ES91K Leadership and Excellence

Introduction:

WaveRidersis a company that sells inflatable boats to the leisure and adventure industry and to the military force. John Excellence established the company in Christchurch, Dorset. The main products of the company are SeaSpray and SeaHorse: two different types of inflatable boats created for two different purposes. WaveRiders sells SeaSpray to the sailing clubs for leisure and adventure and it sells SeaHorse to the military for sea rescue and other military purpose.

John was a marine commando when he got this idea about opening a business in inflatable boats. He along with his teamdesigned a multipurpose high-design boat with soft bottom for the leisure usage. After two years, he launched another high-specification boat suitable for sea rescue and other military purpose, and also made the boats rigid bottomed. Thus, WaveRiders was formed and within four years, it was well established in UK. When faced major challenges from two rivals, Hagen(German) and Surf ZA (UK), WaveRiders introduced technical improvements to maintain their position in the market. Currently, the majority of sales come from the leisure market. SeaSpray generates 95 percent revenue in the UK’s domestic market and 5 percent from Europe, while the ratio for SeaHorse is 90:10.

However, the performance of the company is declining over the years with growing competition in the market. It attempted to recover by reducing prices but that did not increase sales volume significantly.

According to Alan Stevenson, Marketing Director of WaveRiders, the main reason behind the fall in company’s growth is the out-of-date and labour-intensive selling methods. In the modern world, visual effects of marketing are very effective; hence, the company should opt for state-of-the-art marketing techniques. A highly skilled sales and marketing department is required in the company. Also, it should have a flexible pricing and discount system along with good distribution channels to respond quickly to the changes in the market.

Leadership coaching is the personalized or individualized procedure which helps to build the potential and capability of a leader of an organization to achieve short and long terms goals of the company. It also motivates a leader to make contribution for the company’s growth. Coaching refers to the training or guidance of an individual to achieve a goal ("What makes for an Effective Leadership Coach?", 2016). It is personalised, made-to-order process, conducted for a specified period of time with a specific business intention. This type of coaching generally focuses on improving the leadership quality and performance of the leaders at all levels within the organizations ("Next Level Leadership Coaching - What is Leadership Coaching?”, 2015).

Leadership coaching has the following benefits:

• It helps the leaders to develop their skills and that impacts the growth of the organization.
• Leaders can promote their skills and achievements for self-marketing and branding.
• The future leaders can be trained to lead the organization successfully.

Conventional education and training can prepare the leaders to tackle the technical aspects of their roles, while one-to-one coaching helps them in developing their personal skills, relationship skills and helps them to grow as a professional human being. However, due to minor mistakes in interpersonal and leadership capabilities and negligence towards duties can turn out to be very costly for both the company and the individual ("Leadership Coaching Strategies | Harvard Professional Development | Harvard DCE", 2013).

Coaching can be termed as a partnership association. The coach is not the expert in the company of the client, rather the client is the expert within the company and the coach guides him to become more expert in the business ("What is Leadership Coaching?", 2014). The method is almost same for leadership coaching too. A coach usually applies a variety of procedures, such as:

• Using data from primary and secondary surveys to find out the pattern of behavarial patterns connected with business procedures.
• Listening to the client’s problems and guiding them for solving that.
• Helping the client to set his priority and overcoming obstacles.
• Guiding the client to  get out of his comfort zone and take risks to explore new options.
• Assisting the client with setting the goal and making business plans.
• Providing various sources of learning.

It has been found that more than 60% of the CEO’s of huge corporate houses have their own personal coaches ("Coaching Models used in Business, Executive Coaching", 2016).

Assumptions about the organization:

A training module is made for the leadership coaching of the CEO and the directors of WaveRiders. This is a plan for the development of human resources of the company. While drafting any plan or making any module, it is absolutely necessary to make different types of assumptions of the company. These assumptions can include general environment, factors related to specific business, management and issues outside control. In case of Waveriders, the general assumptions can be as follows:

The director group consists of the CEO and Marketing Director, Finance Director, production Director and HR Director.

