In this chapter, we explore areas you need to address when you help a boss become a better coach. One is role clarity, for there are two roles the boss takes on when coaching employees. The other deals with an effective sequencing of those role responsibilities.

For example, bosses hold employees accountable for results, while a coach helps people improve the skills needed to achieve those results. Bosses who coach both mandate the goals and help people develop the ability to accomplish them. That is no small feat. When a boss coaches a staff member, he never stops being the boss. He cannot pretend not to have performance expectations of his employees while he is coaching them. His performance expectations are always there.

There are common pitfalls when people act as both a boss and a coach. One extreme is the boss who soft-pedals his bottom-line expectations because as a coach, he wants to develop his employees. A boss may try to coach an employee into compliance (replace the word coach with nag, cajole, or plead). This faulty thinking goes something like this, “Maybe if I coach them, they’ll do what I want.” Coaching is not a substitute for performance management. Yet another extreme is a boss who thinks coaching means being directive and giving an employee constant mandates on how to accomplish expectations. Nobody (neither the bosses nor the employees) truly enjoys being in either of these two extremes. True coaching of an employee is something altogether different.

There are separate and sequential roles a boss should use when coaching an employee:

Bosses should not confuse the two duties, and the first role must be completed before the second. Role 1 places the leader’s coaching within a larger context of work expectations. Trying to coach without first addressing expectations is wasted coaching time and produces poor results. Your job as an executive’s coach is to help a boss through this sequence so he can incorporate coaching effectively within his management responsibilities.

Clarity in expectations means being behaviorally specific. The employee needs to know:

When the boss has clarified her expectations with an employee, she dramatically raises the employee’s chance of success, as well as the boss’s. (For more on giving explicit and specific expectations, see Fournies, 1998.)

Just because the boss has been clear, however, does not mean the employee gladly accepts the task and implements it. Sometimes an employee resists the boss’s expectations, either explicitly through argument or covertly through lack of follow-through.

Role 1 also includes gaining commitment from the employee, an essential step before moving on to role 2. An employee’s commitment is shown in three ways:

Part of the commitment process is allowing the employee to express her concerns, worries, and resistance to the boss’s expectation. Although it may not sound like it, discussing obstacles and giving reactions is a way that the employee starts to imagine herself actually doing what it takes to accomplish the goal. The boss’s job is to listen to the concerns and assure the employee that he understands what these reactions are.

At some point, the boss must determine the level of commitment that the employee has to the expectation. The boss needs to hear a clear answer, whether it is a no reservation commitment, a commitment with reservations, or no commitment at all, and must determine if he has secured an adequate commitment from the employee to move forward. A commitment with reservations can be a productive commitment if the reservations are solvable problems that the employee and the boss are committed to addressing, especially as these may indicate organizational obstacles.

Sometimes a boss is eager or anxious to get on with a project, and will settle for one or two of the criteria for role 1 instead of all three. This is where you as the executive’s coach can save the boss from himself. You can continue to challenge the boss to be thorough in role 1 so the rest of his work does not unravel later. You can be particularly useful when the process does not go smoothly, for example, when the boss runs into an employee’s resistance to commit to the expectation.

The first two must be addressed during role 1 before moving on to coaching in role 2. The third is a legitimate coaching issue and can be addressed in role 2: coaching for increased performance. We address the third kind of resistance when we explore role 2 later in this chapter. But let’s look at the first two and how to handle them during role 1.

A Legitimate Concern About Organizational Obstacles. An employee may identify legitimate obstacles within the structure of the organization, contradictory priorities, or resource problems that must be addressed up front for it to be possible to accomplish the goal. If they are not addressed, the employee’s efforts may fail, no matter how committed he is.

Many times the boss does not want to hear about these obstacles, but she must if the goal is to be successfully achieved. This is an example of the loyal resistance I mentioned in Chapter Ten. You can help leaders listen to this kind of “resistance” as a positive contribution. The employee’s objections are intended to improve the organization and can lead to an appropriate readjustment of the boss’s expectations. This kind of loyal resistance is good feedback to the boss. The boss needs to let the employee know that the boss will better structure the project so that the employee can accomplish his mandate. (For more on the conversation between a manager and employer on organizational obstacles, see the “improving performance” section of Kinlaw, 1993.)

