The most important thing in leadership is truly caring. The best leaders care about people they lead, and people know when caring is genuine.

—Dean Smith, University of North Carolina Basketball Coach

Those who make the I to We transformation connect authentically with their team because they have their best interests at heart. People follow leaders who understand them and are invested in their success. When such leaders point their teams toward a clear purpose, they ignite a new energy: “We can change the world for the better!” These principles are key to your leadership, but a final quality—coaching—is required to unlock your team's full potential.

The time is overdue for rethinking leaders not as managers but as coaches. Although in recent years many leaders have hired external coaches, shouldn't your leader be your coach, not your manager or supervisor?

The concept of the leader as coach contrasts with decades of literature describing the leader as manager. My colleague John Kotter articulated the difference between leaders and managers in his book A Force for Change. Yet even today, business leadership is still not fully accepted as an academic discipline. Many business schools prefer to teach traditional managerial techniques of exerting power over subordinates, directing them, delegating work, and evaluating their performance via quantitative metrics.

In contrast, coaching is the process of fully engaging a team and bringing out the best qualities and skillsets of each member. The best coaches are deeply engaged and care about each team member, even in very large organizations. The coach and the team share a common definition of success and are measured by the same scorecard. They have a unified desire to win, yet everyone respects the different roles of the coach and team members.

Just as great athletes seek the best coaches, the best people want to work for leaders who are actively helping them to perform at their best. The coaching leader relies far less on positional power and more on trust, empathy, mentoring, and feedback. Those who work with great coaches rarely describe the experience as easy, because these coaches are extremely demanding and hold their teammates to high standards with full accountability. As a result, they lead their teams to greater heights than anyone believed possible.

Engaged Leaders Coach Their Team

There are legions of legendary sports coaches, and many like Vince Lombardi and John Wooden have written business books. Yet perhaps the most successful sports‐to‐business crossover is the late Bill Campbell. He had a mixed record as Columbia University football coach but truly thrived as coach to the founders of Silicon Valley, including Apple's Steve Jobs, Intuit's Scott Cook, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Google's Larry Page. Another Bill Campbell mentee, Eric Schmidt—Google's chief executive officer (CEO) during the company's hypergrowth period—wrote a book about Bill called Trillion Dollar Coach. The title estimated the value created by the leaders Bill coached.

How did Bill make such a mark? He turned the idea of hierarchy on its head, saying, “Your title makes you a manager; your people make you a leader.” Bill had tremendous respect and love for his people. His manifesto proclaimed, “People are the foundation of any company's success. The primary job of each leader is to help people be effective in their job and grow and develop through support, respect, and trust.”

To describe what it takes to be a great coach, we have developed the acronym COACH. As a leader, you need to Care for people, Organize and Align them, Challenge, and Help them (Figure 10.1).

Mary Barra: Coaching Changes Culture

General Motors (GM) CEO Mary Barra is the pied piper of the new generation of coaching leaders. Mary's leadership sharply diverges from GM's 50 years of top‐down financial managers who occupied the CEO chair, such as Rick Wagoner, who eventually led the company into bankruptcy with his short‐term focus. In contrast, Mary cares deeply about GM's 155,000 employees, as she aligns them around GM's Triple Zero purpose of “zero emissions, zero accidents, zero congestion” and challenges them to produce top quality, safe vehicles.

Named CEO in 2014, Mary's whole life prepared her for the challenging role of transforming GM. Starting as an 18‐year‐old co‐op student at Kettering University, she has worked at GM for 41 years, including jobs as factory inspector, design engineer, plant manager, and head of human resources. She explains, “While my friends worked at fast‐food restaurants, I applied engineering skills in GM assembly plants. That experience was invaluable, giving me an early understanding of the auto business.”

No sooner was she named CEO than she was confronted with her first major crisis: Cobalt ignition switch failures causing 124 deaths and 275 injuries. To investigate, she hired former U.S. attorney Anton Valukas. His report revealed GM routinely sent accident reports to its legal department rather than the quality and design teams that needed to fix the underlying issues.

The report declared the root cause was incompetence, describing GM as mired in a bureaucracy that lacked accountability and transparency. “Reading the Valukas report was one of the saddest times of my career,” Mary says. “Most frightening was that the report said everything everyone's always criticized us about. It was a gut punch. As the report said, ‘No single person owned any decision.’”

