Leaders who communicate from the inside out and use character and values to engender trust will have an easier time articulating direction, purpose and belief and helping employees and clients navigate the significant changes to come.

What does that style of communicating look like? How can it manifest itself in an organisational setting? And how can leaders be true to themselves while seeking to be ‘more authentic?’ 

In coaching, we have what I think is the nearest proxy to what authentic leadership communications looks like – a kind of template or framework for what leaders should be aiming for. 

The rich panoply of coaching skills – skills of enquiry, listening, playing back, ‘holding the space’ and encouraging awareness and insight – all sound light years away from the profile that has traditionally been sought and rewarded in leaders.    

The positioning of the coach as kind, generous of spirit, optimistic, worthy of trust and keen to transfer competence and guide rather than dictate is very similar to the positioning of the authentic leader, who in the face of accelerating change will best demonstrate muscularity and decisiveness by mobilising, encouraging dialogue, emboldening others and democratising rather than seeking to impose a narrow and ultimately delusory sense of control. 

Like a coach, the authentic leader will be forward-looking, non-judgemental, recognising the primacy of the individual as the prime generator of insight and meaning, committed to securing positive outcomes and genuinely invested and interested in other people. Increasingly this will mean being responsible for guiding the process rather than the content and letting go, in order to truly lead.     

The coaching approach rather than the old style of directive communicating will be the best way of bringing people together and instilling in employees, customers and stakeholders some feeling of control, agency and understanding over the trends that will increasingly impact our world. When allied to an authentic leader’s character, this will be a powerful and effective combination.

Coaching is the ultimate calm mode of communicating. The warm, inviting coaching approach will be a powerful counterbalance to both the detached, cool and rational dynamic driving technological change and the red-hot emotion and feeling often associated with rapidly changing social values.

For those listening and reporting to leaders, it will be the difference between them feeling marginalised, isolated and at the behest of forces that are moving with unnerving speed and disruption, and feeling they are still a part of this process and can influence the conversation.

Simply put, the coaching approach to communications is the best way for leaders to understand, articulate and mobilise to meet the great changes and disruption to come. And to further develop their own authenticity as leaders.