Don’t Just Coach Your Employees—Teach Them

Welcome to HBR on leadership case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts hand selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. The best leaders are great teachers. That's the title of an HBR article by Sidney Finkelstein, a management professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He says that leaders who coach, give clear feedback and invest in their direct reports growth have better relationships and stronger performing teams. In this 2018 episode of HBR IdeaCast, Finkelstein talks with host Sarah Green Carmichael about how managers at all levels can adopt a teaching mindset even when they're short on time or not. Subject matter experts.

So how do these kinds of teacher leaders approach managing really differently from other, other managers?

Well, I think that they understand that to win, to be successful, you absolutely have to have great talent around you and they're willing to invest in that. And that means specifically spending the time working hand in hand, sometimes very personally. And I don't mean every day because if you have five or 10 or 15 direct reports, you can't possibly be spending all your time with everyone else. But periodically. And they value it and they recognize it and, and at the same time, what they're doing is they're pushing people, they're forcing people to kind of raise their own game. And so it's one of the best ways to not only motivate people, but also get them to perhaps a different place and a higher level than they might otherwise have been.

What are the types of lessons that great leaders should be teaching to their direct reports? Like particular. Are you talking more about like life lessons or elements of the work itself? Basic professionalism? What are you talking about here?

Some leaders would teach about general professionalism, about ethics and about what was right and what was wrong and about credibility. Other leaders would focus on what I call points of craft. So very specific lessons on how to run your business. Look in the fashion industry, Ralph Lauren and the way he would specifically teach people around him on what it takes to be a great merchandiser. Actually, Mickey Drexler more recently is another good example of that. Larry Ellison, known as a particularly tough boss, but one that would constantly be talking about software architecture and the nature of technology. But there's also life lessons, and by that I mean maybe some discussion about how to manage your time, how to think about your goals. Bill Frist was a longtime CEO of Hospital Corporation America, would tell many of his proteges, and they shared those stories with me when I interviewed them about how he would have he'd always have a list of his short term goals, intermediate goals and long term goals. And he'd be updating them on a regular basis and which is, you know, a discipline that maybe we all know that's not a bad idea. But how many of us actually, actually do that? But when you have someone that you respect, your, your leader, your boss, in this case a CEO, explaining how this made such a difference and makes such a difference for him, it's, it's going to have a little bit more weight, I think, on how the rest of us might want to manage our time and our careers.

What are some of the benefits that the teacher leader gets out of leading this way?

Benefits are many. Number one, your team gets better. They're learning what works and what doesn't. Number two, if you're a leader, presumably you have more experience at doing whatever you're doing than the people that are under you. And we saw something akin to a master apprentice type of relationship in some of these situations where the leader was the master, if you will, who had spent the years to understand the ideas and the challenges in the business and the people that were on the team were, were learning and wanted to learn. That's another benefit. And I think the third thing is, and I've seen this as a teacher or professor myself, when you really dedicate yourself to teaching other people, they really appreciate it and you create a bond, a connection that is quite meaningful. People inevitably value others that try to help them. That's what teaching is. And so you're not only improving the kind of the content skill set of people that are around you, but at the same time you're tightening the bonds between them and you as, and creating a real team.

I'm just wondering if there was an example or a story of people that you studied for this project where you really saw those sort of bonds of loyalty in a dramatic way.

There were several, but here's one from a smaller coffee chain whose CEO told me this story about how there was a young team member that actually had a prior criminal record. And then there was a story in one of the, in the town where one of the coffee shops was in about how someone had stolen something from a local liquor store and people started to point fingers he hadn't done it. But once you're guilty, people think you continue to be guilty. She spent a lot of time talking to him and then talking to a lot of the other employees to use it almost like a teaching moment about how we make certain assumptions about other people that could be wrong. They could be and in this case you could see extremely damaging to someone's life, someone's livelihood, someone's self confidence. And when she was telling me the story, she talked about how in this particular coffee shop, probably a rotating group of six or seven people, and she said they were never tighter because people felt like she didn't jump to conclusions, she didn't let anyone else jump to conclusions. She had that debate, that discussion, and people respected that.

So it sounds like it's not just something for knowledge workers or it's not just something for, you know, a certain kind of company. It sounds like you've seen this in all industries.

Well, I've looked at dozens of industries and companies in different countries as well. And there must be something universal about teaching. And that shouldn't be a shock to anyone because how much time do we spend in our lives, in every country in the world, learning and teaching? And in most countries we spend the first, you know, from age 3 or 4 or 5 till age 18 or 22 or 26 or what have you in a form of teaching. Then you go to work and all of a sudden it's all gone, it's over. You're assumed to know everything. You could begin to feel it's like an imposter syndrome. You've been part of a team and you've been learning for years and years and then all of a sudden you're expected to know everything. And we all know that's not possible. So it's fundamental, I think, to people.

