Many people today would like to see managers become manager-coaches. Some even advocate this shift as necessary to liberate an organization. I do not share this view, and I even believe that this confusion is detrimental to the success of a liberation process.
What is the value of raising awareness or training executives in coaching?
- Understanding and practicing the coach’s stance can help managers broaden their range of intervention methods. The high-level stance is not mandatory in every situation. Varying stances can give employees more “leeway.”
- It is also clear that many of coaching’s tools can be useful in team facilitation. In particular, the art of asking good questions can profoundly change the way a manager interacts with colleagues.
- Finally, since most coaching training programs emphasize self-reflection, this exposure can introduce many managers to interpersonal dynamics or learning processes.
However, these positive aspects should not obscure the inadequacy—or even the counterproductive nature—of promoting coaching in this way within a “liberated” organization. In traditional companies, coaching managers has often served only to temporarily and superficially mitigate—and thus, ultimately, avoid questioning—the perverse effects of the hierarchical pyramid. In organizational liberation, this practice of individual coaching for managers creates confusion on several levels:
- A trust-based organization is not—and cannot be—the result of techniques, even those of coaching. It is always a creation in which everyone is invited to play an irreplaceable role, one that cannot be modeled within a method or tool. In a professional world unfortunately dominated by the “problem > solution” mindset, training managers in coaching can easily become a way for executives to sidestep the real question at hand regarding the future of managers. The same phenomenon can, in fact, occur—I’ve seen it—with the rollout of training for all managers in a particular leadership model.
- Another pernicious aspect of such a view of coaching as a possible substitute (or even complement) for management is that it most often reinforces individualism. The common foundation of coaching training programs–especially in France—is individual coaching. Yet one of the major challenges of an empowerment process is the formation and development of responsible and autonomous teams. I have seen companies attempting to embrace a culture of empowerment by asking each member of their executive committee to hire an individual coach… While such a process may help each person grow, it inevitably neglects the necessary collective cohesion.
- Finally, there is something even more essential. As Bob Davids (SeaSmoke Cellars) says, “the scarcest resource is leadership.” A coach is not necessarily a leader. Certainly, leadership consists essentially of leading oneself. And to achieve that, it can be helpful to be coached. But it is not by being trained in coaching that a manager will become a leader. The crux of the matter is to foster more leaders throughout the organization. The qualities needed to lead others do not—to my knowledge—align with those of a coach, no matter how excellent. The success of the most advanced liberated companies does not rest, first and foremost, on internal or external coaches!
Behind this question—which may seem purely semantic—lies, in my view, another crucial and recurring question: what becomes of managers in a process of organizational liberation? It shows little regard for human intelligence and adaptability to suggest that it will be enough for a manager to become a manager-coach simply by undergoing proper coaching training. We must have the courage to acknowledge that what has shaped managers’ daily routines and skills for decades—setting goals, delegating, passing information up or down the chain, planning, evaluating, monitoring, and reporting—will all disappear. Therefore, every manager committed to this shift must ask themselves: “What do I want to do with my life?” And immediately afterward, the question every leader must ask: “Why would others agree to follow me?”
