New Leadership Skills for Success in a Global Business Environment: Lessons from Executive Coaching

To be effective, leaders over the next decade will need to develop new skills to address the increase in business volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity that they confront. Executive coaching has a distinct role to play in developing these skills and abilities as it extends to multiple life domains and has the potential to affect leader performance. By reflecting on that which is hidden or taken for granted, leaders become more aware of they see situations, deal with paradoxes and dilemmas and so on. A recent research project on the development of executive coaches sheds light on the events that lead to productive change and suggests that coach development has implications for the ways in which we develop leaders.