The people you studied for this are at the top of their career and really experts in their field. But there's also a lot of us in organizations who are managing people who, who actually know more about the craft than we do. You know, for example, some young MBAs who are out in the world managing people who are subject matter experts. How do you lead someone through teaching if you are managing someone whose job you don't necessarily fully understand?

There's something to be said to reverse engineering a little bit of this. I have found almost again without exception, that these leaders that are great teachers are also great learners. What that means is if you're the younger person or the MBA or what have you, that supervising someone has deep specialization. You need to spend the time and provide the respect to learn from that person because it's a two way street. And it turns out that when you're open to learning, other people are very often open to learning from you as well.

One of the things that I think managers do struggle with is finding ways to Work this into their workday. How does a good manager sort of find those pivotal moments and intervene in a way that will have an impact down the line?

Yeah, I have a couple of specific suggestions. Number one, take a good look at your calendar. The amount of time that all of us spend in unproductive time is actually rather remarkable. Top of that list is meetings and how many meetings we go to. And then the meetings we go to, how effectively run are they? How much time are we spending? Do we need to be there? Do we need to go through all those PowerPoint slides? Can't we just look ahead of time at some of the data, some of the ideas, and then when you're face to face, have a real discussion. Now take that idea about when you're face to face, really engaging in a real discussion, getting into the issues. That's what teaching really is. It's taking advantage of the opportunities you already have. So I would say it's not that you have to find all of a sudden an extra 30 minutes or an hour in a day. It's about repurposing time that's not being used as effectively as it could.

I mean, there are moments when important lessons can't necessarily be learned in an efficient way or when they can't really be talked about openly in an open office. Right. Almost none of us have actual office doors anymore. So how can leaders really create those kinds of moments for, for a sort of deeper learning?

Well, you could go out of your way to create some of those moments. Some of the leaders I looked at were people that actually believed that you can go off campus, so to speak, you know, having somebody over for dinner or going out for dinner, trying to take advantage of that opportunity by engaging, by talking, by pushing, by providing these little hints about what you should be thinking about. And the most extreme cases were people like Rene Redzipi, who's a famous chef from Nomad in Copenhagen, one of the most highly rated restaurants in the world. And he would take his entire staff, chefs and staff members to another country for a three or four week period of time where they'd open up a pop up restaurant. Now, I know you're not going to easily find an equivalent for most people in a company, but we do that already. If you think about retreats and off sites, why don't we use them more, not only more effectively, but let's be alert, let's be wise about how we try to use that time.

Sid, one of the things I've been wondering about in this environment of many, many many sexual harassment allegations being publicly made is. I know that even before all these allegations were coming out, some men were just very nervous about mentoring female, younger female colleagues. I worry that one unintended consequence of all of this might make some really good men even more hesitant to mentor younger women. And some of this teaching and learning does happen outside of the workplace. And I'm just wondering, like, what are your thoughts on that and what would your sort of advice to other guys be about how to mentor younger women in a professional way?

Yeah, well, that is a very challenging concern. And I've spoken to a lot of people, a lot of men that are leaders, and many of them are confused. They're not quite sure what they could do. So the off sites become a little bit more complicated if they're one on one. And maybe that's not the right thing to do at this point. Maybe what you need to do is in the office in real time. So maybe it's about picking your spots, looking for the opportunities. I do think it's more challenging and maybe it needs to be because of everything that's happened. But I think it would be a shame if all of this led to women having fewer opportunities to be mentored and taught by great leaders.

Now, how do you get the lessons you're teaching people to stick? Right, because there's telling someone what to do, then there's them actually doing it.

Well, you want to make them as real as possible. When it's something that you need to do to be more effective on the job, it becomes much more likely something that's going to be part of your repertoire. And by the way, the experts about learning, and these are people that in many walks of life, including K12 education, universities and elsewhere, they understand that the best learning is when there's good content, but then you can apply it. It's critical to apply it, to figure out what works and what doesn't and then to get feedback on it. Those are the three steps that are essential to any effective learning. Great content, application of those ideas, and then feedback. And that's exactly what these leaders do with their one on one teaching.

Well, and how does this approach change the way that we might think about feedback?

The best way I think about it, I was talking to a former COO of Sotheby's the other day and we were talking about feedback and he said, you know, everyone knows the rules of feedback. If you have something negative to tell someone, well, you need to say two or three positive things to them and then you hit them with what you really want. Well, everyone knows that. So why bother with the two or three things that the good people know? That you're just kind of treading water until you get to the good stuff. The best people, the highest aspiration people, they want to know it. Tell me what you think, tell me why, back it up and tell me what you think I should do. And I'll decide whether I want to adopt that or not. But I know that there's an issue. And so being much more direct, that's certainly the case for these leaders that I studied. And being clear on what you can get better at, I think is a big differentiator. Now, having said all that, there are a lot of people that are quite sensitive to feedback. Those are the types of people that I don't think are gonna be the leaders of the future.

It's interesting because I have seen some surveys that really show that managers hate giving critical feedback and try to actually avoid it much more than like, the recipients of that feedback feel like mostly recipients are interested in receiving. They say at least that they're interested in receiving critical feedback. And I just wonder if thinking of it as leading, as teaching is a way of getting around some of the awkwardness of giving critical feedback.