Less than 3 months into her role as CEO, Mary was called before Congress to testify about this problem. She acknowledged GM's problems were much deeper than ignition switches, stating bluntly that GM's entire culture had to be transformed. “The Valukas report is extremely thorough, brutally tough, and deeply troubling,” she told Congress.

It paints a picture of an organization that failed to handle a complex safety problem in a responsible way. There is no way to minimize the seriousness of what Mr. Valukas uncovered. Two weeks ago, I addressed the entire global workforce about the report. I told our team bluntly that the series of questionable actions uncovered is inexcusable.

Mary used the ignition switch crisis to create a burning platform to transform GM's culture from a slow‐moving bureaucracy that looked inward and denied its problems to a customer‐focused, transparent culture that owned its challenges. She committed to establish a new industry standard for quality and safety, recalling 30 million vehicles her first year and creating Speak Up for Safety to reward employees for transparency. “I never want to put this behind us,” she says.

I want to put this painful experience permanently in our collective memories. We've got to create the climate where people can speak up, without fear in the organization, and express different points of view. This requires building a diverse team.

To change GM's moribund culture, Mary transformed the entire leadership team, promoting Mark Reuss to president and filling her executive committee with GM veterans and outside hires who brought fresh perspectives. She sets high standards of behavior for her team and empowers them to meet these standards with full accountability. She frequently meets with employees in factories to see if cultural changes are taking hold and offers to help whenever possible. “If we want to change this elusive culture, it requires changing behaviors because that defines the culture,” she says.

Not that I want to be described as mean, but the company is too nice. To be truly great, your team must have diversity of thought and be willing to collaborate constructively. I've become much more impatient about how we do things and how quickly we do things.

In establishing GM's purpose and strategy, Mary has been bold. In 2017, she announced a new mission: “Our goal is to deliver world‐class customer experiences at every touchpoint and do so on a foundation of trust and transparency.” In 2021, she committed GM to produce only electric vehicles by 2035.

Mary Barra is the epitome of the new coaching leader. She cares about her leaders and employees and connects with them to understand their perspectives and motivations. Having started on GM's factory floor, she is able to build strong relationships and trust with her team. In sharp contrast to the top‐down, hierarchical culture that ruled GM for 50 years, she organizes her leaders as an integrated team, putting leaders in their sweet spot and empowering them to lead their teams on behalf of the whole enterprise.

In articulating GM's new mission, vision, and leadership behaviors, Mary aligns her mammoth organization around common goals but does not flinch in challenging people with audacious goals around quality, safety, and electrical vehicles to raise GM's sights. Meanwhile, she expects peak performance from her team, while helping them meet challenges and solve problems.

Mary's new approach to leadership was recognized by her CEO peers when the Business Roundtable named her its first female chair in 2021. There she advocates for the multistakeholder approach that focuses first on customers and employees.

Care: Build Understanding and Trust

The capacity to develop close and enduring relationships through care with empathy and candor is essential to building trust. If you do not deeply understand people and care about them, you cannot help them unlock their full potential.

Caring relationships are marked by intimacy and informality. Intimacy requires people to be open, vulnerable, and willing to admit mistakes. Frequently, the best discussions and creative ideas come from informal interaction, rather than back‐to‐back meetings around conference tables. Spending time together outside the office—taking walks, meeting for coffee, having social dinners, or doing fun activities—develops comfort and trust that leads to more candid conversations. Through these discussions, people understand each other's truths and become thought partners.

When their caring is real, leaders can answer this checklist affirmatively:

• I understand my teammate's career objectives and how their current role helps them develop.
• I understand each person's intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, as well as their challenges.
• I have deep one‐on‐one meetings that go beyond superficial discussions.
• We have natural and free‐flowing interaction and are comfortable with each other, including moments of “common humanity.”
• I know my colleagues' family members and understand their lives outside work.

People demand more personal relationships with their leaders before they will invest themselves fully in their jobs. They insist on having access to their leaders, knowing that it is in the openness and the depth of the relationship with the leader that trust and commitment are built. Because Mary Barra cares about her employees, she realizes from them a deeper commitment to their work and greater loyalty to the company.

Real relationships create empathy—the ability to walk in someone else's shoes. Empathy builds rapport, in which team members feel psychologically safe and believe their leader has their back. Only with empathy are leaders able to draw the highest level of engagement from colleagues from different cultures and empower them to achieve exceptional performance. This requires humility and the capability to engage people personally rather than judging them.

