Increasingly, coaching is becoming integral to the fabric of a learning culture-a skill that good managers at all levels need to develop and deploy. Over the past decade, we’ve seen it in our ongoing research on how organizations are transforming themselves for the digital age we’ve discerned it from what our executive students and coaching clients have told us about the leadership skills they want to cultivate in themselves and throughout their firms and we’ve noticed that more and more of the companies we work with are investing in training their leaders as coaches. This is a dramatic and fundamental shift, and we’ve observed it firsthand. The role of the manager, in short, is becoming that of a coach. To cope with this new reality, companies are moving away from traditional command-and-control practices and toward something very different: a model in which managers give support and guidance rather than instructions, and employees learn how to adapt to constantly changing environments in ways that unleash fresh energy, innovation, and commitment. Twenty-first-century managers simply don’t (and can’t!) have all the right answers. Rapid, constant, and disruptive change is now the norm, and what succeeded in the past is no longer a guide to what will succeed in the future. Command and control was the name of the game, and your goal was to direct and develop employees who understood how the business worked and were able to reproduce its previous successes. If you could prove yourself that way, you’d rise up the ladder and eventually move into people management-at which point you had to ensure that your subordinates had those same answers.Īs a manager, you knew what needed to be done, you taught others how to do it, and you evaluated their performance. Doing your job well meant having the right answers. Once upon a time, most people began successful careers by developing expertise in a technical, functional, or professional domain. The article concludes with recommendations for making coaching an organizational capacity-effecting a cultural transformation by articulating why coaching is valuable for the firm as well as individuals, ensuring that leaders embrace and model it, building coaching capabilities throughout the ranks, and removing barriers to change. They describe how managers can use the four-step GROW model to become more skilled at listening, questioning, and drawing insights out of the people they supervise. The authors explain the merits of different types of coaching-directive, nondirective, and situational-and note that sometimes no coaching at all is appropriate. As a result, many firms are moving toward a coaching model in which managers facilitate problem solving and encourage employees’ development by asking questions and offering support and guidance rather than giving orders and making judgments. In the face of rapid, disruptive change, companies are realizing that managers can’t be expected to have all the answers and that command-and-control leadership is no longer viable.
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