An Unproductive Boss-Employee Pattern. A second reason an employee resists a boss’s direction has more to do with an unproductive, well-established pattern between the two of them. There may be an unintentional but quite ingrained habit of relating to each other that increases the employee’s resistance to the boss’s direction. It happens more often than most executives think. If the executive tries to coach the employee before they break the pattern, the boss actually reinforces the problem and continues to thwart progress toward the business goal. You can coach the boss to look for and identify her unproductive pattern with the employee. Some possible patterns include the following:

Missing from all these relational patterns are straightforward conversations about performance expectations. Expectations arise not in a vacuum but within a relationship, and the boss-employee relationship pattern can make it difficult to set straightforward expectations. As the boss’s coach, you need to strongly advocate against coaching (role 2) until this pattern is shifted and allows for the communication of and commitment to expectations.

There is, of course, the issue of homeostasis, or the push-back against any pattern change. As the boss changes her side of the pattern—stops inviting, or stops raising concerns, or stops threatening, or stops feeding fears—and starts being clearer and more straightforward about expectations, the boss may get resistance to the very change she makes. The boss might say to you, “First, he won’t do it, and now he’s fighting my shift in the approach I’m taking with him!” This double dose of resistance is common before the boss and employee establish a more productive pattern. The boss must learn to expect this kind of resistance and increase her own tolerance level for it rather than returning to the old pattern just because the employee’s resistance makes her uncomfortable.

That is why the boss has hired you. You can help the boss plan for this kind of resistance and explore options to increase her tolerance in the face of it. Besides the discussion on breaking patterns in Chapters Six and Seven, here are guidelines you can give the boss. This sequence of actions helps to gain an employee’s commitment and initiative when there is an unproductive pattern between boss and employee:

This gets the boss to the starting gate of coaching. (For an example of a boss beginning to shift an unproductive pattern with an employee, reread the conversation between Miriam and Sam in Chapter Seven.) The boss proceeds to coaching only when the role 1 conversation is done and the employee understands and commits to the business goal.

The boss can use Ken Blanchard’s situational leadership model to tailor his coaching to the specific employee’s needs around the issues of competency and confidence. In fact, you can serve your client well by developing his ability to diagnose the employee’s developmental needs according to this model. Then the boss can match his coaching style to fit those needs.

Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all management style, Blanchard, Zigarmi, and Zigarmi say bosses need to employ the style that brings out the best results. Managers need to assess each specific employee and the task they face at the time. They outline different styles arising from two independent variables in the employee:

These variables are independent because an employee can have any combination of the two. For example, she could be high in competence but low in motivation, or low in competence and high in motivation, or low in both, or high in both. A boss needs to match his leadership style to the employee’s combination of the two variables.

The boss’s approach to an employee is based on two other independent variables:

Directive behaviors are more essential when an employee’s competence is low, whereas supportive behaviors are important for a low motivation or low confidence level but less crucial when an employee has high confidence or high commitment.

This approach is work-task specific. For example, a boss could have an employee who has this combined profile:

The boss needs different management styles depending on which tasks he is addressing. The boss must give high direction and high support regarding the computer tasks, low direction and low support on training skills, and high direction and high support on supervisory skills.

How can a boss keep track of all of this? Actually, it takes very little time to assess where employees stand developmentally on specific tasks. The challenge comes from the boss himself; he usually has his own preferred, dominant style, one that he keeps using on everyone, whether they need it or not.

As the boss’s coach, you can help clients think through their approaches to employees and evaluate whether they are effectively matching their style to each. You can spend part of your coaching time teaching your client to evaluate his situational leadership effectiveness.

When the boss matches his style to his employee’s needs, he can accelerate the employee’s development. He can also decrease the frustration they both may feel if he uses the wrong style. A typical frustrating mismatch occurs when the employee is committed but unskilled and receives negligible direction and training from her boss. Another extreme example results from a boss who constantly looks over the shoulder of a highly committed and skilled employee. Both scenarios can demoralize the employee and frustrate the boss.

