Coaching practices for What Are Some Things I Can Do Right Now to Become a Better Leader

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For What Are Some Things I Can Do Right Now to Become a Better Leader, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I lead by directing and correcting and stepping in to fix things, and my team has gone quiet and passive, waiting to be told
• I keep forcing myself to lead the way I think a leader is supposed to, even when it cuts against my grain, and I can’t actually name what I’m naturally good at
• Everything still flows through me
• I stand up and tell my team what we value, but I’ve started to wonder whether my own choices actually match the words
• I’m well-meaning and I think I’m being helpful

Practices that may help

1. Leading from behind — the servant leader stance
   Influence others more through example, listening, and restraint than through assertion and command.
   The Tao Te Ching, Made Practical
2. Identify your dominant leadership strengths — and lead from them
   Know which of the four leadership domains you naturally operate from and amplify it rather than trying to be equally strong in all four.
   Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
3. Distribute leadership rather than centralizing it
   Develop leadership capacity throughout the team, not just in the designated leader.
   Transformational Leadership, Made Practical
4. Model the values you expect (idealized influence)
   Become a living example of the values you want your team to hold.
   Transformational Leadership, Made Practical
5. Watch for the accidental diminisher patterns in yourself
   Most Diminishers are not aware they are diminishing — the behaviors that made them effective as individuals undermine them as leaders.
   Multipliers: How Leaders Amplify the Intelligence Around Them
6. Lead from the executing domain — deliver on goals consistently
   People strong in executing know how to take an idea and make it happen.
   Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
7. Put the growth of others first
   Start from "how do I help this person succeed?" rather than "how do they help me succeed?"
   Servant Leadership, Made Practical
8. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders
   The same people perform differently under different leadership — so start with the leadership.
   Extreme Ownership, Made Practical
9. Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
   Strengths-based leadership, developed by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie building on Gallup’s decades of manager research, holds that the most effective leaders invest in their own strengths and build teams whose combined strengths cover all four leadership domains — executing, influencing, relationship building, and strategic thinking. Gallup’s correlational research consistently finds that strength-focused teams report higher engagement and performance, though the causal direction is not fully established.
10. The Leader as Coach: A New Management Paradigm
    Leading as a coach means creating space for people to think and grow rather than solving every problem for them. The approach draws on coaching methodology — asking over telling, listening before advising — and is supported by research on autonomy, self-efficacy, and learning. The shift is behaviorally demanding because telling feels faster and more capable, even when it systematically reduces the people around you.

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