Managers: Do you ask or tell?

HBR’s management tip of the day earlier this week was around coaching conversations: you can’t be a great manager if you're not a good coach. We could not agree more.

Many of the people coming into our ACTP coach training are managers who want to “take a coaching approach” in their leadership style. They want to be more “ask” and less “tell”, moving away from the old “command and control” model of management towards a collaborative and empowering style that, frankly, most employees expect (or often demand, if they are Gen Y).

HBR suggests deep listening (yes!) and restraining the impulse to provide the answers. This is probably the most important and the hardest element of coaching for managers; how to tread the fine line between managing (where you do tend to give firm advice, answers and even directives) and coaching (where ideally you are asking your employee “What do you think should happen now?”) For the manager it can involve some (possibly quite scary) letting go of their perceived “control” of their employees, and a willingness to open up to a more more trusting relationship. Ultimately the employee becomes more engaged and satisfied at work because they feel “I did it myself”. To quote Lao Tzu:

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”

By the way, where HBR suggest “give him a deadline” we would suggest a coaching style approach would be to “ask him to nominate a realistic deadline”.

Mandy Geddes, General Manager, Education, IECL