Sometimes an employee is totally unfamiliar with and unskilled in key processes that are required to attain the goal. Training becomes necessary in these situations. For an employee to be productive, the boss needs to make sure all the classic stages of training are covered:

Employees are shortchanged when they do not receive all of the training steps. A boss is responsible for making sure that he or someone he designates must train the employee in the skills necessary to do her job.

The boss also tests the employee’s willingness to acknowledge his own contribution to his difficulty. Can he see how he contributes to his dilemmas regarding the business issue? The boss uses immediacy and describes her experience of the employee while she talks with him. This feedback acts as a mirror of the employee’s attitudes and actions. Finally, the boss establishes a contract to coach if the employee wants such help from the boss on this particular issue. Once role 1 (commitment to expectations) is completed, role 2 (coaching) is an option that the employee can accept or decline. This option approach to accepting coaching from the boss positions the employee’s motivation where it belongs: with the employee. The employee takes advantage of whatever tools he believes he needs, including the coaching he could get from his boss.

There are many opportunities for a boss to use immediacy in coaching an employee. The boss gives feedback on her experience of the employee here and now and identifies the very thing the employee struggles with while approaching the business goal. Let’s say that an employee tells his boss, “Jane and Darnell constantly argue with each other at the committee meetings and ignore my facilitating.” In this example, the boss might use immediacy by saying, “You know, I’m also finding it difficult to follow your agenda during this meeting. You seem unsure as to where you need help. I wonder if Jane and Darnell experience your facilitating in the same way—as somewhat disjointed.” This conversation invites the employee to see his own counterproductive pattern of behavior.

The boss needs to be aware, however, that she may uncover more than her employee’s ingrained pattern. Some organizational alignment issues may emerge as well. In other words, she needs to check to see whether roles are well defined and executed in this particular project. Close-in coaching gives the boss a chance to check whether her staff is aligned or misaligned with each other and with her department goals.

As you help the boss coach her staff, you can foster her thoroughness in attending to the boundaries and responsibilities of the roles of sponsor, agent, implementer, and advocate. Such attention can guide the boss and employee as they determine the best course of action.

In the previous example with Darnell and Jane’s arguments, the boss can ascertain the employee’s thought process, including which action he thinks should come first. The employee may uncover a core role confusion between Jane and Darnell; their arguments with each other are only symptoms of the lack of role clarity. The employee/meeting facilitator (the agent) cannot resolve the arguments because the boss (the sponsor) should resolve role issues. Or the employee may decide to facilitate the conflict between Jane and Darnell as an interpersonal issue. Alternately, the employee may decide to keep to the agenda in the meeting so the whole group does not get sidetracked. The employee’s development is stimulated when he personally confronts issues regarding which direction to proceed in and then solicits the boss’s input on the first action to take.

In such situations, the boss wears two hats: the boss hat and the coach hat. Depending on the course of action the employee chooses, the boss has to decide if the employee is ignoring or hiding behind alignment issues. If the employee has misjudged an alignment issue, the boss must step in and course-correct the employee’s plan.

If the real issue is role confusion between Darnell and Jane but the employee plans to treat it as an interpersonal conflict (ignoring the alignment role confusion), then the boss needs to step in and clarify the roles between Darnell and Jane, which the employee is in no position to do. When this issue surfaces during a coaching conversation with the employee/meeting facilitator, the boss can clear up the issue fairly quickly, not by coaching the employee to deal with it, but by going directly to Jane and Darnell and distinguishing between their roles on the project. Jane and Darnell can then act more productively in the meetings that the employee facilitates.

Or the actual issue may be that the employee’s facilitation style confuses Darnell and Jane, who in turn argue over how to proceed on the agenda. But the employee tells the boss that Darnell and Jane’s roles are not clear (hiding behind alignment issues). In this case, the boss needs to challenge the employee to improve his facilitation skills.

The boss must address these issues because the boss has authority to determine what the employee will focus on next. A coach can see the same situations and diagnose them the same way as the boss, but a coach merely recommends rather than mandates a next course of action. If the boss steps in and changes the employee’s plan because the employee misreads or hides behind an alignment issue, then the boss must temporarily leave her coaching role to make a “boss decision” about the employee’s plan.

