Summary

According to Daniel Goleman, nonprofit leaders can incorporate different leadership styles in their relationships with employees. The leadership style used least by nonprofit leaders is the coaching style. In a nutshell, coaching leaders encourage employees to establish long-term development goals and help them conceptualize a plan for attaining them. The ongoing dialogue in a coaching relationship ensures that employees know what is expected of them, and how their work fits into a larger vision of where the organization is going.

The Background

Let`s see how the coaching style might work in practice. Within 18 months of becoming the executive director of Education Unlimited (a nonprofit that provides mentoring opportunities to low-income children), David Owings decided to work with senior staff to create professional development plans. Each staff member was asked to come up with a set of 3-5 goals that they wanted to achieve over the next 1-3 years in the organization.

The Solution

David then worked with each employee individually to devise a set of milestones and measurements of success for each goal. The feedback David received from the process was extremely positive: staff felt that he was investing in their development, and in return they were willing to give their best efforts.

Lessons Learned

As the example shows, coaching leadership works well when employees want to advance and achieve their potential. This type of leadership doesn't work work as well when employees are resistant to learning or changing their ways. In such situations, nonprofit leaders have to dig below the surface to understand what's causing the resistance. They will often discover that the resistance stems from a misunderstanding of the process: unlike many so-called "performance improvement plans," which are thinly disguised warnings to improve one's performance or face some undesirable consequence, the professional development plan with its clearly defined milestones and measures of success is designed to help employees succeeed.