Anything you’ve accomplished in your life required a strategy. A strategy is merely made up of the goals you choose and the actions you take to achieve those goals.
The better you become at choosing the right goals with a strong set of actions, the better your strategies will be.
Keep reading to learn the best methods for strategy coaching.
Let’s dive in.
Strategy Coaching: 11 Best Methods
1. Know And Understand Your Team
A strategy coach can help you learn about each person on your team more deeply. Their strengths and weaknesses; what they excel at and what challenges them; what motivates them and what they find discouraging.
Utilize formal personality testing and consider having your team members complete regular self-evaluations. Then with the results, ensure each employee is in the most effective position possible.
2. Transparency
Strategy coaching can help you build trust with your employees, form relationships, and ensure everyone’s on the same page by being transparent.
From the top down, transparency will help foster a company culture of open communication and trust.
Ask yourself these key questions:
- Do I frequently let others know I’m open and allow them to get to know me?
- Have I let my team know and understand my values and motivations?
- Is my method of making choices and decisions clear and consistent?
- Am I vulnerable enough to let team members know when I make a mistake or discover a fault in my own knowledge base?
Related Content: Business Strategy Coaching
3. Lead By Example
The best leaders will guide by example. Strategy coaching teaches you doesn’t make sense to expect your team members to do anything you wouldn’t do.
This shows them you don’t place yourself above them. You’re leading with them.
4. Collaboration Over Competition
Humans can be competitive. However, discouraging unhealthy competition while encouraging collaboration and recognition of group achievements is strategic coaching.
It allows you to foster a culture that thrives as a team and one that inspires members to rely on each other.
5. Be Clear
Strategic coaching helps you clearly define your objectives and goals. Start your team off with big-picture thinking and encourage the members to discuss and brainstorm ways to meet your long-term goals.
Here you draw from individual strengths and request your team’s dedication, commitment, and creativity.
Once the larger goals are identified, develop a timeline which includes any milestones or benchmarks that keep everyone accountable. This helps you gauge your team’s cohesion, progress, and accomplishments.
6. Celebrate The Milestones
Celebrating milestones and benchmark goals will keep your team on track, inspired and motivated. Pay attention to the individuals on your team.
Highlight important and meaningful occasions from work anniversaries and personal achievements to professional gains and team wins.
This is a powerful way that shows you see and acknowledge each individual. This method in strategic coaching builds team motivation and morale as well.
7. Building A Balance Of Trust
At the core of effective strategy coaching sits a foundation of balanced trust.
While the other methods can help establish this trust, make an effort to show your employees you care about them, consider them to be valuable members of the team, and have a keen interest in them and their accomplishment.
8. Groundwork For Success
Strategic coaching offers the groundwork for them to operate effectively.
Therefore, it’s critical they receive access to training, software, resources, strategies, materials, and anything else they might need to be successful in their roles. If something is lacking, fill the gap as quickly as you can.
9. Constructive Feedback
Feedback through strategy coaching has the power to make or break the achievements of the team. Giving and receiving constructive feedback can be tricky.
Remember to craft your message so that the positive is emphasized and what requires work has action steps to go with it. Refine your feedback skills over time, and be open to feedback from others too.
10. Request Feedback
During meetings and one-on-one sessions with team members, ask for ways you can improve in your role as a strategy coach to help your employees reach the performance and behavioral goals you’ve set together.
Keep an open mind, remain flexible, ask clarifying questions and maintain perspective.
11. Manage Conflicts
Even with your efforts to build a unified team, conflicts will inevitably arise. Your strategy coach helps you understand it’s up to you to keep an eye out for interpersonal upheaval within your team.
Leadership coaching makes an effort to understand all sides of the issues, and then offer coaching for dealing with and avoiding these problems in the future.
Strategic Coaching Model
Strategic coaching helps you identify the needs of your team before they become problems. This proactive approach opens up learning opportunities before things fall apart and an urgent change is required.
Even better, your strategy coach will give you the ability to increase the chances of success and to help every team member develop within the company structure.
For your company to be positioned for success over the long term, each function, department, and individual must figure out how to align with and support your organization’s overarching business strategy.
