Announcing a Plan Is Not Coaching Your Team
Everybody learned to ride a bike the same way. Somebody held the seat, ran alongside for half a block, and then let go without mentioning it. You wobbled. You fell. You got back on because the falling turned out to be survivable, and about forty minutes later you could ride. Nobody learned from a manual. Nobody did it because they got a memo or their boss told them to. Nobody learned it in a classroom.
David Sandler wrote a whole book around that idea in 1995 called You Can't Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar, and I've spent thirty years watching how right he was about teaching people how to sell.
The part he left out was all the lessons for leaders trying to coach their people...
I have seen it hundreds of times. A leader sees the business development problem clearly. Sits down, thinks hard, maybe pulls some research, and builds a genuinely good plan. Presents it at the Monday meeting. Sends the deck. Asks if there are questions, and there are none, because there never are.
Ninety days later, nothing has moved, and the leader is frustrated with the team.
That leader reads the bicycle manual out loud from the porch and then wonders why nobody can ride. The plan was fine. Plans are almost always fine. Announcing a plan and coaching a person to execute it are separate activities. Teaching takes place near the bicycle.
Running alongside your team
I sat in a meeting recently with a CEO and his executive team, and they were exasperated with their managers. Nobody was taking initiative. Nobody was having the hard conversations. Same complaint I have heard in every industry we serve.
Megan asked one hard question that ended the complaint session: "Can you walk me through the one-on-ones you've had with them about this?"
Long silence. Then some version of "well, I mentioned it at the leadership offsite."
Running alongside is the hard part, but it is the only thing that works. It is thirty minutes a week with one person about one pursuit. It is asking what they plan to say before the meeting instead of asking how it went afterward. It is going with them, sitting there, and keeping your mouth shut while they do it badly. Letting them wobble and picking them back up after they fall.
You are not necessarily there to make the meeting go well. You are there so the person feels supported. You are there so you can see what went wrong and give them better coaching to prevent it the next time. You are there because the long-term goal of self-sufficiency is more valuable than doing it for them.
The scrape is the professional development curriculum.
The hardest thing I ask principals to do is let somebody lose one. We have all watched a younger colleague heading into a meeting underprepared, and the pull to take the wheel is enormous. So most leaders do. They answer the question they were asked. They make the recommendation. The meeting goes better, the client is satisfied, and the person in the passenger seat learns that if it gets difficult, somebody senior will handle it.
At the beginning, during onboarding, training wheels may be helpful. But do that four times to a very capable technical professional, and you have trained them to be a spectator in their own client. Then in six years you need them to bring in work, and you don't understand why they can't or won't.
A scraped knee is cheap compared to the cost of permanent incompetence. A forty-eight-year-old principal who has never carried a conversation alone is way more expensive. By then, the lesson costs far more time, money, and energy to teach.
The conversation you owe your leadership team
There is one more piece of this. If you never ride your bike, why would you expect your team to?
If you will not sit across from a leader or manager in your organization and say "I'm disappointed in this result, and here's what I expect going forward," you have no standing to expect that manager to say it to anyone on their team.
Candor and coaching move down through an organization, and rarely move up. Whatever the leadership is willing to do and say out loud sets the ceiling for everyone below them. Most firms think they have an accountability problem in the middle. What they have is a candor problem at the top that arrived in the middle after they learned about your example.
Growth is a behavior, and behaviors get transferred by people who are willing to be in the room while somebody else does it wrong.
Let go of the seat. Stay close enough to catch them, far enough that they have to steer.
Whose seat are you still holding, and what would happen this quarter if you let go of it?