There are closely 350 employees and they are divided into several groups, meant for separate tasks. They are being led by the team leaders.

SeaSpray brings in more revenues than SeaHorse and it targets the leisure industry more due to larger customer base.

According to Morris (2015), the assumptions for leadership coaching could be:

• Everyone can lead: since it is a motivational and influencing factor in a professional world, it is assumed that every person can be leader and can impact others.
• Sometimes a person has leadership characteristics in-built but sometimes, a leader is made. Such a person can develop his leadership skills through education and training and can impact others through his leadership abilities (Gloss, 2013).
• Effective leadership is the resultant effect of scope, training, knowledge and experience. To grow the leadership potential, a person needs chance and scope, a good guidance and hands-on experience of leading a team. A combination of all these can make a person a good leader.

Training/guidance module:

All leaders need guidance from trusted advisor(s), for handling new projects, implementing major changes, or looking for personal or professional get through.  To develop the personal attributes and achieve superior understanding of the natural talents to improve the performance of himself and that of the organization, a leader needs good coaching.

The aim of the leadership coaching programme is to train the CEO of WaveRiders for creating an effective strategy for the company. It also includes training modules for the Directors of WaveRiders. It focuses on the coaching of the management to create a vision, formulate a strategy and achieve the goals of getting back its position in the market. The coaching programme operates in a framework of strength of natural talents of the leaders. It helps to boost the confidence of the leaders to perform their best (De Vries, 2014).

Our training programmes apply the science of using the leader’s own insight and proficiency to make connections with the executive’s strengths in their individual and organizational performance. We use techniques to assess the leader’s strength and weaknesses to understand their unique business challenges in a better way. Then we use those findings to formulate a highly specialized coaching guide for the leader. These modules are generally one-on-one programmes since that helps to understand the individual characteristics of the leader in a more personalized manner. However, these modules also include sessions with the executive team of the leader and also his subordinates.

At the end of the training, we provide honest feedback about the leader’s growth and performance during the guidance period. We also provide full support to increase the self-awareness of the leader and his capability to work in the desired manner to achieve success. The impacts of the extended support can be described as follows:

• Increase in self-awareness and expansion of the leadership capacity
• Recognizing and influencing the most important and crucial partnerships to build a strong relationship.
• Promoting the organizations brand, culture, purpose and vision.
• Creating a good reputation within the business circle.

Our institute follows three keys to formulate a good and customized coaching guide for the leaders of any organization. The mindful coaching is the improved technique that brings about better results (Riddle, 2012). For WaveRiders also, we followed the mindful coaching technique and the three main points in their training module are:

1. An empty mind
2. Non-reactivity
3. Permissive attention

To start the coaching, the first requirement is to have an empty mind. It is necessary to have a mind free of any preconceive notions or idea. Before going for a coaching, a leader must be prepared to learn the basics and for that, his mind should be free from any prejudices. He also must listen to what is being told. There should be a healthy interaction between the coach and the leader. Both the parties should have an open mind to welcome any suggestion and think the rationale of that (Cox, Bachkirova & Clutterbuck, 2014).  

Non-reactivity refers to the policy of non-reaction in case of any provocation. It is one of the most important characteristics required for both the coach and the leader.  During the training, none of the party should be provoked to react in any case. The calmness of the mental and emotional space is necessary to understand the contents and not to misinterpret any. Non-reactivity also helps a person not to be judgmental about anything and everything. The leaders, especially, need to practice non-reactivity to run a team or an organization smoothly. This also helps to make a harmony among the team (Fletcher & Mullen, 2012).

Permissive attention refers to the state of convincing a person of something that he believes he could never perform. It is a task of the coach to draw the attention of the leader in a positive way towards something that, has a possibility of being a disaster. It is about drawing the attention of the leader to do some productive changes (Adams 2016).  

