Can a Manager Really Be a Coach?

Last week, Gallup released some research about what effective coaching from managers looks like. Their argument was that if you want to sustain high performance in the team, you need ongoing dialogue and regular, actionable feedback, with the best managers doing three things: establishing expectations early, continually coaching, and creating accountability.

I commented on the post to say I agree (to a degree), but my question was who is teaching managers how to coach, and can managers actually coach effectively when they’re also responsible for performance?

I don’t disagree with the premise of the research - managers should know their people, they should absolutely give feedback regularly rather than saving it for the 1:1 or performance review, and they should be helping their people work through problems rather than jumping in to solve them. These are what I consider the basic fundamental coaching skills that can make someone a better manager.

But what I’ve been thinking about since is whether we’ve gone one step further and started expecting managers to actually be coaches. I don’t think they can be, and I think expecting it is setting a lot of good managers up to feel like they’re failing.

Can someone coach you while also judging your performance?

The problem is, a manager is being asked to do three very different things. Your manager can coach you, but they’re also the person who establishes what is expected of you, and the person who holds you accountable when you don’t meet those expectations.

Imagine your manager asks you: “What do you think is getting in your way?”

There are plenty of situations where that is exactly the right question to ask. Maybe you’ve come to your manager with a problem, and rather than giving you the answer, they’re trying to help you develop the judgment to work it out yourself, or maybe you have a difficult decision to make and need some support. This is where coaching can be incredibly useful.

Now imagine you’re struggling in the role itself, and you’re overwhelmed by some changes, you don’t think the expectations are realistic, and you’re not sure you’re capable of doing what’s being asked of you. Does “What do you think is getting in your way?” feel like the same question?

Maybe you would tell your manager everything, but most people don’t. That doesn’t mean you have a bad manager or that you don’t trust them, but the reality is that they’re still the person who decides whether you’re doing a good enough job.

They make decisions about your future opportunities, whether you get a raise or a promotion, and if things aren’t working out, they’re also the person responsible for doing something about it. That power dynamic doesn’t disappear because your manager has learned how to ask good coaching questions.

Sometimes an employee doesn’t need another question; they don’t need to be coached. They just need an answer.

If someone’s work isn’t meeting expectations, asking them to reflect on how they think things are going might be a useful part of the conversation, but it can’t replace saying “this isn’t the standard I need from you.” When managers are told their job is to coach, I think some of them start using questions to avoid that sentence, and that isn’t fair to the manager or the employee.

Sometimes there’s context only a manager has, or a decision needs to be made, or people just need to be held accountable. None of these are failures of coaching; they’re part of being a manager.

Coaching skills aren’t the same as being a coach

Coaching skills and being a coach aren’t the same thing, and I think that’s the distinction we’re missing, and from what I’m seeing, we’re expecting our managers to be everything to everyone.

That being said, there are coaching skills I would want every manager to develop: listening properly rather than just waiting for their turn to speak, asking questions with curiosity before jumping in with an answer, helping someone question their own thinking patterns, and resisting the urge to solve every problem themselves. Especially in today’s workplace, the most important of these is giving people enough room to build critical thinking and develop their own judgment.

These skills can make someone a much better manager, but they don’t make the manager an independent coach.

When I’m coaching someone, I don’t decide whether they get promoted, I don’t write their performance review, I don’t decide whether their work is good enough, and I don’t need them to hit their numbers so that my team hits its number.

That means someone can feel safe telling me:

“I think my boss is wrong.”
“I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.”
“I’m struggling and I don’t want anyone at work to know.”

There isn’t an employment consequence attached to telling a coach those things, and that’s often exactly what makes real development possible. Independent coaching isn’t inherently better than manager coaching, but it is different, and the difference is the power dynamic.

How many jobs are we actually giving managers?

This is where I think the conversation becomes much bigger than coaching. Just look at everything we’re increasingly asking managers to do: manage performance, develop careers, coach people, motivate them, manage conflict, support wellbeing, communicate organizational change, build culture, retain talent, help people navigate AI, change how their teams work (and the list could go on).

Then somehow they also have to deliver their own work. Individually, everything on that list sounds reasonable, but put them together and we’ve created an extraordinary job. Then when managers struggle to do it all, our response is often to give them another framework, send them on a training program, or decide they’re the problem.

If you manage people, how much of your week actually goes to your own work? How much goes to everything on that list? When did someone last take something off your plate rather than add to it? If you feel like you’re falling short, have you considered that it might be the job and not you?

Maybe some managers do need more development, but I also think we need to look much harder at the job we’ve designed.

So when should a manager coach?

I don’t think it’s useful to debate whether managers should coach their people. Of course they should, sometimes. The question is knowing when to coach, and when to just manage.

Next time someone brings you something, ask yourself which of these they need:

• If they need help thinking through a challenge: coach.

• If you’re trying to develop their judgment rather than demonstrate yours: ask, don’t tell.

• If they don’t understand what’s expected of them: give clarity.

• If their performance isn’t good enough: give direct feedback.

• If something needs a decision: make one.

• If they need a confidential space to explore something they’re not comfortable saying to the person who decides their future at the company, recognize that their manager may not be the right person for that conversation, and help them find someone who is.

Managers don’t need another expectation that they should be coaches. They need the judgment to know which role their employee needs from them in the moment.

Organizations need to get clearer on that too. If we keep responding to every new need employees have by adding another responsibility to the manager’s job, at some point we have to ask whether we’re developing better managers, or just asking them to be everything to everyone, which is an impossible task.