that comes with a growing business. You know that you have fundamental issues to address. It feels daunting, and you don’t have the first clue where to start.

This is where a good coach can help you become better at handling issues and pushing through the discomfort, instead of just taking the easy way out.

Completely unaware of communication problems

Leaders often drastically underestimate how critical their communication skills are. Most are unaware of the impact it has not only on the culture of the organization but also on performance and employee relationships.

Leaders must demonstrate the quality and consistency of communication they want in the organization.

The ability to motivate employees, get them to work towards a shared goal, and increase productivity all comes down to your ability to communicate effectively.

Sadly, it’s a skill very few leaders have. Fewer still are even aware of this gap in skill.

Not operating in facts and data

It’s shocking how many leaders make critical decisions based on emotions and gut feelings. There are a lot of feelings, stories, and opinions that don’t have any basis in facts in their business.

So one of the key things we teach our clients is how to deal with the facts so

1. they can own their successes, and
2. they can be honest about their challenges

The skills we teach ground you as a leader in reality. You learn to see things as they are and make decisions based on data without simply relying on gut feelings and instincts.

Once you start building the discipline of not giving in to emotions first and grounding your decisions on data, and then leveraging emotion, you start seeing success more consistently.

Related – also read: Why Even Successful Business Owners Should Hire a Business Coach

Communicating with Clarity

Communicating effectively with the rest of the team is a crucial leadership skill. Studies have shown that 69% of managers are uncomfortable simply having clear communication with their team. This not only directly affects morale, but it can also lead to a lot of inefficiencies and mistakes. Leaders often end up not communicating at all or communicating too much.

With the help of a business coach, you can set up the right cadence of these communications with your team. Daily stand-ups, weekly check-ins, and monthly reviews are all great tools. At Exit Momentum, we help our clients identify the right mix that works for them and their employees.

Taking ownership

The culture of an organization starts right at the top with the leader. You are ultimately responsible for everything that happens in your organization. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you can become a good leader.

At Exit Momentum, we help our clients see where they are unable to take ownership. This is a huge blind spot for most leaders. Having a coach in your corner can help you spot these blind spots. A coach can help you see where and how you are avoiding ownership and what taking ownership in that situation can actually look like.

Coaching next-level leadership

Developing just yourself as a leader can only take you so far. This is the 4th level of leadership according to John Maxwell’s 5 levels of leadership.

You grow as a leader by identifying and growing leaders within your organization. This helps them become more capable of making decisions and running the business without micromanagement.

This is one of the biggest things we help our clients with at Exit Momentum. Building a leadership team is not an easy or quick process. With a coach by your side, you can leverage their experience and work together to build a strong team capable of taking your business to greater heights.