Are you a manager? Are you a coach? Is it an either/or, or is it an and?
I think about this question a lot, and it comes up often in conversations I have with leaders across different industries and org types. The answer, in my experience, is almost always the same: the best managers are coaches. Getting there takes deliberate practice and a willingness to sit with the discomfort of not having the answer.
The moment that changed how I manage
I remember it clearly. A leadership training I attended many years ago at one of my previous employers. We spent a couple of days immersed in discussions and exercises, simulating a business and playing the roles of various leaders and stakeholders. One of those experiences that sticks with you.
One of the concepts that hit hard was this: if one of your employees asks you a question and you answer it directly for them, you’ve just taken their job away from them.
My initial reaction was skepticism. Isn’t helping people the whole point? But I tried it when I got back to my team. Instead of answering questions directly, I started responding with questions of my own, guiding people toward their own answers rather than handing the answer over.
What I noticed over time was that my team became more confident, more resourceful, and better prepared when they brought things to me. They stopped looking for answers and started bringing thinking. That shift mattered, for them and for me.
From manager to coach
That experience was one of the early steps in my own evolution from a sometimes directive, sometimes micromanaging manager into something closer to a coach. It wasn’t overnight and it wasn’t linear. But the coaching mindset became a thread I carried forward across every role since, not just with people I managed directly but with peers, cross-functional partners, and people outside my organization entirely.
What I’ve come to value most is the person who’s innately curious. The one who proactively explores multiple solutions before bringing a problem forward, who genuinely wants to understand how the pieces fit together, and who treats every challenge as a chance to build a mental model they can draw on next time.
Harvard Business Review’s piece “The Leader as Coach” captures this well. The most effective manager-coaches ask questions instead of providing answers, support employees instead of judging them, and facilitate growth instead of dictating direction. That framing has stayed with me.
Why this matters more now
The case for coaching as a core management skill has only gotten stronger. Work is more distributed and asynchronous than it used to be. Managers often aren’t physically present with their teams. The talent landscape is competitive, and people have more options than they did even a few years ago. In that environment, the managers who keep great people are the ones who invest in their growth and create the conditions for them to do their best work.
There’s also a newer dynamic worth naming: AI is changing what coaching needs to do.
When everyone on your team has access to tools that can draft, analyze, and propose solutions in seconds, the bar for human judgment goes up, not down. The question isn’t “did you solve the problem?” anymore. It’s “do you understand the problem? Do you know why that solution works? Can you tell when the AI is wrong? What would you do differently next time?”
That’s coaching territory. AI can produce an answer. It can’t teach someone how to think about whether the answer is the right one. The managers who’ll matter most over the next few years are the ones who can pull their people up the judgment curve faster than the tools can do the work for them. That’s a coaching skill, and it’s becoming one of the most valuable things a manager can offer.
Building a coaching culture
Coaching isn’t a personality trait reserved for a certain kind of leader. It’s a skill, and like any skill it can be developed with intention and practice. The organizations that build it into how they develop managers see the effects across retention, engagement, and performance.
If you’re thinking about how to build more of a coaching culture in your organization, I’d love to talk about it.