Making clear distinctions about when the boss is stepping out of the coaching role and when she is fully in it builds credibility with the employee. He can trust that when the boss makes statements or suggestions or asks questions from the coaching role, they are only coaching interventions (suggestions and recommendations), not disguised boss mandates. The employee can trust this because he knows he will hear directly from the boss when the boss is making a “boss decision” rather than giving coaching help. Once this rhythm is firmly established between the two of them, the employee is free to take the boss’s coaching statements as input or recommendations, not as expectations or obligations.

This is the core issue in coaching as a boss. Coaching is a staff development activity, not a sneaky way to get the employee to do what the boss wants. When the boss coaches, she conveys her belief that the employee has the resources to solve the problem. To act on this belief is not to impose help but to offer it when needed. This does not prevent the boss from stating her own positions, but instead of giving answers, she shares her viewpoint to provoke and expand her employee’s perspective on the issue. This requires a particular attitude from the boss: the employee is ultimately responsible for producing the results the boss sets for him.

Another agreement about the boss’s intervention is particularly critical if the employee is a manager or supervisor and leads meetings where the live-action coaching occurs. The boss and the coachee also need to know whether or when the boss will step out of a coaching role and act within her authority as the coachee’s boss.

For instance, the coachee/manager may hold a team meeting where an issue comes up that would normally require the boss’s input or decision. If the boss is there as a coach but immediately intervenes without clarifying her role switch from coach to boss, the change can disrupt the group and undermine the coachee’s legitimate authority. The group may begin to distrust the boss’s on-the-spot “coaching” and assume that everything she says comes from her position of authority.

When the boss preemptively acts as the boss, she denies the coachee the opportunity to decide when it is best to turn to his manager for input on decisions. That moment is lost when the boss jumps in. The boss misses the chance to observe the coachee’s maturity in managing the boundary between the boss’s authority, the coachee’s authority, and the team’s authority.

But, you ask, what if the boss sees red flags in the coachee’s meeting? What if she knows the coachee is giving incorrect information or overstepping his authority? The boss can act but should take care that she does not undermine the coachee in front of his employees. The boss and coachee should determine beforehand the conditions under which the boss will intervene as his boss and how she will do so. You can give some of the following suggestions to the boss about this agreement:

Once the boss learns to manage the boss-coach boundary during live-action coaching sessions, she can turn her attention to the actual coaching itself. The guidelines are those enumerated in Chapter Seven. As coach, the boss works to support the employee’s goals, foster changes in the employee’s patterns of interaction, and help the employee maintain effective alignment in his organization.

The coach should debrief the employee after he has implemented part of the action plan that he generated during their planning sessions. Debriefing is necessary for both the live-action coaching sessions and the times when the employee is implementing his plan on his own. When it comes to the boss debriefing the employee regarding his effectiveness, many of the debriefing activities of executive coaching come into play, with the employee self-assessing first. Discussions of the employee’s strengths, challenges, patterns, management of alignment issues, and next steps can catapult the employee to a deeper level of self-understanding and encourage him to take ownership for his performance.

When the boss debriefs her effectiveness as a coach with the employee, she needs to be honest about how much feedback she wishes to receive on her coaching. Encourage her to be as open as possible. It may be difficult for the employee to give his manager an honest evaluation of her effectiveness as a coach. Therefore, the boss needs to set an inviting tone in order to get useful feedback. This is the one case where it is effective for the coach to self-assess first so the employee experiences the boss’s readiness to receive real feedback. True openness means that the boss weighs what the employee says rather than assuming the information is either not useful or a reflection on the employee’s performance. (“Of course, I wasn’t successful as your coach because you were such a lousy coachee!”)

Here are some questions the boss can ask both herself and the employee during debriefing about the boss’s coaching effectiveness:

When the boss coaches team members effectively, it has a ripple effect throughout the organization. Many of the boss’s other initiatives go more smoothly. She has more highly developed employees who can take on more issues independently and interdependently with peers without the boss’s continual micromanaging.