Play Now:

Susanne Madsen - Author and Leadership Expert

Generally speaking there are six leadership styles: authoritative, democratic, affiliative, pace setting, commanding and coaching. Each one of these has its time and place.

But for you and me as project leaders, project management coaching should be at the top of our list. After all, it is the people working on our projects who get things done, so we want to unlock their potential.

And leadership coaching may just be the answer.

A little while back we had Susanne Madsen on one of our leadership podcasts to discuss how her Project Management Coaching Workbook can help unleash your potential. And today, we are going to do a deep dive into various coaching techniques and how it can make you a better project leader. The tips you'll pick up will help you get better at motivation and coaching skills and working with your colleagues.

Episode Transcript

Podcast Introduction

Cornelius Fichtner: Hello and welcome to Episode #330. This is the Project Management Podcast™ at www.pm-podcast.com and I'm Cornelius Fichtner.

This is a Premium Episode and normally this would mean that it's only available to our Premium listeners. However, we are making this one available to everyone.

We're doing this because of you are a listener to the Free Project Management Podcast™ and you have ever wondered what you might be missing then well here is your chance to listen into a Premium episode. You can find out more at www.project-management-podcast.com/premium.

And if you are already one of our Premium subscribers then as always, thank you for your financial support of your favorite Podcast.

Generally speaking, there are six leadership styles: Authoritative, democratic, affiliative, pace setting, commanding and coaching. Each of these has its time and place. But for you and me as project leaders, project management coaching should be at the top of our list. After all, it is the people working on our projects who get things done so we want to unlock their potential and coaching may just be the answer.

A little while back, we had Susanne Madsen on the program to discuss her project management coaching workbook and how it can help unleash your potential. And today, we are going to do a deep dive into various coaching techniques and how those can make you a better project leader.

And now, what would you do? Enjoy the interview.

Podcast Interview

Female voice: The Project Management Podcast’s feature Interview: Today with Susanne Madsen, project leadership coach, author and speaker.

Cornelius Fichtner: Hello, Susanne! Once again, welcome!

Susanne Madsen: Thank you, Cornelius. A pleasure!

Cornelius Fichtner: So we want to talk about coaching. Can you define it for us please? What does coaching mean?

Susanne Madsen: Yeah, yeah, good one! I mean there are many different definitions but what I would say to the listeners is that coaching is a way of unleashing someone else's potential. So when we coach, we really help people to help themselves in let's say overcoming an issue or in reaching a certain goal.

That really means that coaching is non-directive which is interesting because we're talking about management and coaching today and we often associate a manager with some who gives direction. So what we are really saying here is that a coach is someone who does the opposite of command and control. They really listen and they help someone to find the answer for themselves which is different, right, that brings us to really two different types of coaching if you like that I think is important to make clear already at the stage.

But the first one is that as a coach, you can be independent. So I'm an independent coach and I help people to find the answers for themselves and move forward in whatever is right for them.

The second permutation is that when we coach as a manager. So we just said that managers often give direction but when we coach as a manager, we refrain from giving a lot of direction because what we really do is we help our employees to upscale and we help them to be successful in reaching their goals. And again, we try to allow them to find the answers for themselves. That was a long answer to question, Cornelius. What do you think?

Cornelius Fichtner: Oh, but I like it. I like it. I like it. Coaching on a very high level, it's a leadership style. But there are other leadership styles as well and before we go more into detail here, let's do a quick review of these. So we have authoritative, democratic, affiliative, pace setting and commanding. Can you just give us sort of a high level overview of these five before we then deep dive into coaching?

Susanne Madsen: Yeah, sure! So the first one you said, authoritative, and by the way these six leadership styles, coaching being the sixth, they are from Daniel Goldman. So they are not my styles. People can Google them and see them at there.

So the first one as you said is authoritative, also called a visionary. Authoritative is a funny word but really what we mean is that it's a leader who is good at setting the vision, creating the vision and inspiring people to follow. It's that traditional view of the leader who makes people follow. An authoritative leader will not necessarily tell people how to get there but they will paint the big picture and they will enable people to fill in the detail. So they'll paint the big picture and their role is to be inspiring.

The second one, democratic. Now, that's all about sharing the problem with a group. So asking people 'what do you think?' It's really a consensus-driven leadership style. We may think that's a good leadership style but actually research shows that when we make decisions by consensus, it's not necessarily the best way of making decisions. So I think democratic…

Cornelius Fichtner: Hey, I'm from Switzerland. I really resent that, okay?