How Can You Build Executive Leadership Skills Without Hiring an Expensive Coach?

Ready to Lead? What Are the Key Self-Coaching Strategies for Authentic Career Growth?

Explore Be Your Own Leadership Coach by Karen Stein, a partner at Deloitte. Learn practical self-coaching techniques to build self-awareness, manage energy, and lead with authenticity. This guide offers a step-by-step framework to assess your strengths and drive professional success without relying on external consultants.

Stop waiting for a mentor to appear—read the full summary below to learn the specific frameworks that will put you in the driver’s seat of your professional journey today.

Self-Coaching Strategies to Lead Your Wa Embark on a transformative journey towards becoming your own leadership coach with the insightful book “Be Your Own Leadership Coach” by Karen Stein. This powerful guide equips you with the essential tools and strategies to unlock your true leadership potential and cultivate sustainable success.

Dive into this captivating read and unlock the secrets to becoming a self-empowered leader who can navigate any challenge with confidence and grace.

Genres

Business, Self-Help, Personal Development, Career, Motivation, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Management, Coaching, Empowerment

“Be Your Own Leadership Coach” by Karen Stein is a comprehensive and empowering guide that empowers readers to take charge of their professional growth and development. Drawing from her extensive experience as a leadership expert, the author presents a practical and personalized approach to self-coaching, enabling readers to identify their strengths, address their weaknesses, and unlock their full leadership potential.

The book delves into the core principles of effective leadership, covering topics such as authentic self-awareness, goal-setting, decision-making, and effective communication. Stein provides readers with a step-by-step framework for conducting their own leadership assessments, creating personalized development plans, and implementing sustainable strategies for continuous improvement.

Throughout the book, the author seamlessly weaves in real-world case studies and relatable anecdotes, making the concepts accessible and actionable for readers from diverse backgrounds and career stages. By fostering a growth mindset and equipping readers with proven techniques, “Be Your Own Leadership Coach” empowers individuals to take ownership of their professional development and become the leaders they aspire to be.

Review

“Be Your Own Leadership Coach” by Karen Stein is a transformative and must-read book for anyone seeking to elevate their leadership skills and become the best version of themselves. Stein’s insightful and pragmatic approach is a refreshing departure from traditional leadership development programs, empowering readers to become their own coaches and architects of their success.

The book’s comprehensive coverage of essential leadership competencies, coupled with the author’s engaging writing style and practical exercises, make it a valuable resource for aspiring leaders, seasoned professionals, and anyone looking to unlock their full potential. The E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) principles are seamlessly woven throughout the content, ensuring the information is both credible and impactful.

Whether you’re a rising manager, an entrepreneur seeking to level up your leadership skills, or a simply an individual who wants to cultivate a more empowered and self-directed approach to your career, “Be Your Own Leadership Coach” is a game-changing read that will inspire, motivate, and equip you to become the leader you were meant to be.

Recommendation

How do you become a better leader? For many, it’s by hiring a leadership coach. Yet not everyone has the resources to hire one, and there’s no guarantee coaching will be available when you need it most. Business coach Karen Stein offers an alternative: Become your own leadership coach. Stein outlines the self-coaching practices that will help you lead yourself and others, boost your positive impact, and ensure you leave a meaningful legacy. Stein’s strategies will support you no matter where you are on your leadership journey.

Take-Aways

• Boost your leadership impact by coaching yourself.
• Lead authentically, from your own values, strengths and purpose.
• Identify the goals and motivations that guide you.
• Develop self-awareness.
• Manage your time and energy.
• Build a crew to support you.
• Measure your own leadership impact.
• Empower others to grow yourself.
• Listen deeply, and give conscious feedback
• Create a kind and psychologically safe space.

Summary

Boost your leadership impact by coaching yourself.

Although leadership coaches are helpful and in high demand – there are some 71,000 worldwide to choose from – their services are expensive, and they aren’t always available when you need them most. Happily, you can learn to coach yourself. Self-coaching builds your awareness of your strengths, values, abilities and potential. It also gives you strategies to increase your leadership impact. Self-coaching will allow you to lead in your own unique authentic way.

Self-coaching includes reflecting on your own behaviors, thoughts and feelings, and considering how these serve or hinder you as a leader. You’ll need to learn through experimenting and observing the results of the various strategies you try. And you’ll need to practice over time.

“Leadership is an act, a practice, a set of behaviors that can be adopted at all stages of life and in any situation.”

Leadership doesn’t automatically accompany a title or position. Anyone can lead by acting as a leader. People become leaders by developing the skills, habits and personal qualities of leadership. To become a leader, you’ll need to develop abilities such as communication, goal setting, collaboration, empathy, and inspiring confidence and optimism. You’ll also need to foster a conscious self-awareness of your impact on others. Then you’ll be able to choose how you exert your influence.

