Becoming a Leader Coach: A Step-by-Step Guide to Developing Your People

When to Act As a Leader-Coach

In your role as a leader, you have options and choices to make regarding what will be most useful to your direct report at a particular time and for a particular task. Those options—managing versus coaching—are illustrated in Figure 2.

Taking a leader-coach role is particularly useful when you want to see a positive change in your direct report’s workplace behaviors. Although it takes less time to give an answer or provide a solution, you save time in the long run if you make wise choices about when to use a coaching approach. This is because you are building the capacity of your direct reports to solve more problems ...