It's a great insight, Sarah. In fact, if managers were to say or think teaching involves helping people understand new things, but also learning what they could do better, it may be a way of reframing feedback that makes it a lot easier. Absolutely.

How do you know if you are basically good enough at your job to manage that way?

One thing you're going to discover, and you got to be alert, self aware, emotionally intelligent, all those other good things is pay attention to your class, pay attention to the people that you're talking to. Are they taking it all in? Does it appear like it's adding some value? And then maybe more practically speaking, does it lead to some change in their behavior or their action that you think is useful? So in a way, it's a bit of a market test. You may or may not know how good you are at this. And I'm not going to say everyone is automatically going to be great at it, but I also don't think it's all that difficult to do. And I know it's extremely easy to try. It's just a mindset shift that says that's part of my job.

What if your direct reports are, you know, bad students, so to speak, and just aren't taking the lessons to heart, don't seem to be paying attention? Aren't improving then what do you do?

Well, number one I'd say is, well, let's make sure you're reasonably effective at teaching. Let's make sure that you're teaching reasonably useful ideas. You don't want to put the blame on team members automatically. It could be you and you could find that out through a coach by talking to your boss, talking to peers, talking to colleagues, putting that to the side. And you're actually really good at this or reasonably good at this and nobody's taking it well. We have, we have a question to ask and that is do you have the right team? And not everybody has necessarily the right team or to be more precise, certain team members might not be as open to learning as high aspiration as the best best teams need to be. And then there are a bunch of things you can do about that from a one on one conversation where you bring it up and you ask for feedback on what could I be doing better to share this point of view with you because we're not seeing the type of change or adjustment that might be a reason. Maybe I'm missing something. So some humility goes a long way here. And you know, after you've done that a couple of times, you still see no result. Then you, you want to start to think about the bigger picture and is this person really actually producing and sometimes changes are going to be needed.

Yeah, I do wonder about the communication piece of this because I know managers will often say like, oh, we had a real come to Jesus meeting and I think we're going to be on the same page now. And then the person that they had the meeting with may have no idea that they supposedly have just been given a very strong lesson. They sort of walk out of thinking, huh, that was an interesting meeting. But they don't really get the message. So sometimes I just wonder like, how can you just make sure your message is really being received?

It is actually amazing how often that's the case. And this is not just about business. It's called life. You think you've communicated effectively and your partner, your business partner, your team members, they're not getting it. And there are a lot of things you could do about that. Number one again is, well, ask people to share with you what the message is. Have them repeat it back in their own words because you may not have communicated as effectively as you think you have. You know, not everything we say is going to be perfect. In fact, you know, there are flaws all the time, but it's not about that. It's about doing everything we can to reinforce the message and try to make it as clear as possible. But I think one of the best ways is asking for feedback directly and real time. And that also gives them an opportunity to add something or extend what you just said. And that's a great way to get a little bit of feedback from them and allow them to be a little bit more independent and not just parrot back what you said and then you can continue the conversation.

So we've been talking about this teacher leader approach and it sounds sort of universally glorious, but I am a little bit of the mind that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Are there cases where either this is really costly or there's risks involved, or there's some kind of downside or some kind of trade off involved, or is it truly that this is like universally glorious way to manage people?

I have a tendency of talking about this as if it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. And that's probably being communicated right now. So the question to ask is, what is the culture and environment of the team? How are they used to working? And if you started all of a sudden to show up and start to do this one on one teaching, would they be wondering what the heck is happening? That doesn't mean it's a bad idea. It means a transition. To try to do it a little bit is going to probably be a little bit, a little bit bumpy or take a little bit longer. So one of the things that I think great teachers do to kind of flip the question a little bit, one of the things great teachers do is they customize their lessons to the people on their team. And so I would say that you want to customize how you introduce or begin the process of thinking about yourself as a teacher. If you haven't done that as much, or if you want to increase how often you're behaving and acting in this way, you want to think about the team you're in and what's going to work and what's not going to work and kind of think about the sequencing of it. So I think if you're not paying enough attention to the people in your team and how they behave and what they're doing, then I think that could make this much more difficult than it might otherwise be. As long as you can manage your time again, as we've spoken about, I think there's going to be much more upside than the occasional hiccup that might occur.

Well, Sid, this has been a really fun conversation and I've learned a lot. So thank you.

Thank you.

That was Tuck School of Business Professor Sydney Finkelstein in conversation with Sarah Green Carmichael on HBR IdeaCast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another handpicked conversation about leadership from Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, be sure to leave us a review. And when you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books and videos with the world's top business and management experts, you'll find it all@hbr.org this episode was produced by Mary Jane and me, Hannah Bates. Kurt Nickish is our editor and music by Coma Media. Special thanks to Ian Fox, Maureen Hoch, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Kaboz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you, our listener. See you next week.

Sam.