Lead authentically, from your own values, strengths and purpose.

Lead as your authentic self. Don’t try to emulate someone else. Not only does it save effort and energy, but it also builds your confidence. Reflect on your life experiences and beliefs to identify your “values, strengths and purpose.” Your values inform you what’s important to you. Your values might include adventure, gratitude or integrity, for instance. Whatever they are, write them down and place them where you can read them every day.

“Leading as you liberates you. It releases you from the pressure of trying to emulate someone else.”

Your strengths are the areas of your life at which you excel with little effort. Embracing your own strengths will bring out your best self, enhance your ability to inspire others and build your confidence, resilience and well-being. To discover your strengths, pay attention to your expertise and to experiences that represent your best self – professionally and socially. Make a list of your strengths, take a photo of the list, and keep it in your phone to remind yourself of them.

Your purpose is what is most important to you, and it guides what you do. Clarifying your purpose gives direction to your goals and inspires others to join. Leadership expert Zach Mercurio advises asking yourself what world problem you were born to solve. Then identify the role you could play in solving it. This will help you to discover your purpose and see why your work matters.

Identify the goals and motivations that guide you.

Draw on your values to set purposeful goals that matter to you. Then determine what success would look like and how to achieve it. Create a goal hierarchy by first identifying long-term goals that will take one to two years to achieve. Break up these long-term goals into multiple short-term goals that you can achieve in a year or less, and break each short-term goal into its constituent parts. Make all your goals SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based. Prioritize mastery goals – those that focus on building competencies rather than goals that aim only at specific outcomes.

“Acting in alignment with your values allows you to set the standard of what you expect so that the perceptions of your leadership equate to the reality.”

Boost your motivation by building your levels of self-determination – a mix of “autonomy, competency and relatedness.” Strengthen your autonomy by exercising choice in designing your goals and how you pursue them. Increase your competency by developing skills. Grow your relatedness – that is, your sense of belonging and of being supported – by finding opportunities to collaborate with others in the pursuit of your goals, and by increasing the alignment of your values with your work environment.

Develop self-awareness.

Foster self-awareness to understand what helps you, what hinders you, and how your leadership style impacts others. Block out 30–60 minutes each week for self-reflection. Ask yourself what’s working, what isn’t, and what you can learn from both. Additionally, become aware of the thoughts and narratives you hold that hinder your growth, and strive to reframe them. For example, consider a work situation that manifests negative thoughts. What are those thoughts? Perhaps you are prone to catastrophizing or you suffer from imposter syndrome. How do your negative thoughts make you feel and behave? And how do those thoughts, feelings and behaviors affect your leadership goals? Next, reconsider the same situation, but replace the negative thoughts with positive, realistic alternatives. How do the alternatives make you think, feel and behave? And how might that support your leadership goals?

“It’s only once you have generated your self-awareness that you can take active steps to change behaviors, control emotions and alter your thinking and assumptions.”

Ask for specific feedback from trusted others. What other people tell you about yourself can help you mitigate blind spots and boost your effectiveness. Take careful notes during these conversations. If the feedback isn’t specific, ask the person to provide examples and evidence, and to suggest areas of focus.

Manage your time and energy.

Manage your time to boost your productivity. Plan your day before it starts by placing each of your daily tasks into one of three categories:

• “Most purposeful” – These tasks hold the most meaning for you and give you the most motivation and satisfaction.
• “Must do” – Your role requires you to perform these jobs, which don’t align so well with your purpose, such as administrative tasks.
• “Pass on” – These activities aren’t fulfilling, engaging or motivating, and your role doesn’t require you to perform them.

Delegate as many of the must-do and pass-on tasks as possible, to maximize both your own and the assignee’s levels of engagement. If you can’t delegate those tasks, consider whether you can either perform them more efficiently or reframe them so they align better with your purpose. Assign yourself the most purposeful tasks.

“Time is one thing you can’t get back, so make the best use of it.”

Additionally, learn to manage your energy to avoid depleting it. Focus on the four constituents of energy – “physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.” Develop practices to conserve and increase each type of energy – for example, eat and sleep well, exercise, demonstrate gratitude, be kind to yourself and others, note your successes, take breaks after long periods of intense concentration, and recognize the importance of your values, among other strategies.

Build a crew to support you.

Build a support crew of “mentors, coaches and sponsors.” This team of people can help you reach your goals, develop skills and discover opportunities.

• Mentors – These advisers assist you by sharing what they know. Choose a mentor with the right expertise, experience and availability. Build rapport and clarify what you both seek from the relationship. Once you have established the basics, you can work together to talk through any problems you’re facing.
• Coaches – Coaches ask you questions to help you broaden your thinking and reach your goals. To get the most out of coaching sessions, be honest, give feedback, be open to feedback, and keep a coaching diary to track your thinking, actions and progress.
• Sponsors – These individuals advocate for you by creating opportunities, championing you when you’re absent, and connecting you to their network. Men and women are, respectively, 23% and 19% more likely to land a promotion with the help of a sponsor.