The care factor ultimately creates trust, which Stephen M. R. Covey asserts has quantifiable impact for organizations. When trust is low, there is a measurable “trust tax” that slows down decision‐making and increases cost throughout the organization. When trust is high, speed is fast and alignment comes easily.

Organize: Get People Playing as a Team

As a coaching leader, your second task is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each team member, along with their motivations. Then you can organize individuals into a cohesive team where all members operate in sweet spots that play to their strengths, compensate for their weaknesses, and motivate them to peak performance. Nothing is more destructive to a team than having someone play outside their sweet spot. Such a situation hurts the individual's confidence, slows the team down, and ultimately prevents the organization from fulfilling its purpose.

How do leaders create a culture where everyone is in their sweet spot, playing together for the greater good of the team? Coaching leaders engage regularly with their team members while observing their leadership. For example, a board chair might attend the CEO's strategy offsite to both add value to the executive team and see the CEO in action. Similarly, leaders could join salespeople making customer calls to understand customer needs and wants.

As a leader, are you working side by side with your team members? Do you model appropriate behaviors and provide constructive feedback? Do you know enough about their world and context to make useful suggestions? This is sitting sidesaddle to learn, make suggestions, and encourage them rather than judging them from a distance.

In addition to such firsthand observations, you need data so you can trust but verify your teammates' inputs. Look at leading indicators like employee surveys and customer inputs to predict how your team is doing, as financial performance provides only after‐the‐fact historical information, which may be too late to act on.

Building an empowered team begins with your daily behavior. You cannot preach empowerment and then behave in a hierarchical manner, or you lose credibility with their colleagues. Nor can you reward or even tolerate power‐driven subordinates who behave like jerks or play politics.

Align: Unite People around a Common Vision

The coaching leader's most challenging task is to align employees with the company's mission and vision and inspire them to take on bold goals to make the mission real. This is much more difficult than setting financial goals that do not impact or inspire most employees.

The leader's job is to make the mission and vision come to life and to use them in determining strategy, setting goals, and making decisions. In this way they become an incredibly powerful way to bring all employees together with common language and unified objectives. A mission and vision that are nothing more than a poster on the wall have no meaning and may even invoke cynicism among employees.

At Medtronic's Mission and Medallion Ceremony, all new employees receive medallions with the mission engraved on it. This brings home that all employees—whether they work in facilities, research and development (R&D) labs, or sales—must contribute to its mission of “alleviating pain, restoring health, and extending life.”

Challenge: Summon People's Best

Anson Dorrance, who coached soccer player Mia Hamm and has won 21 NCAA women's soccer championships, creates a weekly stack ranking of every single player that he posts publicly. He calls the exercise “competitive cauldron,” as he rates each player on a list of factors such as their speed. On his team, players know where they stand and what they need to do to improve.

Great coaches like Anson add the greatest value by challenging their players. Watching game tapes, creating weekly team ratings, or having one‐on‐one feedback meetings are ways of challenging people to step up to peak performance. Ask yourself: Have I stretched my team members? Have I challenged someone who is delivering less than their full potential? Have I pushed players outside their comfort zones? Challenging people not only engages them in improving their performance but also helps them develop as leaders. Matt Christensen, who played basketball under Mike Krzyzewski at Duke, says, “Coach K. was in my face every practice to help me get better.”

Middle managers frequently characterize such challenging, engaged leaders as micromanagers, but that misses the importance of challenging them by getting deeply involved in the details to help their teams perform.

Help: Solve Problems and Celebrate Success

Many leaders believe their job is to create the organization's strategy, structure, and processes and then delegate the work to be done while remaining aloof from the people doing the work. Wrong! Today you cannot succeed sitting behind a desk in your office; you must be personally engaged with your team where they work.

Coaching leaders help their subordinates figure out the best path to achieving their objectives. Jack Welch was challenging and hard on people, yet those very challenges let people know that he was committed to their success. If something was off track, he dug in to help the leaders course correct through a special set of working sessions he called deep dives. Jack's curiosity and rapid‐fire questions enabled him to develop a point of view. Known for his candor and aggressiveness, he also looked for opportunities to celebrate success.

