The winner of the 2020 Warren Bennis Prize—for the top leadership article published in Harvard Business Review—was The Leader as Coach.
When I first read it, I felt validated. I didn't wonder then why the article wasn't called The Manager as Coach. It felt great to see illustrious people eloquently capturing an idea I’d also been championing for years: a coaching style of leadership is the main driver of performance and well-being over the long term.
That belief had already shaped my work with CEOs and their teams across industries. It inspired me to co-found Manageable (coincidentally) in 2020, with the aim of giving everyone at work the gift of a great manager—rather than the accidental variety. How? By inspiring managers to confidently practise a coaching style of leadership.
But I’ve noticed a recurring pattern in conversations with countless leaders world-wide, from first-time managers to CEOs. They keep asking three questions that suggest we have a problem with Leader as Coach, and with the distinction between Manager and Leader implied by the article.
Here they are:
- Who should I coach?
- When should I coach?
- What’s the difference between coaching, mentoring, leading and managing?
These questions suggest the Leader as Coach idea has got lost in translation. But more importantly, they hint at a deeper issue: faulty borrowed logic from Executive Coaching. I believe this is now hindering rather than helping leaders at every level in an organisation.
Who Should I Coach?
This is the big one, so I will dwell on it. At first glance, the question seems reasonable. Not everyone needs the same kind of support, right? That’s the logic of Situational Leadership, a model that’s been around since the 1970s, encouraging us to adapt our leadership style to each person and context. It presumably took us away from One Size Fits All Leadership.
Then, in the mid-1990s, came the Skill-Will Matrix inspired by Situational Leadership. It focuses on how skilled (or talented or able) someone is to perform the job and how motivated or willing someone is to do the job well. This Matrix gave us permission to sort team members into a 2x2. Four sizes now fit all!
And I've noticed that the Skill-Will Matrix is being used to help managers answer the question of who they should coach. Let's dive a bit more into the borrowed logic of the Matrix, and its relevance for managers choosing people in their team to coach.
So who do you think? I've heard some say it’s the Top Right folks—High Skill High Will. But really? Why coach the ones who are already thriving? What's the Skill/Will upside of coaching your most motivated and talented people? Maybe they should be left alone to keep excelling, and being positive role models or mentors. Maybe coaching these people is rewarding for the coach. Tricky.
Others say Top Left—High Will Low Skill. But is coaching really the solution here? Wouldn’t upskilling or training be the answer, rather than spending precious time asking them open-ended questions? Hang on. If their Will is really so great, why haven't they taken it upon themselves to develop the skills they are judged to be lacking? And do you know who is predictably High Will Low Skill? Not team members, but managers, because 80% of managers have had no training to lead their teams.
While I've not heard many arguments for the people in the bottom two quadrants, I can imagine what they'd be. High Skill Low Will people should be coached since coaching is so motivational. It will ignite their passion. But wait. We know managers have the biggest impact on employee engagement, so if someone is Low Will it's quite likely that the manager is part of the problem rather than the solution. So spending more time with the source of your Low Will would be like pouring oil on fire. And upskilling managers should sort out team-wide Will.
As for Low Skill Low Will, there shouldn't be anybody in this quadrant, so problem solved. And what would be the goal here, if by chance you do have someone in mind? Make them Low Skill High Will people? The more we ignore managers and their skills, the more those very managers will move left to this quadrant.
All of this of course assumes managers can accurately categorize people in the first place. And what if Skill and Will aren’t the right measures even if you were good at measuring them? What if open-ness, growth mindset, or some other factor is the way to discern who to coach (if that's even a valid question for team leaders in the first place).
Isn't all this faulty borrowed logic? And maybe it's even worse. Maybe the original logic is faulty. What if Skill and Will aren't independent factors? I'm guessing BJ Fogg (Behavioural Scientist at Stanford University and author of Tiny Habits) might think it's bonkers. Here's something he came up with in 2007:
BJ claims that motivation (let's say that's akin to Will) and ability (Skill) are connected. A timely and skillful nudge from a manager (what BJ calls a Prompt) can make all the difference to something being done (so long as the prompt is to the right of the Action Line). We also know from Dan Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates us or Dan Cable's Alive at Work that learning is motivational!
