Abstract
MPhil. (Leadership Coaching)
This study indicates, through the application of a qualitative methodology to understand the experiences of women executives’ leadership presence, that there are specific areas of focus that executive coaches can put more emphasis on in order to enhance the coaching of executive women leaders, to enable improved leadership effectiveness.
A sample of eight executive women was purposefully selected to participate in this study. There was a fair representation of racial demographics. A semi-structured interview process with four broad questions was used to explore how the executive women leaders experience their own leadership presence, with an aim of extrapolating deep meaning from their personal leadership experiences. The thematic analysis of the interviews led to the identification of a set of ten themes that deductively emerged, within the constructivism and interpritivism paradigms, to highlighting key areas of focus in the development of executive women’s leadership presence.
The strong emergence of the gender identity consciousness of the participants was one of the core themes that emerged from the data. This finding supports recent literature suggesting the need for gender-sensitive coaching, which is a perspective that is currently underexplored in academic literature. The other common themes included the need to enhance enablers to support the growth of female leaders into executive positions, specifically, areas dealing with expertise, influence, confidence, connecting with others, authenticity, preparedness, effectiveness, and the ability to appear in control and be inspirational. Some of these themes are supported by other leadership presence coaching models investigated in literature. The ten themes were integrated into a pragmatic systems coaching approach, to show the application of these themes in typical coaching conversations.
The emergence of specific themes relating to executive women leaders’ presence and the application of these themes into a coaching framework suggest that leadership coaches can begin to demonstrate sensitivity to the developmental needs of women executives. This study therefore advocates for gender-sensitive approaches to coaching, especially in the enhancement of leadership presence of female executives. The study proposes to make contributions to the body of...