Why Good Leaders Coach
In 2000, a Harvard Business Review article reported the coaching style of leadership was the least utilized of the six styles listed below. Fifteen years later, the coercive and pace-setting styles are still over-utilized, while coaching is under-utilized.
| Style | Guiding behavior | Overall impact on the environment |
| Coercive | Do as I say | Negative |
| Democratic | Seeks participation and consensus | Positive |
| Authoritative | Mobilizes people with a vision (most positive impact) | Most strongly positive |
| Affiliative | Focuses on relationships – creates harmony and common bond | Positive |
| Pace-setting | Do as I do – sets high performance standards | Negative |
| Coaching | Develops people for the long term – teaches, demonstrates, inquires | Positive |
Coaching is a powerful tool for developing people who continuously grow their abilities. As a result employees:
- Take on more complex work
- Solve increasingly difficult problems
- Implement solutions that work, and
- Perform at higher levels
This is one set of reasons why good leaders coach and coaching makes for good leaders. It’s also why leaders who don’t coach are passing up a powerful tool.
Why Other Leaders Don’t Coach
Reason 1 – Misguided Beliefs
Managers, especially those who are more results and task driven than people driven, see coaching as too time consuming and tedious. This is especially true in high pressure fast-paced environments, where coercive and pace-setting styles seem more expedient. But this belief about what saves time and takes time is misguided. Managers who operate in the coercive “Do as I say” or pace-setter “Do as I do” modes perpetuate the high pressure environment because they fail to employ and expand people’s ability to solve problems independent of the manager. The organization, therefor, is over-reliant on a single brain when many brains could resolve significantly more problems in less time. The pressure grows because of seemingly insufficient resources to solve multiple problems simultaneously.
Reason 2 – Culture Gets in the Way
This real-life example demonstrates how culture determines the leadership styles that prevail and those that don’t.
Sam, a senior manager, wanted a training program to teach front line managers how to utilize a coaching style. I asked about the company culture, management styles and predominant complaints of front line managers.
Sam described the culture as tops-down command and control. He identified the predominant management styles as coercive and pace-setting. He then described front line managers’ pain points.
“Our managers complain that employees don’t think beyond the immediate task. Even when the next step is obvious and simple, employees don’t act until their supervisor tells them what to do. I’m hoping that when front line managers adopt a coaching style, employees will take responsibility for solving whole problems even if it means going beyond what they’re asked to do.”
My response to Sam:
“The behavior you describe is a direct and unintended consequence of a command and control culture, which inevitably leads to coercive and pace-setter management styles. Those management styles, in turn, beget employees who follow orders and typically don’t go beyond what they’re shown, or told, to do. If you want employees to think about and solve whole problems, you need to create a different culture – one of engagement versus command and control. In an engaged culture, front line managers realize coaching works best to achieve the desired outcomes. That’s the best time for you to roll out a training program that addresses the coaching approach.
Training managers to coach, without changing the culture, will result in little, if any, return on investment. Your front line managers will be trained, but upon returning to a command and control culture they’ll be pulled back to a more coercive and pace-setting style. This will happen not because your managers are bad, ill-willed, resistant to change or lack intelligence. But because they are smart managers who do what works according to the culture.”