All this tells me we have set managers up with a Skill-Will problem, not a solution! This is what I call solving problems with problems. A major part of the solution is to make sure everyone has the skills for their jobs—managers/leaders especially—and treating everyone decently. Now that's going to drive up Skill-Will in lockstep.
The real issue with this question of who to coach is that it turns coaching into a selective act—reserved for some privileged or problematic people. Executive Coaching began that way: first medicine for 'problem people' at work, then a vitamin for 'high potentials' or 'high fliers'. But in reality, coaching skills work with everyone, but not everyone is up for being coached, nor should they be coached.
This is faulty borrowed logic from the world of Executive Coaching. Coaches do muse about who to coach, who is coachable and so on. But managers and leaders have to help everyone in the team. They don't have a choice.
So, forget who's in what quadrant and have better personalised conversations with everyone. Make every conversation count towards performance. If you think that's Leader as Coach, we're speaking the same language.
When Should I Coach?
Let’s say our busy manager has figured out who to coach (or doesn't care because they've already chatted to me). Now they’re often left wondering when.
Are we supposed to believe there’s a switch to be flipped at exactly the right moment? Maybe there’s a calendar entry that reads WARNING: COACHING SESSION, and the manager arrives channelling zen energy, no longer your boss, but your coach.
Absurd, right?
Way before Executive Coaching became a thing, there were related ideas floating around for free. No qualifications needed. Some 2,500 years ago the Socratic Method was being used to such good effect on Plato that he wrote about it for posterity. Socrates allegedly got into the habit of asking good questions to help others arrive at better solutions. What he didn't do was write down his method, maybe because he wisely foresaw the problem of it getting lost in translation!
Leader as Coach isn’t a mode. It’s a mindset. It's about how you lead, rather than when you coach. Have you ever wondered when a sports coach does coaching? No, of course not. That's just what they do. How do they coach? Now, that's a great question. How do you lead?
Great managers shouldn't be toggling between modes. They should be more present, taking time to foster connection. They should ask more and better questions, and then listen more deeply. They should give constructive feedback that creates insight and drives growth. That’s a coaching style of leadership—not a special meeting, but a set of tiny habits baked into daily conversations. It is about wise interventions—or small prompts—that trigger action and change. It's all about performance and the work in hand, after all. Why else is anyone in the team?
Coaching, Mentoring, Managing… or Just Leading?
This final question I get asked—“What’s the difference between coaching, mentoring, leading and managing?”—only arises if you see coaching as something distinct you do from time to time with certain people. Since we've covered the problem of Who and When, this third question goes away. It's another example of faulty borrowed logic.
Executive coaches coach, so they don't mentor, manage or lead anyone. So they spend time explaining the difference. I've read countless books that elaborate on this distinction. But if you could have a coach and mentor combined, wouldn't that be best?
Funnily enough that's how Executive Coaching apparently started in the 1980s. It was based on borrowed logic from Tim Gallwey's Inner Game tennis coaching method. Someone using Tim's method would teach you to play tennis better (mentored you), and at the same time helped you overcome internal barriers to improvement (coached you). Anyone have a tennis mentor? Probably not, because that would be weird. It was just a new, more powerful way of coaching tennis. And it was repurposed as performance coaching for executives in organisations.
Same with leaders and managers. Another big distinction. Yet managers lead their teams every day. They actually lead everyone in every organisation, and have the biggest impact on employee performance and well-being. That's been known for years. An inconvenient truth. Leaders lead and therefore managers don't or can't. Therefore leadership development is not for managers. Curiously, senior managers (leaders) are the most experienced in leadership. Yet they get more help with leadership than junior managers. Imagine senior pilots getting more help flying the plane than new pilots. Senior doctors vs juniors? Scary.
These labels have got people explaining what they do and don't do, because they've backed themselves into a corner or a quadrant.
Leader as Mentor.
Manager as Coach.
Manager as Leader.
Leader as Leader.
I am guilty of advocating for Leader as Coach. But I had and still have something else in mind: the integration of coaching skills to make every conversation matter. It's got lost in translation.
It’s time to stop the coaching madness.
Nobody as Coach.
Managers = Leaders.
Every team deserves the gift of great leadership, all the time.
We need more performance-enhancing conversations at work. Every leader should be schooled in having better conversations!
This article was originally published on Farley Thomas's LinkedIn.
