"Coaching the Dominant Leader: Balancing Drive with People Skills for Greater Impact"

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Effective leaders hold a wide range of skills and qualities to guide, motivate, and inspire others to achieve organizational, professional, and even personal goals.

A dominant style leader (High D in DISC), might say "an effective leader is one who accepts the challenge, takes control, and takes decisions to ensure things get done".

Known to be fast paced and task focused, they prefer maximum independence and freedom to manage themselves and solve problems. Their goal-oriented nature may have others describing them as having high standards and competitive.

High D leaders go headfirst into solving problems and are less concerned about making friends as they are about winning. This results-oriented nature can create an imbalance with others on the team who may feel their leader is too blunt, too direct, and too impatient.

To learn more about the Dominant Leadership Style, review The Dominant Leader: Working With The High "D" Leadership Style

Coaching a Dominant Leader

To achieve more balance and increase their effectiveness in leading different personality types, dominant leaders benefit from working on active listening, showing concern for others, participating more on a team level, and developing the mindset and skills around being more patient, humble and sensitive.

If you are coaching a dominant leader style, here are three tips to help them develop their people skills:

1. Get to the point. Dominant leaders act fast so your coaching questions will need to be brief. Rambling questions that require lots of explanation will frustrate this leadership style and they will quickly disengage.

2. Perspective taking: balancing their personal lives and relationships with their need for results is often an area of coaching. Coach them to take on a variety of perspectives to see the bigger picture.

3. Play with pace: practice variations in the pace of your coaching, and in the pace of their responses to explore the energy and how to optimize this skill to gain the information they need to make better decisions.

Coaching can help leaders to better understand their own strengths and development opportunities that will enhance their effectiveness and ability to produce high quality results.

About Tammy Dunnett

Tammy Dunnett is an international speaker, Executive Coach and Communication Skills Trainer with over 20 years experience working in challenging and even hostile environments like Afghanistan, healthcare, and post secondary education.