Leading and managing people is not just about getting the results we need through the people we lead – it’s about how we get things done while also strengthening relational trust and people's confidence and capacity to reflect, learn and take responsibility for their own actions. This is the essence of a coaching approach to leadership conversations and relationships.

Coaching skills are no longer an optional extra but a critical requirement for formal leaders. By adopting a coaching approach, we can more effectively structure performance management and develop staff in their current roles and for the future.

This means letting go of being the expert fixer, advice-giver, and problem-solver for your staff, and learning to step back and enable them to discover and implement their own next steps. This in turn, assists us to hold people to account and delegate more effectively.