Hello!

As many of you know, The Boda Group was acquired by BTS last year, a global consulting firm focused on the people side of strategy. As you can imagine, the last year has been full of growth, new relationships, and lots of discussion about how we support the talent lifecycle. We’ve had the opportunity to talk with our legacy Boda clients and new BTS clients about how executive coaching can support leaders in so many important moments—as part of talent development conversations, succession planning and broader talent strategies, and as leaders join a company, get promoted, and/or navigate big changes in their company’s strategy, operating model, culture, or ways of working. You can hear some of that conversation in the recording of our most recent webinar on change or join our upcoming webinar on effective feedback.

Our team has been thinking a lot about the many ways our clients are utilizing coaching to build effective leaders and to that end, how we define effective leaders. We wanted to share two perspectives that really resonated with us:

• Harvard lecturer, researcher, and published author Hise O. Gibson advocates for T-shaped leadership in this op-ed: Every Company Should Have These Leaders—or Develop Them if They Don’t – HBS Working Knowledge. “What organizations need now are “T-shaped leaders”—those who share knowledge across the organization (the horizontal part of the “T”), while maintaining functional-area expertise and commitment to their business unit (the vertical portion of the “T”).” This model acknowledges the importance of both technical competence and enterprise-wide skills and provides a framework for leaders to identify which part of the “T” is their strength and what that means for their development. (Hint: a coach could help! 😊)
• In this “Explainer,” McKinsey tackles a big question: What is leadership? According to this analysis of academic literature and a global survey of nearly 200,000 people in 81 organizations, there are four types of behaviors that account for 89% of leadership effectiveness:
  • being supportive
  • operating with a strong orientation toward results
  • seeking different perspectives
  • solving problems effectively

The article goes further to highlight the value of micro habits (or as we like to call them, experiments) as a pragmatic way of improving leadership capabilities in small, measurable steps—also a tremendous element of the work we do as coaches.

As you continue to explore leadership and build skills, competencies, and frameworks in your organization, we hope you find these perspectives as helpful as we did.

The Executive Coaching COE at BTS