Manager as Coach
Picture what it looks like when it's working: your team comes to you with options, not problems. The conversations end with them owning the next step, not you. Your 1:1s are productive in a different way - you doing the questioning, them arriving at clarity they wouldn’t have reached on their own. That's what being more coach-like actually looks like. Not a technique. A different way of thinking about conversations, one that puts the thinking back where it belongs.
This is a practical programme for managers who want to develop coaching skills – not to become coaches, but to lead their teams differently. The work covers listening more precisely, asking better questions, and sitting with uncertainty long enough for the other person to get there themselves. You will build emotional intelligence, active listening, empathy, and conversational precision that helps people move forward rather than stay stuck.
Being coach-like requires resisting instincts that got you promoted. The urge to solve, to jump in, to be the most capable person in the conversation – these are the habits that got you here. The work is learning when they stop serving your team and start getting in the way. That's the uncomfortable part. It's also where the biggest shift happens.
The process
This isn’t a matter of reading Radical Candour, listening to a podcast and taking part in a couple of workshops that give you information – if it was you’d be nearly there already. We are talking about distilling the key skills that make coaching so powerful (active listening, presence, curiosity, powerful questions) and applying them to your context and role as a manager. Applying the tools to your context rather than changing your context to use the tools. This is a programme that establishes where your knowledge base currently is, and from there gives you the tools and practice of implementing them to allow you to lead with a bit more ease.
Step 1 – Diagnostic
What is underneath the simple-sounding development goal of “we want our managers to be more coach-like”? Starting with a solution is never as effective and enduring as starting with really understanding the problem you are optimising for: what is the capability gap, and where does it reveal itself; how do you know it exists, and what will be different for the organisation once things are “better”; why is this an issue now? This work is only effective if it solves the right question.
Step 2 – Design
This isn’t about delivering a training course or a pre-canned programme. The diagnostic phase surfaces something different for every organisation, often questions that the organisation itself didn’t know it was holding. To answer a need that might be different from the one that you thought you had, we need to start at the end and work backwards, from the desired end-state, through the surfaced reasoning and issues, to the existing knowledge and competence of managers. Then we bridge gaps, scaffold knowledge, fill holes and align paths to create a solution that will be what you need rather than what you asked for.
Step 3 – Deliver
This is not coaching training. Managers will not be a coach, or be appropriately trained or qualified to hold 1:1 coaching interventions with people after this. What they will be able to do is to resist the impulse to rescue, to problem-solve, or to move past the difficult questions. They will learn to truly listen, ask questions, gain new perspectives and help direct reports do the same.
This takes place in two elements – teaching some of the principles and skills, and then more importantly applying and practicing those skills, repeatedly, in an observed environment. That’s what differentiates this from most manager development and what moves it from interesting abstract knowledge that only a fraction of managers retain, into a practice that becomes part of what your managers do, and eventually part of who they are.
That practice takes place within the cohort, in triads – delivering, receiving and observing in turn. Managers learn from being on both sides of the techniques and conversations, and from observing others at work. Identifying good points and areas for improvement further deepens the learning, and delivering that feedback to each other in the moment, in public, without losing any of the value – that requires many of the coaching skills they are learning. It will be uncomfortable for most people, but making the uncomfortable safe is what you want them to be doing for others – they need to be able to do it for each other first.
Step 4 – Deepen
Enduring support, for both the manager and the organisation. For the managers, this is a combination of 1:1 mentoring and small-group sessions. The 1:1 gives a protected space to bring real-world examples to work through, to get all the messiness and confusion, frustration and opportunity out in the open with no judgement. Generate options, go and implement them, see how they land and iterate on them.
The group sessions are a chance to learn from each other’s experiences, to celebrate the successes and to gather good ideas as well as being supported by an internal cohort all going through the same challenges and triumphs. Both of these are more successful if run for a defined period of time post-workshops, rather than a defined number of sessions. Having support available for 6 months feels much more valuable than having 6 sessions.
Organisationally you want to ensure that the support is in place to help managers succeed – they don’t need their hands held through the development process, but a little scaffolding goes a long way. This is a culture change programme that, if embedded properly, could change the way the organisation thinks about management for years to come.
Who am I?
In military aviation, you cannot be the answer to everything. When you're leading people in high-stakes, high-tempo operations, your job is to grow their capability to make decisions – not to make the decisions for them. I spent twenty years in an environment where the consequences of over-dependence on a single leader were immediate and unambiguous. You learn quickly to teach people to think, not to hand them thinking.
I teach this the same way I do everything – directly, with enough discomfort to make it stick. I'm not going to hand you a coaching model and send you away. I'll work with you on the specific conversations you're avoiding, the moments where you jump in when you shouldn't, the habit of solving that you haven't noticed is a habit. It's practical. It's applied to what you're actually navigating. And it's uncomfortable in the way that useful things tend to be.
I hold ICF and EMCC accreditation as an executive and team coach. But credentials tell you I'm qualified. They don't tell you whether your managers are in the right place to shift how they lead – or whether something else is getting in the way. That's what the first conversation is for.
