So check this out… Successful modern management is about moving away from command and control towards coaching, mentoring, supporting, and guiding. Your job as a manager is to empower, enable, and unlock people’s potential.

I recently read an interesting article on this topic in the Dec 2019 Harvard Business Review, which is about teaching managers to be less task masters and more masters of coaching.

The general premise is as an individual contributor you excelled in your area, you had all the answers, got promoted into management, and knowing what needed to be done, tasked others with how to do it. But in this era of rapid evolution, what worked in the past is highly unlikely to be a blueprint for success in the future.

The article describes four styles of coaching:

1. Directive: Telling people what to do. Requires high energy input, and you don’t get much in the way of energy output.
2. Laissez-faire: Let the team figure it out on their own (somewhat akin to Scrum based self-organizing teams). Low energy input, don’t get much energy output either.
3. Non-directive: Asking a lot of questions, and doing a lot of listening as well. Ultimately guiding individuals to solve problems on their own without you explicitly telling them the answer. Fairly low energy input, but you get high energy output as individuals feel a sense of autonomy and freedom to solve problems on their own.
4. Situation: The ideal dimension, walking the line between the directive and non-directive styles.

Coaching may not come naturally, especially to new managers, so the articles cite a few basic steps:

1. Assess the situation
2. Listen
3. Ask open-ended questions
4. Practice non-directive coaching

This is just to wet your appetite, the article is very in depth with a clear framework and guide with how to take your coaching to the next level. If you’re interested, you can pick up the Nov/Dec 2019 issue here:

https://store.hbr.org/product/harvard-business-review-november-december-2019/BR1906