The Hindu Business Line : Can the captain also be the coach?

In the world of team sports, you will always find a captain and a coach. While the captain is responsible for all the decisions and actions on the field including the conduct of the team, its morale and for leading it to victory, the coach focuses on the physical and mental fitness of the players, improving their skills and techniques and correcting their flaws. While the captain leads from the inside, the coach brings a teachable point of view based on his incisive observ ations from the sidelines.

Unlike in the world of sports, in the world of business we have always placed both responsibilities on the same person — the manager.

Given the traditionally long relationship that managers enjoyed with their teams and the respect that organisations placed on the principle of unity of command (every subordinate should report to only one supervisor), team members were always aligned to a single boss who was supposed to train, clarify roles and responsibilities, evaluate, give feedback, develop and manage morale.

Sadly, while much has changed in the external labour market as well as in the way we design work units, organise work, hire, retain and build relationships, the fundamental expectation of the manager (captain) also having to be the coach remains unaltered. As a result, we have only task managers and captains. No coaches.

Why you cannot be both captain and coach in the world of business

There are at least five reasons why the same person cannot be both captain and coach for his team members:

Organisations are increasingly taking the view that talent belongs to the organisation and not the manager. What this means is that managers cannot hold on to good resources and can be asked to release them to other teams or work units. If talent is owned by the organisation in the interest of better internal mobility and the resultant managerial relationship is short-lived, he certainly cannot provide the employee the continuity of a developmental relationship.

More and more organisations (including consulting firms, software service firms and all professional service firms) are embracing project-based structures where teams are assembled under a manager around a project and are disbanded once the task is completed. The inherent problem with this arrangement is that while the task gets accomplished, the needs of people seldom get fulfilled comprehensively. From the more mundane tasks of figuring out who will do the performance appraisals and give feedback, to the more involved tasks of who will champion the careers of team members, many of the important people dimensions often get neglected. With many efficient captains and few coaches, the talent development agenda suffers badly.

Add to this the outsourcing model where every outsourced employee has a “customer manager” who wants his work to get done and a “back-office manager” who wants revenue generated by him, but neither having the time for his development.

The problems of attrition and the ever shrinking tenure of employees also leaves most managers wondering whether the emotional involvement outside of the task is worth it at all. The manager focuses on getting things done and the employee focuses on getting his returns maximised.

I must add that long tenure by itself is no guarantee for captains becoming coaches. Many traditional organisations that offer long tenures also suffer from the same problem simply because most of their managers are quite ill-equipped to play the coach role. With little preparation and poor role models, they find great comfort in their task orientation.

Finally, we must understand that managers demonstrate the behaviour that they are measured against and rewarded for. Despite all the rhetoric, organisations reward the managers who win. So managers will always focus on being good captains.

How can we give the employee a captain and a coach

While it seems clear that a captain cannot be a coach for the same person (at least in most cases), there is no denying the fact that every employee needs the guidance of both a captain and a coach.

How can organisations make these dual roles available despite their obsession with the principle of unity of command?

There are three simple but difficult things that organisations need to do quite urgently:

The time for mentoring is NOW. Organisations have, for years, struggled in vain to implement mentoring programmes to promote socialisation, job skill development and career development because it was then an idea ahead of its time. Now is the time to legitimise the role of mentors as distinct from the role of managers and implement such mentoring programmes. The overwhelming transience will form a rich manure for mentoring to take deep roots.

Help the coaches do their job. While it is easy to design such a programme, it takes a lot of effort to make it work.

The managers and mentors must collaborate closely enough to be able to make a difference.

We have traditionally tried to keep these two roles as wide apart as possible and that is part of the problem.

Unless the mentor is able to watch, from the sidelines, the employee perform and give the captain his observations and insights, the real business value of mentoring will be lost.

Similarly, employees must be helped to understand their responsibility for making such a programme work. Their willingness to invest in the relationship is key.

Help the captains to be coaching oriented on the field. All of this does not imply that one-half of the organisation will consist of mean-minded and notorious captains and the other half of warm and empathetic coaches.

In other words, we must help every result-focused captain to also be coaching-oriented in his style, because a captain will have to be a coach for someone else. The world of business cannot afford to employ fulltime coaches for everyone!

If the world of sports can so quickly embrace the hard principles of business and profit from it, why can the world of business not embrace the soft principles of sports and profit from it?

(The writer is the founder and CEO of totus consulting, a strategic HR consulting firm. He is also the co-founder of the Executive & Business Coaching Foundation India Ltd. He can be reached at ganesh@totusconsulting.com)

More Stories on : Human Resources | Management | People@work

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Emotional engagement at work

When failure strikes

Can the captain also be the coach?

‘Competency-based assessment, open appraisal preferred’

Not everyone can become a leader