Research Paper By Sybelle Gielisse
(Executive Coaching, NETHERLANDS)

We are dying for a new leadership style; How Coaching skills can attribute….

An introduction

The “Anglo Saxon way” that present leaders often still show is ‘outdated’1. That was the opening of an article in a Dutch newspaper not so long ago. In the knowledge based society managers don’t have all the solutions anymore. These days there is no place for authorative behaviour and decisiveness as a leader. The current society is demanding another type of leader.

Probably this is also due to the fact that we are living in challenging times. The economy is currently turbulent. Technology is extremely fast paced and dynamic! In fact, there is an accelerating rate of change. With the advancements of technology and the Internet, we have more efficient ways to do pretty much everything. Business is highly competitive – as soon as you think of something new, invariably your competitors will too. Buyers
are more aware and better informed with a world of choice available to them, literally at the touch of a button! There is now a greater level of complexity in everything we do, not least because we operate in a global economy.

Along these developments employees have also changed; they work better if they are heard and if they are taken seriously. They are looking for more own responsibility and they want to decide themselves how they are doing their work.

This all has led that we are demanding another style of leadership. We see a prominent shift from the autocratic and directive leadership of the twentieth century to a more participative and democratic style of the new generation. But a lot of the managers/leaders are stuck in the so-called “vertical paradigm”. They still have the annoying tendency to think for their employees, to say how they have to do their work and so on. This new kind of leadership is demanding other managerial skills and behaviour.

At the same time (Executive) Coaching is becoming a hot topic. The profession appears to be growing, with an estimated 47,500 professional coaches generating close to $2 billion (USD) in annual revenue/income. Forbes.com put life and business coaching on its list of “Surprising Six- Figure Jobs.” Coaching is not new, but it is not so long ago that we called it “coaching”.

Like leadership coaching went through different kind of stadia. But funny enough (or not so surprisingly) the developments of these two topics were based on the same tendencies in our society.