Stephen Hawking once remarked, “Half the battle is just showing up.” Many leaders get so busy with meetings they don't take the time to be with people and help them. They say they're too busy to attend award ceremonies, company picnics, sales meetings, or trade shows. Nor do they walk around offices, factories, labs, and field sales and service locations. Showing up at important events or engaging on the frontlines means a great deal to people and enables them to take leaders off their pedestals and see them as real human beings. Celebration is an essential part of helping by rewarding good behaviors and motivating. Coaching leaders will frequently say both “thank you” and “well done!”

Leaders can help their colleagues by counseling them, offering suggestions, or assisting them in making vital contacts. For example, as CEO of Merck, Roy Vagelos regularly ate in the company cafeteria, where he asked people about their work and their challenges. He took notes about the conversations and thought about specific problems for a few days before calling employees back with his ideas.

Imagine how Merck researchers must have felt when they picked up the phone to hear Roy getting back to them with help. “I'd call them up and say, ‘That's a tough problem, but here are a couple things you might try,’” Roy says. “People love to have their leader involved. They feel you want to be part of the solution.” These interactions reinforced the importance of the researchers' work and had a multiplier effect upon employees.

Often the most helpful thing a leader can do is genuinely listen. Active listening is one of leaders' most important abilities, because people sense they are genuinely interested in them. Warren Bennis was a world‐class listener, who patiently listened to your ideas and then contributed astute observations that came from a deep well of wisdom and experience. We feel respected when others believe they can learn from us or ask for our advice.

In Eyewitness to Power, David Gergen writes, “The heart of leadership is the leader's relationship with followers. People will entrust their hopes and dreams to another person only if they think the leader is a reliable vessel.” Authentic leaders establish trusting relationships with people throughout their organizations, with long lasting rewards. In today's world where remote work is far more prevalent, the stakes are higher than ever for an intentional approach to fully engaging everyone. To bring out the best from their teams, authentic leaders must COACH them to success.

Coaching at the Right Altitude

Leadership requires adapting to the context at hand. When do you engage deeply as Kevin Sharer does? When do you only provide context and give people freedom as Jim Whitehurst did to stimulate innovation? First, you should determine the context, throttling your involvement up or down depending on the circumstances. For example, Jim engaged more deeply on safety issues at Delta but managed Red Hat's innovation portfolio with a light touch.

When you understand the context and the readiness of each person, you can select the right level of involvement. Aetna CEO Ron Williams uses management dashboards and personal observations to decide where to focus his time. He says the best leaders have “their head in the clouds and their feet on the street and use their observation powers to know when to be where.”

Judgments about your involvement depend upon your assessment of the effectiveness, capability, and experience of your team. Being deeply involved makes sense if the organization is in a crisis or team members are inexperienced. Being less involved makes sense when your team is on track and its members are experienced. Overall, engaged leadership is most effective.

The “Levels of Involvement” framework in Figure 10.2 enables you to decide how to engage your team.

Your Leadership Style

The topic of your leadership style is saved for last because your style is the outward manifestation of your authentic leadership. Style without authenticity makes you a persona, which most people see right through.

Many organizations work hard to get young leaders to embrace the company's normative leadership style by sending them to training programs to bring their styles into line. Therein lies the risk: Will you have to compromise who you are to succeed in the organization? If you do, you will feel like an imposter, trying to be something you are not. All the leaders profiled in this chapter have unique styles that work effectively for them, but you cannot succeed by emulating their styles—you just need to be yourself.

Having a range of styles that enables you to be flexible for the situation is important for your leadership. You need to adapt your leadership style to the capabilities of your teammates and their readiness to accept greater responsibility. For example, if your teammates need clear direction, they may not be ready to handle full delegation. Conversely, creative or independent thinkers will not respond positively to a directive style.

In leading, it is important to understand the situation, as well as the performance imperative, and be flexible in your style to maximize your effectiveness. Once you understand the context, you can adjust your communication and leadership style to get results yet retain your authenticity.

Emerging Leader: Robert Reffkin

Robert Reffkin has grown into a coaching leader as CEO of Compass, a real estate technology company he cofounded in 2012 and took public in 2021. His mantra? “Nobody succeeds alone.”

Robert's focus starts with caring for his team—he prioritizes writing handwritten thank‐you notes and personally calling new employees to welcome them to the company. He says:

The more you can take time to develop genuine, authentic relationships, the more you're going to be able to realize your dreams because you can take big risks and know that there's a network of people there to cheer you on.

