"Many Skills of Management Can Be Delegated, but not Coaching"
"Your title makes you a manager, your people make you a leader." – Bill Campbell
I’ve observed on LinkedIn and in business communities a trend of influencers advocating that managers can boost productivity by streamlining contact with reports:
Cancel your one-to-ones – they’ll ask if they need something.
Replace meetings with Slack to speed things up.
Let them coach each other, or themselves with ChatGPT, to save time.
To me this is short-sighted over-optimisation, and it will have negative consequences. Fortunately I don’t think this is the norm, but I see some organisations going that way.
Why Support Your Team Directly?
If you hold a management position, you’re responsible for developing your people; that responsibility is an honour and a privilege to embrace, not to optimise away! Delegation is a powerful technique, which I teach mentees extensively, and delegating admin and work below or beyond your expertise is essential for good management. However, it is rarely appropriate to delegate entirely the development of your team. You can make available tools like instant messaging or AI, or encourage peer-to-peer support, but they’re not a replacement for your presence and guidance as a leader.
In my first ever job as a British Army officer, I managed a team of ~35 and I was responsible for most aspects of their performance, professional development and pastoral care – on top of planning and leading the platoon’s training and deployments. I spent a great deal of my time talking with soldiers about their personal issues, arbitrating workplace issues, and writing biannual reports. Everyone up to the top brass has similar responsibilities throughout their whole career, and the value placed on relationships makes military organisations much stronger than the sum of their systems, policies and processes. So when I hear some civilian managers, paid 2-3x what I was paid then, talking about the heavy burden of one-to-one meetings with a handful of direct reports, I find it perplexing. If you don’t want to be a manager, you can choose to be an individual contributor. If you do truly want to lead, communicating frequently and deeply with every member of your team is a must.
Managers need to be prepared to spend time getting to know their people, personally as well as professionally. Much more than business metrics and project updates, it’s important to ask about their partners and families, their hopes and dreams. Junior team members especially won’t perform at their best, or develop to their full potential, if they only get to communicate with their boss via instant messaging or fleeting interactions in team meetings. They’re also less likely to reach out proactively, so it’s more likely their problems will go unspoken and fester. This is equally true of less confident personality types, or people who have a serious reason to fear speaking up.
How to Support Your Team Directly
The onus is on the manager to facilitate regular proactive communication. Yes, it’s time-consuming; it can even be frustrating when you have core business priorities to attend to. But what is leadership if not the art of understanding and motivating your people to unlock their potential? It is your core business. Done well, it fosters a high-performing team and maximises the organisation’s impact. Ultimately, a group of engaged individuals performing together as a team also reflects well on their leader.
What I recommend to every manager to get the best out of their team is:
Team meetings at least weekly to update on core goals and projects, as well as to raise any other opportunities or concerns so you can act on them quickly.
One-to-ones with direct reports fortnightly (more regularly if the pace of change is fast), with enough time and headspace to cover business and personal matters.
Make yourself available to deal with time-sensitive queries and urgent concerns whenever they arise, and make it explicitly clear how people should reach out.
Remember to listen more than talk – this time is for them more than for you.
Have an agenda to use the time efficiently but give people an opportunity to go beyond that scope – if these meetings feel pointless, you’re running them badly.
Seek expert advice if you don’t feel comfortable coaching or mentoring your team – you may first need to invest in your own coaching, mentoring or therapy.
To be clear, this isn’t just my old-school military mentality. Many of the world’s most successful tech companies, including Google and Apple, were built on this principle:
“Create a climate of communication, respect, feedback and trust – all through coaching. Many of the other skills of management can be delegated, but not coaching... The path to success in a fast-moving, highly competitive business world is to form high-performing teams and give them the resources and freedom to do great things, and an essential component of high-performing teams is a leader who is both a savvy manager and a caring coach.” – Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell
What do you think? Feel free to tell me I’m a dinosaur. I’d also love to hear your tips for running more effective one-to-ones and team meetings – please comment below.