A couple of years ago, I took a course about coaching for managers. The course was eye opening and I learned about a distinction between different types of managers. On the one hand, we’re all familiar with managers who lay out specific activities that need to be accomplished, and then direct team members to execute those activities. 

Instead, a “coaching manager” coaches team members to identify problems that need to be solved and influences them to take action to solve those problems.  

A great example of this is David Marquet, the former captain of a US Navy nuclear submarine. At the start of his career, Marquet been assigned to be captain of the USS Santa Fe, the “worst performing” submarine on the fleet. Marquet credits his leadership style with turning the ship’s performance around to becoming one of the best performing ships in the fleet.  

In a book, Marquet describes a specific order he gave early in his career to an officer to set the ship’s engines to a specific setting, “ahead two-thirds”. The officer then relayed the order to the engine room: “ahead two-thirds”. When nothing happened, Marquet asked his officer what had gone wrong. The officer replied that there was no such setting on this specific ship, but that he had given that order to the engine room because he had been told to do so.  

This episode describes a problem with traditional top-down approaches to management and transformed the way Marquet led his military organization. Marquet realized that organizations are smarter and more agile when knowledge workers are empowered to make decisions. He also realized that empowering knowledge workers to make smart decisions starts with team managers.  

A parallel can be drawn with any team but is especially true in agile technology organizations where individual team members such as engineers are more knowledgeable about how systems work than their managers.  

A manager still has an important role in leading a team. Managers should see themselves as coaches to their team members, talking team members through their decisions, asking tough and guiding questions to help knowledge workers more clearly understand the problem at hand and the best approach to resolving the problem. 

 This also helps team morale – empowered teams are motivated because they are working with ownership to resolve their own problems with their own solutions.