[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Great Recession is a tough time to be in business. Company leaders are under pressure from the economy, their stakeholders, and even themselves. If you want your company to survive and thrive through this economic downturn, however, it’s important that you start developing leadership skills today—not just for yourself but also for your employees so they can support each other as well. One way to do this is through leadership coaching.
Challenge employees to lean into their strengths.
The Great Recession presents a unique opportunity for companies to develop the strengths of their employees.
After all, during hard times, companies will need more than ever to rely on their people’s talents and abilities. How do you harness this potential? A great way is by encouraging your employees to use their strengths at work so they can achieve goals faster and more efficiently.
Here’s how: identify your employee’s personal strengths; ask them how they use those skills at work; then help them find ways to use those skills every day by encouraging them with positive feedback and recognition when they do it well.
Help employees define their motivation and purpose.
If you want to create an environment where people feel motivated, it’s important to define what motivates them. This includes defining the purpose of your leadership and the company, as well as identifying what drives individual employees. To do this well, it is crucial to understand:
- The specific goals and objectives of your organization (and how they align with those of your team).
- The values that drive each person on your team.
Encourage empathy from managers.
Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, is a key leadership trait. Unfortunately, empathy can be hard to teach and even harder to develop. This means that many leaders who have been promoted because they’re great at their jobs struggle with this skill until they come face-to-face with a crisis situation.
The best way for leaders to develop compassion and trust in the workplace is by encouraging empathy from managers—both new ones who are just starting out and current ones who may want to improve upon their own skillset. Empathy can be taught through roleplay exercises where employees share what it’s like for them when things go wrong; this gives managers an opportunity both learn how best respond when an employee is stressed and understand how it feels from their perspective as well as offer constructive feedback on how things could’ve been handled better in hindsight
Emphasize building resilience and agility.
You can strengthen your employees by encouraging them to take risks and learn from their mistakes.
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from setbacks—a trait that’s especially important during a recession, when companies are forced to make painful decisions about which parts of their businesses are worth keeping and which need to be cut. Resilience helps employees weather the storm.
Agility (the ability to adapt quickly to changes in the environment) is also important for success in a recession—but it’s less obvious how leaders can help employees build agility when times are tough and resources are scarce. Leaders have an impact on talent management, but there’s another way they can encourage agility: by helping people identify opportunities for innovation within their existing roles or departments rather than looking at external job postings or promotions as the only path forward.
Build self-awareness in leaders.
To be a good leader, you need to be aware of who you are. Self-awareness is not something that comes naturally and it can be difficult to develop, but there are ways to build it. The first step is understanding how self-awareness helps with leadership.
Next, we need to understand what it means for someone to be self-aware. Emotional intelligence (EI) is a key component of self-awareness which helps leaders understand themselves and others better.
Finally, there are steps that leaders can take in order to increase their own level of emotional intelligence as well as help their followers become more emotionally intelligent too!
Develop a culture of trust.
Leadership coaching is a powerful tool that can transform your business and the lives of everyone involved. Asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness. It shows that you have the self-awareness to know what skills you need to improve in order to be effective in your role as leader. The good news is that leadership coaching doesn’t require any expensive equipment or complicated training; all it takes is an open mind and willingness on both sides of the relationship.
In order for your team members to trust you, they need to feel safe around you—and most importantly, respected by you as someone who knows more than them about how their roles fit into the overall structure of the business (which should always be true). You can build trust through transparent communication about goals and expectations, but also by making sure people know exactly how much responsibility each person has within those parameters—and setting clear boundaries between departments so there aren’t any misunderstandings along those lines either..
Leadership coaching can help your company prepare for an economic downturn with a strong and motivated staff.
During the Great Recession, many companies were forced to reduce their workforce. In some cases, this meant laying off staff members; in others, it meant encouraging employees to find work elsewhere and continuing to pay them while they found new positions. Regardless of which route you took, leadership coaching can help your company prepare for an economic downturn with a strong and motivated staff.
Leadership coaching helps employees focus on their strengths by identifying their natural talents and working environment preferences. It also helps managers become more empathetic by teaching them how to identify what motivates others beyond money or other extrinsic rewards (such as praise). This means that the next time someone comes up short on goals—whether due to poor timing or bad luck—you’ll be able to figure out why instead of simply firing them because nothing else has worked before. Finally, leadership coaching teaches employees how resilience and agility can help them bounce back from setbacks or unexpected changes within their organization so they’re ready when things go wrong again later down the line!
Conclusion
The truth is, you don’t need to be an expert on every business topic. There are plenty of resources out there for you to learn from—and we hope this article has given you some ideas about how you can use leadership coaching to do just that! As we mentioned before, the best way to learn about leadership coaching is by trying it yourself. Don’t wait until your company is in trouble before signing up for training; instead, take advantage of free workshops and classes offered by local organisations like SCORE or your Chamber of Commerce. The more prepared your team is before the next economic downturn hits (if it ever does), the better off they will be when it comes time to weather any stormy seas!
