True North, Emerging Leader Edition, 3rd Edition

10THE LEADER AS COACH

The most important thing in leadership is truly caring. The best leaders care about people they lead, and people know when caring is genuine.

—Dean Smith, University of North Carolina Basketball Coach

Those who make the I to We transformation connect authentically with their team because they have their best interests at heart. People follow leaders who understand them and are invested in their success. When such leaders point their teams toward a clear purpose, they ignite a new energy: “We can change the world for the better!” These principles are key to your leadership, but a final quality—coaching—is required to unlock your team's full potential.

The time is overdue for rethinking leaders not as managers but as coaches. Although in recent years many leaders have hired external coaches, shouldn't your leader be your coach, not your manager or supervisor?

The concept of the leader as coach contrasts with decades of literature describing the leader as manager. My colleague John Kotter articulated the difference between leaders and managers in his book A Force for Change. Yet even today, business leadership is still not fully accepted as an academic discipline. Many business schools prefer to teach traditional managerial techniques of exerting power over subordinates, directing them, delegating work, and evaluating their performance via quantitative metrics.

In contrast, coaching is the process of fully engaging a team and bringing out the best qualities ...