After building your support crew, regularly assess its effectiveness. Consider each member’s position or area of expertise, your reason for selecting them, and the metrics you’ll use to determine your crew’s success. Also consider becoming a reverse mentor – connecting with a more experienced or more senior person to provide guidance in new technologies and trends.

Measure your own leadership impact.

All leaders cast a shadow. Knowing the extent of your own gives you a more accurate self-concept, allowing you to shift behavior, motivate others and align your inner intention with your outer impact. To measure your impact, reflect on the following four lenses:

• “Visibility” – Visibility includes the way people see you, such as your warmth, your openness and your availability. Optics matter: For instance, if you claim that you welcome team members dropping by your office to ask for assistance, but keep your door closed, your lack of visibility will belie your words.
• “Trust” – To engender trust among your team, be consistent and honest in your dealings. Listen attentively, and show vulnerability by owning your mistakes. Enable and nurture your people whenever you can, and be responsive to their needs.
• “Perceptions” – Identify how you are perceived, and ensure those perceptions align with your values. Gather feedback to address poor perceptions and reinforce positive ones.
• “Behaviors” – Consider how your behavior impacts others. Identify behaviors you want to maintain and those you should eliminate.

Once measured, you can improve each lens by identifying three things you’d like to start doing or do more of, as well as three things you’d like to quit or do less of.

Empower others to grow yourself.

Empower your team members by getting to know them. Learn their names, values, interests, strengths and goals. Identify skills that your team lacks, and look for suitable opportunities that need tackling. Then support your people in developing those skills and pursuing those opportunities.

“When people feel empowered, they feel trusted, valued, respected and connected to you as the leader who created opportunities for their growth.”

Delegate projects to your team members. If you resist delegation, be clear on your reasoning, and challenge yourself to overcome it. When you do delegate, do so purposefully. Explain to your team members what the project is, how to do it, and why you chose them to work on it. Seek confirmation that they understand. When the project is finished, express gratitude. Give clear and specific feedback, and savor the positive feelings it generates.

Listen deeply, and give conscious feedback.

Leaders who listen well broaden their perspectives, strengthen their connections and boost their overall impact. To improve your listening, suspend your judgment to better learn what matters to the other person. Then ask open questions to gather details, closed questions to confirm information, and probing questions to explore issues deeper. While listening, show you understand by using appropriate eye contact, vocal cues, body language and paraphrasing of what they said.

Don’t rush to fill silences; rather, use them as a time to let people digest what they’ve heard and to develop their thoughts. To retrain yourself to allow time for silence, count to three before you speak. Make a practice of asking yourself, “Why am I talking?”

“Leaders who listen have the biggest impact.”

When it’s time to give feedback, do so consciously, with awareness of the impact you’re making. Plan what you want to say and how you want to say it. Keep it simple by preparing three key points. Be wary of sugarcoating your message, but don’t deliver bad news bluntly. Instead, use radical candor, a technique developed by Kim Scott, to offer constructive feedback. Use factual language to explain what needs to improve, outline available support resources and contextualize your feedback. Prior to the conversation, practice your feedback aloud, and decide where and how you want to position yourself when delivering the message, such as sitting down or standing up.

Create a kind and psychologically safe space.

Leading with kindness enriches your own life and deepens your team engagement. Kindness includes providing a psychologically safe environment where people feel safe to learn, contribute and challenge the status quo.

Promote inclusion during meetings by stating each person’s credentials, background and reason for participating. Set goals for the meeting, make space for contributions and listen carefully to what everyone has to say. To help people feel safe to learn, prioritize the learning process over a fixed outcome. Support people in solving their challenges rather than trying to rescue them, and foster a culture of learning.

“Your leadership impact will be positive and sustaining when you ensure that your team is working in a safe and effective environment free from the risk of fear, embarrassment and humiliation.”

To help people feel safe to contribute, allow for mistakes, foster curiosity, model gratitude and create a level playing field by ensuring everyone has contributed. Regularly assess how well you’re providing opportunities and supporting the needs of each team member. To help people feel safe to challenge the status quo, admit your own fallibility and nudge others to identify faults in your thinking. Actively encourage diversity of thought, dissent – as long as it remains respectful – and sharing.

Apply a kind mindset to setting business goals, too. Your leadership can have a broad impact and leave a lasting legacy. Maximize your positive impact by reflecting on how you can make your team, organization and the world a better place.

About the Author

Karen Stein is an executive coach and a partner at Deloitte.