alt Hacker NewsWhen I was a manager I had to take a training based on the book "The Coaching Habit." It left me really sour on the role, and explained some of the behavior of previous managers of mine that I least appreciated, specifically that their approach to management seemed to be to just get me to articulate and explain my problems over and over until I somehow rubber-ducked myself into solving them myself. When that didn't work, it transitioned to "so how can I help?", which would again eventually be turned around into "now you know how to go help yourself", no matter how direct the request was or how much it really needed management authority behind it.
I get that the point of the strategy is to help people with strong director-style personalities to listen and empathize a bit more, but in my experience it ended up being implemented as "my responsibility to my reports is to listen and nod."
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My biggest complaint about some people is that they measure success by the act of doing and rarely by the result.
If I help someone, I am checking if you no longer need help. If I say I’m going to be there at a certain time, I remember every time I’m late. If I do laundry a certain way so I won’t lose a sock, I make sure I haven’t lost a sock. When I do something, my brain replays me “Oh the last time you did this, you made this mistake. Do you want to try it a different way?”
People read how you are “supposed to do things” and feel good when they do it. If you switch to measuring your work by your result, you learn way faster and also get really good at things.
This is a main reason why Agile Coaches often end up with such a bad rap, and the role is on the outs.
They're supposed to be people who can work with leadership to ensure the right people are on the right teams working on the right stuff at the right time. And turn around and be able to help teams untangle their QA and CI/CD processes to speed delivery.
Instead, the damn "life coaches" got their foot in the door and started infecting everything. The only time "coaching" is a valid approach is when both you and a coachee agree that the person has what they need to solve the issue and just needs a sounding board or a rubber duck. There's nothing more infuriating that needing help solving a problem and being told "well how would YOU solve the problem?" Idiot, if I knew that, I wouldn't be asking!
So basically a crash course in psychoanalysis?
The "required" reading for newly minted managers in my $billion company was/is this shit called "One Minute Manager": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Minute_Manager, including "one minute reprimands" as if employees are children. Happily, I am no longer a manager.
> "The Coaching Habit."
Oh wow. This comment just completely explained the worst "manager" I ever had. They must have been using this terrible method.
>no matter how direct the request was or how much it really needed management authority behind it.
They nearly drove me insane with this circular cycle. It was the only job I ever walked out on. I emailed on a Sunday night that I would not be returning to the office after a particularly terrible cycle of this nonsense.
To be clear I am not a "needy" employee. When I ask a manager for something it is because I do not have the authority do the thing.
Three buckets of "management":
1. Mentoring: "this is what I did in a similar situation..." - overused and often not as similar or detailed as needed.
2. Coaching: "what do you think?" valuable for longer term development that depends on deeper thought and introspection; Your immediate problems a generally neither of these.
3. Sponsoring: "You mentioned you're looking for X and I heard about a new project where you could learn... want me to connect you?" under-used by managers, super valuable but harder to scale & can be hit/miss.
What your ICs actually need a lot of the time: "solve this problem for me." Most managers can't do this, which is why they became managers. The good ones combine their own skills with 1-3 above to unblock and DON'T push it back on the requestor.