Every team member is required to:
- Have engagement in the strategic planning and support the broader vision of the company
- Find ways to contribute their unique value
- Help harvest strategic opportunities and navigate around obstacles to success
During a series of strategic planning sessions, the leadership team learns the coaching strategy report specifically crafted to take their organization to a new level of success and competence.
The focus of strategy coaching is to come up with a viable action plan that will improve processes and drive growth.
Strategic Coach Tools
Your strategy coach will tell you, being a doer instead of a thinker means providing yourself with the methods to think through things at a pace that leaves you feeling more at ease.
Your confidence will soar when you know you’ve done the planning.
1. The Impact Filter
By being aligned with your greater purpose, being clear about your intentions, you’ll realize whether your aim is right for you, your company, and important people around you, or not.
The Impact Filter is a thinking process that filters out everything other than the impact you want to have. It guides you to be clear on what you want to achieve, the best and worst possible results, and what success means to you.
It can change the way you approach your goals.
2. The Strategy Circle
All those things that seem to oppose our goals are actually the raw material for successfully achieving them.
Obstacles in your path lead you to a greater version of yourself that excludes them. Rather than avoid them, learn to use them as an official and integral part of the solution.
The Strategy Circle allows you to harness the power of negative thinking by envisioning your desired outcome and then becoming aware of everything standing in the way.
The Strategy Circle asks you to think cynically so your brain can communicate what has to be solved and overcome. To reach a major breakthrough, you have to be willing to do the work so you can transform what stands in the way.
3. The ABC Model
Determine what you can automate and what you can delegate. If we hold ourselves responsible for our freedom and find solutions for the activities that don’t fascinate or motivate us, we can make more time and space for the things that do.
The ABC Model can bring clarity to how you’re spending your time. Find out how technology can help you get certain things off your plate so you can spend time building the future you want.
4. The Entrepreneurial Time System
Time away or for ourselves is not a luxury – it’s required for creativity. Don’t wait till burn out happens.
Preserve your energy so you’re always operating at your best and offering the most competitive results by changing the way you manage your time.
It’s a new way for organizing your schedule so you’re always operating from a place of drive and efficiency.
Business Strategy Coach
What makes a good Business Strategy Coach is firstly, they require everything that comes with a wealth of relevant and appropriately high-level business qualifications, experience and skills.
There are many brilliant coaches, but far fewer with that business acumen and “boardroom credibility” to quickly understand your business and bring added value through their own experience and success in their career in leading businesses.
Secondly, the strategy coach requires the skills that come from experience. It takes discipline to recognise their primary role is to coach, not consult.
Good business strategy coaching brings awareness to you, the client, through listening and reflection. Then guides you to develop your own strategy that will be effective to your own unique situation.
A business strategy coach can be a sounding board to reflect ideas to you and your team, while also both bringing their own ideas and drawing on the understanding of the business and its people.
Strategic Coach Worksheets
Here we offer you some worksheets as a free download to begin your strategic coaching journey by learning more. This gives you an idea of the kind of methods a strategy coach can offer in leadership coaching.
- The Impact Filter
https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/images/5/5f/Impactfilter.pdf
- The ABC Model
https://www.therapistaid.com/worksheets/abc-model-for-rebt
- The ABC Problem Solving Worksheet
https://smartrecovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/ABC_Worksheet.pdf
- The Entrepreneurial Time System
http://www.biggerfuture.com/images/uploads/GRDP_Time_System.pdf
Strategic Coach Books
These strategy coaching books can help you understand strategic coaching and help your leadership team develop a radical shift with new insights while you clear the blind spots, shift perspectives and save time.
Here are four books to begin your research:
- Your Life As A Strategy Circle
https://private.strategiccoach.com/store/products/296
- Understanding Our Response To Stress And Adversity
https://www.dartmouth.edu/eap/abcstress2.pdf
- Whatever It Takes
- Advanced Mentoring Skills
Companies today with talented leaders who can unleash the potential and performance of every member of the organization, will drive success professionally and personally for every member of the team.
A constructive strategy coach can help you build the team’s commitment to the goals of the company, invite team members to participate as partners in the business and truly transform the organization.
Strategy coaching can enhance business success and integrity in a way that’s genuinely sustainable over the long term.
Find a strategy coach near you to help your team develop their career to be leaders of the future. If this article on the best methods for strategy coaching has been helpful ✅, please consider forwarding it ✅ to your friends and colleagues.
