Coaching Column

Live & Learn

MANAGING MENTAL, PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL WELLBEING AND DEVELOPMENT

76 How to build agility

Put the principles to work

77 Matter of life or death

Personal experience of a mental health crisis

78 Wigan Council

A new deal for staff wellbeing

80

Book Club

Edge reviews top leadership titles

eaders working in the public sector today face three very particular challenges. What’s more, all of them necessitate a potentially broader range of skills and mindsets.

Firstly, public-sector leaders are now expected to deploy sound commercial sense while delivering against the needs of the community they serve. An example of this is the requirement to apply outcome-based budgeting, which embraces the development of partnerships between private and public-sector organisations. Leaders need to build relationships with stakeholders in different organisations, with different cultures. They have to become effective, networked leaders – traditionally not something public-sector culture has required.

Secondly, different public-sector organisations are now working together within communities, seeing this as an effective way to improve outcomes. That means public-sector leaders need to be adept at getting diverse groups of stakeholders on board with initiatives and achieving collaborative buy-in. They must have good people skills, an ability to view things from different perspectives and strong powers of persuasion.

The third challenge has arisen with the rise in workforce diversification. Public-sector employees are increasingly working flexibly, and often remotely. So public-sector leaders need to master the art of communication and understand what triggers their staff. Furthermore, as the

L

A new leadership style

Coaching can help the public sector to unlock its human potential

By

Neela Be!ridge

workforce becomes more diffuse, leaders must rethink how they communicate with their staff and maintain a ‘visible’ presence.

To meet these challenges, public-sector leaders can no longer behave as effective commanders and controllers. Instead they need to develop their ‘right brain’ powers of intuition and emotional intelligence so they better understand different points of view, as well as the value of collaboration.

Coaching can be crucial to helping leaders to address the challenges, unlocking their full potential. My coaching approach for public-sector leaders is human-centric. I work with each leader to examine the four dimensions involved in their leader persona: leading self, leading others, leading the organisation and leading the community.

The coach’s role is to support leaders to attain deeper self-awareness and awareness of others through embodied learning on three levels – bodily, emotional and linguistic. This can be achieved through the deployment of whole-body learning techniques and somatics (neuromuscular training).

Many leaders in the public sector are life-long public servants. The challenges presented by today’s world are forcing them to change how they think and act. Coaching can help them transition towards an effective leadership style in this fast-moving environment.

Neela Bettridge is a coach and mentor specialising in the development of leadership strategy and skills for C-Suite executives and senior teams. She is also founder and host of the breakfast seminar series ‘Women in Leadership’. Find out more at www.neelabettridge.com