Robert organizes his team based on advice from his mentor who told him, “Stop trying to make your weaknesses a strength. Minimize your weaknesses and maximize your strengths.”

No one is good at everything, but everyone is great at something. Take the time to identify your strengths and those of each member of your team and then look for every possible way to leverage those strengths.

As Compass grew, Robert collaborated with team members to align them around an aspirational mission statement. He encourages his team to align around tactical visions daily as well by asking, “What does success look like?” at the outset of each new project. He says, “Simply answering that question enables everyone to imagine the same goal.”

One of the ways Robert illustrates the challenge principle is through direct, honest feedback.

The most important lesson I've learned in my life is that feedback is a gift. My relationships with many of my mentors deepened because I started asking them for tough, candid feedback. Then I'd take their advice, apply it in my life, and let them know how it had helped me.

Finally, Robert helps his teams win by sharing concrete advice to improve their performance. His book No One Succeeds Alone brims with practical advice on topics such as, “Help people you know be successful at something.” He is deeply vulnerable, cataloging his many failures and setbacks. When Robert's team members face adversity, they feel comfortable discussing it with him.

Bill's Take: Applying the COACH Framework

Joining Medtronic in 1989, my first task was to care about the company's mission and values, our leaders, frontline employees, and customers. To learn the business, I adopted a 30–30–30–10 model: 30 percent of my time with customers, 30 percent with employees, 30 percent with executives, and 10 percent with our board and external stakeholders.

New to medicine, I learned how our products worked through the eyes of our physicians and their patients. During my Medtronic years, I witnessed over 700 live procedures. I spent time talking with Medtronic engineers and scientists in their labs and touring factories. On global visits we followed a 1‐hour rule, spending only 1 hour reviewing the business and then meeting with customers.

Through these learning experiences, I realized we needed to organize as a global matrix of strategic business units and geographic teams rather than the functional organization Medtronic had. That put decision‐making at the point of impact rather than corporate headquarters. We also needed to get people in their sweet spots, moving them to their best positions and recruiting leaders to fill gaps.

Next, we enabled our executives to function as a team of Medtronic enterprise leaders, not separate executives running their own teams. We formed an executive committee and an operating committee to build teamwork, address challenges, and make decisions. The Medtronic Mission enabled us to align our leaders worldwide with a common purpose and behaviors. By focusing on our external purpose of serving patients, we minimized the internal politics that existed before I joined.

I love to challenge people to perform their best. These challenges produced great results, but some people resented being challenged as we raised the bar on performance to meet patients' needs. To help people solve problems came naturally. Some people called this micromanagement, but as they saw results, they recognized that deep engagement in the business worked to everyone's benefit.

In the years since leaving Medtronic, I have mentored many people on leading as coaches—not directors or bosses—which has helped them become more effective leaders. Based on these experiences, I am a firm believer in the leader as coach model.

Idea in Brief: The Leader as Coach

Recap of the Main Idea

• The acronym COACH can be used as a guide for leaders to coach their teams to achieving the very best:
  • Care: Build understanding and trust.
  • Organize: Get people playing as a team.
  • Align: Unite people around a common vision.
  • Challenge: Summon people's best.
  • Help: Engage with your teams in solving problems.
• The coaching leader relies less on positional power and more on collaboration, trust, empathy, mentoring, and feedback.
• To bring out the best from teammates, authentic leaders COACH them to succeed through strong relationships, providing constructive feedback on their work, and establishing stretch goals.

Questions to Ask

1. Describe an example from your past where you have been effective in inspiring other leaders around a common purpose and shared values.
2. How effective are you at empowering others to step up and lead? What are you doing to improve your effectiveness?
3. Recall a situation in which you faced a conflict between empowering other people and reaching your performance goals.
   1. How did you resolve the conflict?
   2. Did you give preference to reaching your goals or to your relationships?
4. Would you act differently in the future when facing a conflict between relationships and performance?

Practical Suggestions for Your Development

• Rate yourself on the five dimensions of COACH.
• Ask at least two members of your team to rate you on these dimensions.
• Assess the depth of your professional relationships using the five‐question checklist on page 204.
• Spend time observing another leader in action. What did you learn? Were you able to provide constructive feedback?
• Ask your colleagues if they know your organization's purpose. Engage in dialogue with your team to ensure everyone is aligned.