Part III | Myth 17
Myth 17
The manager-as-a-coach helps people to always find their own solutions (I would like to thank Around Publishing for allowing me to self-plagiarize and use pieces of text for this book from my previous book Around Leadership. Bridging the ScientistPractitioner Gap.) Since the 1990s, it has become a popular practice to paint managers or leaders as coaches for their employees. Coaching in the Rogerian way is easy: just ask open-ended questions and people will readily find their own solutions. It will only take a few minutes of your time, thus leaving you with plenty of time to enjoy the benefits of your managerial salary. Key words Carl Rogers, Rogerian therapy, GROW, unconditional, self-directed, non-directive, solutions-from-within, humanistic ideology. What is the-manager-as-a-coach about? Perhaps one of the first authors to write about the concept of the ‘manager as a coach’ was Sir John Whitmore, with his famous book Coaching for Performance (1992). He was followed by a flock of management writers all over the world, including Myles Downey (Effective Coaching, 1999), Robert Hargrove (Masterful Coaching. Extraordinary Results by Impacting People and the Way They Think and Work Together, 1995) and Dutch engineer Willem Verhoeven (Managing Without Hierarchy, 1991; The Manager as a Coach, 1993). Basically, this flock of believers wants to transform leaders into coaches and wants to make hierarchy superfluous based on the idea that people and teams are self-managing. The manager-coach should incite the collaborator to think and (s)he should learn the facts and find solutions from within. The coach should merely stimulate thinking. This central tenet of the theory is borrowed from the ideas of Carl Rogers (1902–1987), a humanistic theologist and psychologist who observed four important aspects in his non-directive client-centered therapy: 1. Acceptance (total, unconditional, and positive acceptance of the client). 2. Listening (this requires very good listening skills). 3. Empathy. 4. Self-generation of solutions (the belief that the client will always find his or her own solutions. The therapist will never interpret or offer advice). Rogers firmly believed that the client would experience a form of organismic self-actualization, a fuzzy concept used by many humanistic psychologists like Rogers or Abraham Maslow. The closest I can come to explaining this concept is that he believed that if the therapist expressed belief in the client’s ability to use his own experience and skill to find solutions and choose between possible actions or solutions, then this would give the client a sense of agency and increase his sense of ‘self.’191
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These concepts are closely related to another fuzzy concept in psychology: self-efficacy. A skeptic’s HR Dictionary
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