The Boss-Less Future: Coaches Are The Ultimate Manager-Less Leaders

This article was originally published on Coach U Blog on March 19, 2024.

Reinvent, reimagine, reconstruct ... or perhaps the better term is to remember the essence of your business? Your mastery in professional coaching extends beyond the sacred "live" moments with clients and enterprise customers to include your worldview, mindset, and philosophy of coaching. What do those three terms evoke for you?

Each client you serve in your business has a livelihood of some variety, from parenting to executive leadership and everything in between. The distinguishing factor is you, and our choices about how you show up and what you stand for as you express, interact, maintain presence, and partner with individuals and teams. Worldview includes your identity, shaped, and formed from your personal history, cultural traditions, geographic locations over time and any influence philosophically and/or spiritually over the course of your life. Mindset includes your current time frame of reference, attitude, thoughts, and beliefs that motivate how you act, whether conscious or not. Your philosophy of coaching, much like a business brand, expresses through your presence and engagement with yourself, your clients, your colleagues, and your professional community.

When did you last focus on these three things and take a deliberate approach to declaring what makes you, you? Clients do not engage a professional coach; they engage a human being who shows up and resonates an empowering expression of safe acceptance, acknowledging respect, courageous challenge and being a champion for what could emerge through a mutual belief in what the client wants. As you cultivate partnership with each client, you are constructing your business with that client and many relations in their lives who are influenced by their evolution in mindset and behavior.

You are a manager-less leader and always have been, whether you are an entrepreneur or an internal corporate employee delivering coaching services. This does not change with the trade winds of the economy or societal influences. The Gartner Group prediction quoted above highlights an external influence that is out of your control yet profoundly influences both you and your client mindset about life and the world of work. Between the prevalence of agile work processes (30 percent) and hybrid work environments (50 percent) in organizations, about one-third of teams operate without a manager today. Whether you are working with associates, their boss or their family members navigating this disruptive change in the experience of a livelihood, everyone, including you, has had moments of insight that sound something like, "I don't know what to do now" or "I'm not prepared or ready for this."

You do know and so do your clients. Uncertainty and doubt cause you to temporarily forget what you do know. You and your clients possess the capability, resourcefulness and creativity to use curiosity that stimulates new thinking and ideas to build a new basis for how to relate to life.

Reflect for a moment on your business in its current form and state. What purpose did you declare for your business and in turn, adopted the moral and mental strength to manifest? Bring that original thinking forward to today and ask yourself whether the external circumstance has changed anything about that purpose. My hunch is that your answer is no, and you just took the first step in remembering the essence of your business.

It's normal to feel uncertainty and doubt in the face of external circumstances that challenge your comfortable rhythms and sense of choice. Do you see the paradox in this situation? Throughout your journey as a coach, you've worked diligently to strengthen your confident competence. The door seems closed to share it because of something you did not intend and feel powerless to change. Notice that you are not alone in that experience; your clients share in that experience.

Challenge yourself to take a risk beyond your fear that your business has changed irrevocably. The external change in the environment offers an opportunity to be more receptive than pre-pandemic and the start of digital transformation in business. Of course, conversations focused on the content and tactical level of workplace experience fills the emotional space in coaching with stress and anxiety about increasing complexity and uncertainty. (Gartner also reports that only 47 percent of employees believe that their manager can lead the team to success in the future. Note the verb "believe," which you know as a coach arises from how a manager shows up and chooses to engage with their team.)

Being with the strong emotions expressed by your clients requires your diligence and deliberate attention toward balance, calm and whole-self presence. Your energy infuses the partnership with clients so that a pause settles the part of the brain that stimulates protection strategies.

What you offer in the role of coach in today's environment matters more than at any time prior. The stakes are high and demand every ounce of courage, choice and civility you embody so that clients remember what they love, sitting under the fear, which in turn motivates a growth mindset and unconditional curiosity.

In today's world that demands each person exercise agency and self-trust while sustaining connection to a shared purpose for health and wellbeing, coaches are the embodiment of the solution to rise toward the future. Remember who you are, what you aspire to contribute and how to express your essence. These steps are what sustains your business, no matter the external factors that appear to mitigate success.

Choose to show up, be in action and connect with gratitude that you have and do share your gifts in the world every day.

Published in choice, the magazine of professional coaching. Used with permission.
Original link of this article: https://choice-online.com/the-boss-less-future/

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The author of this article

Janet M. Harvey, MDD, CMC, ACS