Research Paper: Coaching: A Tool to Empower Clients To Become Leaders in Their Professional Life

Indeed, coaches may support their clients in doing the following:

1. Lead clients to clearly identify their objective (i.e. what type of leader they aspire to become and what positions they intend to hold) by using the SMART analysis.
2. Conduct various assessments to determine their clients’ personality type, current leadership style, values, etc. These assessments will enable clients to determine where they stand when the coaching process starts and to better evaluate their progress.
3. Ask clients to elaborate a very detailed action plan that will help them achieve their goal. This plan will have to include specific actions and deadlines. Examples of actions would be the behavioural changes clients need to make to be a leader, the skills they need to develop, their career plan and the steps they will take to implement it.
4. Identify the internal obstacles (e.g. underlying automatic commitments — UACs) as well as the external obstacles (e.g. their working environment, the opportunities for promotion within their current job and the resources available to them) clients face that prevent them from fully achieving their goal.
5. Determine the resources (human, financial, time, etc.) they need to achieve their goal.
6. Define ways to celebrate every success.

Case Study

As an illustration, I will share the coaching process I used to coach the owner of Roksen Enterprise which has ten (10) employees. I have been coaching this 30 years old Senegalese female business owner for four (04) months. She has quite an unconventional background and is facing a lot of issues in being a leader. She has lived half of her life abroad, i.e. in the United States and several European countries.  When she obtained her degree in Finance, she decided to return to her home country to start an organic farm business.She was very excited about her business idea but had not fully grasped the meaning of being a leader when she started her business a year ago. Indeed, she had focused more on the business set up and marketing strategies of her business. The business has an incredible potential to be more then successful but her struggles with leadership have proved to be a real obstacle.