As we gear back up from the summer vacation months, let’s focus our attention on the use of new tools. Coach-like tools to be exact.
Being a coach-like leader is not a personality trait. It is a set of practiced habits that many of us might not have been taught.
We were taught to solve, direct, and decide. To be the person with the answer in the room. And while those skills matter, they can quietly work against you when what your team needs is someone who helps them think, not someone who thinks for them.
So…How can you become more coach-like?
- Start by deciding to keep learning. The leader who has already figured everything out is not someone who can coach. Curiosity is the foundation of this whole approach, and you cannot be genuinely curious if you are mostly interested in confirming what you already know. Your own development is not optional; it is the prerequisite. Ask my clients. They will tell you my go to phrase is: “Out of curiosity….”
- Notice more. Command-and-control leadership tends to make people invisible to it. Coach-like leaders pay attention to what is actually happening in the room: who lit up when a topic changed, who has been stuck in the same pattern for months, what keeps coming up in every one-on-one. When you make the other person the center of your attention, rather than your agenda, you start seeing things that were always there.
- Ask more than you tell. Even when you have a strong hunch about the answer, ask the question anyway. Telling people what to do gets compliance. Asking people what they think builds capacity. The discipline of staying curious, especially when it is faster to just share the solution, is one of the most significant shifts a leader can make.
- When you ask, wait. Silence is not awkward; it is where the real thinking happens. The moment most leaders jump in to fill a pause is often the moment their team member was about to arrive at something important on their own.
- Resist the pull to one-up or redirect. A good coach is not the star of the story. Your job in a coaching conversation is to support someone else’s clarity, not to showcase your own.
Here is the one I want to leave you with, because it matters more than the rest: if you want to be a coach to others, have a coach yourself. I say this from direct experience, as someone who works with an executive coach and who has built my practice around exactly this kind of relationship. You cannot fully appreciate what it means to be coached until you have experienced it from the other side of the conversation. And if you are curious what that might look like for you, I would genuinely love to talk.
Which of these habits is furthest from how you typically show up, and what would shift if you started practicing it NOW?