The coaching model to be used in WaveRiders:

The coaching models must be very flexible, adaptive and customized for different organization. The behavioral based models are derived from the approach towards learning and change (Passmore, 2015). It should meet the following criteria:

• A complete and comprehensive description of the process
• It is a predictive model and directs towards an outcome
• It explains the characteristics and relation of the components
• It applies validated behavioral transform process for producing sustainable and measurable change.

In the words of Rock (2014), traditional leadership coaching models, such as, Grow Model, Goal Setting, action planning are outdated models. Those fail to develop long lasting and quantifiable behavioral competencies. Moreover, not all the organizations can apply a single theory, but the models were not customizable for individual needs. The old models were ineffective to measure the changes in the behavioral pattern of the leaders in different organizations. Hence, the new approaches emerged. The coaching models in 21^st century are more flexible and more productive. These are based on behavioral science. These models comprise of the factors such as, personal development, emotions, ethics and principles, motivational levels, beliefs, cultural background, attitudes etc. (Ladegard & Gjerde, 2014).  Some of the aspects of such a model are as follows:

• Targeting and giving attention to specific behavior of individuals
• Analysis of the specific behavior according to its background and consequences
• Application of suitable and dependable methods of assessment, data collection and analysis
• Formulating a developmental plan
• Employing valid techniques for managing, measuring and maintaining behavioral changes.

It is difficult task for the coaches to choose the best model for a particular organization. For the CEO and Directors of WaveRiders, we choose model of learning acquisition (Nahavandi, 2016). This is about learning and development of skills of the leaders for sustainable growth of the organization. We choose Solution focused theory of leadership coaching models for WaveRiders. This model assumes that the consumers have the answer within themselves and identifying that critical question for the growth of the organization is the main objective of the leaders. Hence, creating the solutions based on the commitments of the partners or customers is the foundation of this theory (O'Connell, Palmer & Williams, 2013).

To get back the position in the market, WaveRiders must apply to Solution focused theory for its leaders. It is a positive approach with calculations based on small simple steps. It can be applied in the business straight away (Avolio & Yammarino, 2013). Application of this model enables the leaders, that is, CEO and the Directors of WaveRiders to formulate a solution focused on the growth of the business. We guide the CEO to apply the strength-based perspective to achieve a positive change. He must motivate the employees to find out the solution of the problem and implement that. Solution focused theory is easy to learn and implement, it improvises the existing structure of production, delivers quick solution, enhances productivity of the employees, applies new and improved techniques in production methods and most importantly it is focused towards identifying the factors that works best within the organization and amplifying those factors to achieve success (Antonakis & House, 2014).

We also scheduled transactional leadership theory for the directors of the company. Transactional leadership is also known as managerial leadership. It focuses on management, association and performance. In this type of leadership, the leaders endorse conformity by followers through both rewards and punishments. The leaders are trained to lead the organization by the methods of transactions of rewards and punishment (McCleskey, 2014).

According to de Haan (2013), the management team is guided on the following aspects:

• They should focus more on the solution and not on the problems.
• They should lead the organization through enthusiasm, motivation and support and yield high performance from them.
• The training involves simple conversations with the management team.
• Enhancing the natural talent and skills of the leaders and improve their competencies.
• The most important is the identification of the question, that, what the reason behind the fall in business is. After that, finding the solution of that problem becomes the objective of the business plans.

The CEO and the Directors of the company will be mostly benefitted by this theory (MacKie, 2014). After the training gets completed for the CEO, we chose the Marketing Director of WaveRiders for the specific training. The solution focused theory identifies the major problem of falling revenues is the old fashioned and labor intensive marketing techniques. The marketing strategies of WaveRiders need to be improvised. That will enable the company to reach a bigger customer base and also to the Gen-Y customers. They should redesign the website and print attractive brochures. They should put up more hoardings highlighting the offers and discounts. The Marketing Director is given the coaching on how he could lead his marketing team to perform and achieve the goals of the organization (McCleskey, 2014).

This leadership theory helps to develop the leadership skills of the management by guiding them to achieve a solution to the problems faced by the organization. We expect the management of WaveRiders to utilize this training to overcome the challenges it is facing with the help of good leaders.

References:

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