The process of coaching/mentoring is not a challenged free one. Thus, this post seeks to explore the challenges that leaders often encounter with coaching sessions.

It Feels Lonely at The Top of Your Team

As a leader of a team, you are answerable for directions, strategy, and the ultimate success of your team. You are faced with the task of making decisions with nobody to share their opinion on how to go about it. This is the major responsibility you have for your team or organization as a leader, and it has been proved that it feels lonely making decisions that affect the wellbeing of your fellow colleagues around you can be difficult and challenging. Most leaders strengthen their confidence in decision making when they discuss it with their colleagues or get other people’s opinions.

Business Performance

The responsibility for providing continued direction and innovation to improve and grow the organization as well as raise performance is solely that of the leader. Therefore, as a leader, you expected to lead and motivate a different group of people internally, develop future leaders for long-term performance, work across organizational boundaries in big organizations, and enhance effectiveness. Externally, you are required to be in charge of stakeholders’ expectations, keep pace with the competitors, marketplace, and understand and effectively handle external contexts like the culture and governance. For some leaders, shouldering all these responses is a big coaching challenge.

Not Credible at the Senior Level

Newly promoted leaders of all organizations type usually complain that their colleagues see them as not being credible at the senior level and that they lack leadership command. They have been told by their colleagues that, they hardly contribute productively in meetings except on issues relating to their direct role. Meaning that the newly promoted leaders need to exercise excellent leadership quality in order to be taken seriously both internally and externally.

These are some of the challenges leaders encounter during the coaching session, and this makes them too to say that they find it difficult to speak on issues they have no direct experience of. However, they have true value to offer in terms of their other experience, knowledge, and perspectives.