Coaching, Teaching, and Directing

There’s a right time for each

Helping someone on your team improve is not one activity, it is three. Coaching, teaching, and directing are distinct modes of working with a person, and each is the right choice in different circumstances. A lot of leadership advice treats one of them (usually coaching) as the enlightened option and the others as failures of patience. In practice, a leader who can only coach is as limited as one who can only give orders. The skill is in knowing which mode a situation calls for, and moving between them deliberately.

The three modes

Coaching is the most holistic of the three, and it takes the longest view. When I coach someone, my job is not to solve their problem, it is to help them introspect and answer their own questions. The conversation is built around what they think, what they have tried, and what they believe the options are. The problem in front of us is almost incidental; the real work is building their ability to reason through the next problem without me. Coaching compounds, which is why it is where I try to spend most of my time.

Teaching is what I fall back to when someone is not yet equipped to be coached on a topic. When the subject is too unfamiliar for introspection to get them anywhere, I instead ask leading questions to explore the concept with them, and/or demonstrate how I would solve the issue. Teaching is still interactive (they are working through it, not watching me or being lectured), but I am supplying the scaffolding they do not yet have. The aim is to build enough of a framework that next time, coaching becomes possible.

Directing is where I directly tell someone what to do. I will provide context where I can, because instructions land better when people understand the reasoning, but the defining feature is that the decision is mine and the direction is explicit. It is the least developmental of the three, and it is sometimes exactly what the moment requires.

Deciding which to use

Three attributes drive the choice for me: jeopardy, urgency, and capability.

Jeopardy asks: “what is the cost of them getting this wrong?” If the mistake would harm the company (a security incident, losing a major customer, a data loss), I must err towards directing and tell them how to avoid it. If the downside is a minor annoyance, like perhaps they explore a dead-end for a couple of hours, I can let them explore freely and treat whatever happens as tuition. Most situations sit somewhere between, and the honest question is whether I am comfortable underwriting the worst realistic outcome of them finding their own way.

Urgency asks: “how much time do we have?” If something is needed immediately, I have no choice but to direct; there is no room for a learning journey when the answer is due now. If there is a little time, I will teach. Ideally there is enough time for me to give them the framework and then let them resolve it themselves, which is where teaching starts to shade into coaching. This usually takes the shape of me explaining a customer problem or even sharing the customer feedback and asking the engineer to spend a few hours making a plan to solve it, which we review together.

Capability asks: “how close is this to something they have done before?” If the task is similar to their past experience, coaching is the ideal option, because they have the raw material to reason with. If it is pretty dissimilar to previous experiences, I will need to teach or direct, and the choice between those two depends on the size of the gap between their abilities and the demands of the task. A modest gap is a teaching opportunity; a chasm means directing them through it this time and building the capability afterwards.

The three attributes interact, and the most restrictive one wins. A capable engineer facing a novel problem with high jeopardy and no time gets directed, however experienced they are. The same engineer facing the same problem with low stakes and a loose deadline gets coached, however messy their first attempt is likely to be.

Default to coaching, but not dogmatically

I try to coach as much as possible. It is the mode that builds durable capability, it signals trust, and it is the only one of the three that eventually makes me unnecessary for a given class of problem, which is the point of developing people in the first place.

But it is important to use the other two as necessary. Giving people freedom to grow can easily slide into giving them too little structure to learn. Coaching someone through a problem they lack the foundations for is not empowering, it is abandonment dressed up as trust. They will flail, feel lost, lose confidence, and learn less than they would have from an hour of honest teaching. Equally, refusing to direct in an urgent, high-jeopardy moment does not protect their development, it puts the team and the company at risk for the sake of a principle.

The failure modes are symmetrical. Direct everything and you build a team that waits to be told; coach everything and you build a team that was never shown. The leaders I have learned the most from moved fluidly between all three, and were transparent about which one they were using and why. That transparency matters: telling someone “I’m going to be directive here because we have two hours and the stakes are high, and we’ll do a proper debrief afterwards” preserves the relationship that coaching depends on, even in the moments when coaching is off the table.

Making it a habit

The practical upshot of all this is a quick check before any conversation about a problem someone owns: what is the jeopardy, what is the urgency, and how far is this from what they have done before? Those three answers usually make the right mode obvious. The discipline is in actually asking yourself, rather than defaulting to whichever mode is most comfortable (for most of us that is either always rescuing people or always leaving them to it). Over time the assessment becomes instinctive, and the payoff is a team that gets the structure it needs when it needs it, and the freedom it can use when it can use it.

Applied consistently, this practice helps build a trusting and capable team that gets better and better with time. So don’t just coach - know when you need to teach, and even direct; your team will be better for it in the long run.