Guide, Teacher, Coach

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As a leader it can be useful to recognize the unique role you play in any given circumstance. Should you be acting as a guide, a teacher, or a coach?

I’m a big fan of alter egos, not in the sense of Peter Parker putting on a tight suit to go fight super villains, rather leveraging another persona as a way of putting yourself in the correct mindset to be most useful to your team.

Leaders need to wear many hats, but three of the personas that I think are most instructive when leading a team are that of a guide, a teacher, or a coach.

Guide

One of my great passions in life, outside of writing this newsletter of course, is ski mountaineering. Ski mountaineering is the pursuit of climbing and skiing in the backcountry outside of traditional ski resorts.

I love ski mountaineering because you get to spend time outdoors with people you care about, it’s physically challenging, and you fail a lot which is always a good check to your ego.

It is not uncommon for both beginner and expert ski mountaineers to hire a guide to help them spend a day in the mountains whether it is a short trip in a local mountain range or a more committing expedition far from home.

In the field of ski mountaineering, guides help their clients develop the fitness, skills, and knowledge required to increase their odds of successfully summiting the mountain which makes up their objective. Guides helped me learn the basics of ski mountaineering, and I’ve always found their work to be an excellent persona for any leader to embody as they lead their team.

The primary difference between a guide and our other leadership personas is that the guide summits with you.

This dynamic of a leader being in the arena with their team is an important persona for any leader to understand and be comfortable embodying particularly when it comes time to pull the rope. You can think of the leader as guide persona as a form of the “player coach” term often thrown around to describe leaders of small teams.

While it may be splitting hairs, I prefer the guide persona to the player coach concept as often times when I see player coaches in practice they’re doing too much playing and not enough coaching.

On the flip side, the reason it is important for leaders to retain the ability to act as a guide is because you should never be too senior to step into the arena and pressure test the strength of your beliefs to ensure your guidance to your team is still applicable.

If the CEO of a $60B+ market cap company makes it a frequent practice to join customer calls, you too can find the time to join your team in the arena.

Teacher

I have and continue to benefit from many incredible teachers across my life. As a leader, I find studying great teachers both fascinating and instructive.

I like to separate the teacher and coach persona in my own leadership as it helps me be more effective at delivering the appropriate instruction for the given circumstance.

To me, teaching is primarily a focus on knowledge transfer while coaching is focused on skill development.

Put differently, the teacher persona focuses primarily on the subject while the coach persona focuses on the needs of the individual.

While great leaders are able to embody both the teacher and coach persona throughout the course of leading their team, it is helpful to be clear with yourself which persona you exist in before delivering a training session. Doing so will make your content clearer, and more applicable to a wider audience.

Coach

Frequent readers of this newsletter know I am a big fan of pulling from the lessons of world class sports franchises to build world class teams within a business context. While all three leadership personas discussed in this post are important, the highest impact of the three when it comes to leading teams is that of the coach.

While I call out some of the main differences between the teacher and coach above there are three capabilities unique to the coach which are worth noting.

1. Coaches are carriers of culture

2. Coaches facilitate dialogue

3. Coaches improvise

Coaches as carriers of culture

Probably the most important difference between a coach and a teacher is that coaches are responsible for the creation and stewardship of their team’s culture in a way that teachers are not.

Coaches are generally incentive aligned with their team, they share in the success in ways teachers do not. That’s not to say that teachers don’t experience great joy when their students succeed, I’m sure they do, but in the arena of business coaches are more likely to share in the success of their team based on that team’s performance while teachers are more focused on the assessment of a group’s knowledge relative to a set standard.

This incentive alignment between coach and team means that coaches must define and steward a culture on their team which motivates that group toward a shared goal. It’s easy to think of a coach giving a motivating kickoff at the beginning of a season or a rousing halftime speech in way that a teacher would not.

Coaches as facilitators of dialogue

Given much coaching takes place in a 1:1 setting (remember our Demonstrate, Practice, Apply, Refine framework) great coaches should facilitate effective dialogue vs. telling their team member how to perform a task. An effective coaching dialogue looks more like, “Tell me why you took that course of action?” “How do you think the outcome might have changed if you’d done this instead?” “In my experience I’ve found XYZ to be a helpful tactic in situations like this.”

The best coaching sessions I’ve led, and been part of, always resemble discussion more than instruction.

Coaches improvise

Given effective coaches facilitate dialogue more than deliver instruction it’s important for great coaches to be great improvisors. Coaches rely more on a set of frameworks, principles, and their own experience rather than a set curriculum to improve the skills of the individual member of their team.

This ability to adapt individual instruction to the highest impact improvement for your team member is one of the defining characteristics of a great coach.

Conclusion

None of the personas from the above are hard and fast laws of physics. Many of the greatest teachers I know are also excellent coaches and it isn’t uncommon for a world class guide to also be a world class teacher.

Regardless of which persona you need to embody from one meeting to the next, understanding the difference between the guide, teacher, and coach will help you be more effective.

Remember:

• Guides: Summit with their team and demonstrate what great looks like by being in the arena.

• Teachers: Deliver one to many instruction focused on knowledge transfer based on a set curriculum.

• Coaches: Are stewards of their team’s culture while focused on 1:1 improvement of an individual team member’s skills more through dialogue than instruction.

See y’all next week.