Why Women In Middle Managment Need Leadership Coaching
As business demographics face shifts in North America and Europe, many women are moving up in rank from middle management to executive leadership positions. The baby boom executives are nearing or already in retirement. Smart companies are focusing on internal promotion rather than external recruitment. Promoting from within can have great advantages for the company, while sometimes leaving the new leader and their team with gaps in their knowledge and process.
Whether you are currently in a leadership role or ready to become the leader, if you work in a group, manage a team, multi-task in your department, oversee projects, deal with multi-national contractors or adjudicate between colleagues, you need Leadership Coaching. You may be a brilliant negotiator, financial whiz or a technical genius. But do you have what it takes to manage other high-level employees? Particularly if you’re coming up from middle management to fill slots left by retiring executives as is currently happening in the American workforce.
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Forbes magazine puts it this way:
"There is going to be a real premium for companies to try to retain talent," says Mark Marcon, an analyst with Robert. W. Baird. "And the talent out there to replace the people retiring is going to be scarcer and scarcer."
As a result, companies will have to rely on younger people to take on management roles, says Gary Burnison, Korn/Ferry’s chief operating officer. And they will have to identify candidates who might have been overlooked in past years. "What we see is a war for talent," Burnison says. "Despite all the technological innovations of the past century, a simple truth remains: people make businesses successful."
Leadership coaches aren’t just for executives who are struggling to get the job done. Those overlooked middle-managers, in fact, might be prime candidates.
Leadership coaches often work with managers who have been highly successful, but see barriers preventing them from reaching the C-suite. Some are technical whizzes who don’t have the interpersonal skills to manage a large staff.
In other cases, coaches are called in when there has been turnover on an executive team, and the senior officers need to get to know each other. Leadership coaches can help a new CEO adjust to his or her position, or aid a board trying to develop a succession plan.
Do you realize what opportunities are now opening up for women in business? Barring the women’s work movement during WWII, we have never had such corporate opportunities like this before. And yet, many of us are blocked from achieving the positions and opportunities that they see in their own companies.
Why?
What I see commonly in the women I coach is perception of the invisible "glass ceiling" barrier preventing their upward momentum. While we know much of the glass ceiling is perceptual, some of it is actual. Barring real covert discrimination however, persevere without exception and believe deeply in yourself.
Leadership Coaching For You
If you are a woman in middle management and leadership positions are opening up that you would really like to acquire, don’t allow this to stop you. Here are some coaching tips to help pull you forward:
1) If nothing stood in your way, no glass ceiling, no discrimination, no derailment - what could you accomplish?
Hint: Using only the skills and talents you already have, where you sit at present.
2) If you are short political savvy or knowledge of corporate culture, how can you acquire it in the swiftest, most comprehensive way possible?
Hint: This is the time for corporate mentorship. If you don’t already have a senior mentor in your company, now is the time to cultivate one.
3) If your communications, people management or interpersonal skills are off, or you have personal barriers to leadership success, get leadership coaching while you’re still working in lower or middle management. It is imperative when such opportunities as executive retirement open up spaces for others to advance, that your skillset be in place.
Hint: If you’re a woman in management looking for leadership coaching with cutting edge blockage removal tools, see who I coach here.
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