My Leader Is My Coach: Building a Coaching Relationship Within the Leader-Follower Dyad

Introduction

Over the last decades, the typical workplace has constantly increased in complexity. Organizational scholars have defined for a long time the condition of constant change and unpredictability at work with the acronym VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (Cockburn & Smith, 2018; Dhillon & Nguyen, 2020). However, scholars recently proposed a new acronym to indicate the even higher level of workplace complexity, BANI, which stands for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible (Le Roux & Sutton, 2022). With complexity increasing, a traditional approach to management is typical of the industrial age, in which the manager tells what to do and the workers execute is not effective, as every team member is asked to be reactive, creative, autonomous, and fully engaged in facing unexpected challenges (Ahmad et al., 2023; Dhillon & Nguyen, 2020; Peng et al., 2019). Leadership theory and practice have evolved to focus on facilitating employee learning, development, and commitment to the team. In his influential book about leadership, James Burns (1978) described this leadership style as “transformational,” stressing the role of the leader in (positively) transforming followers and helping them become a better self at work. Over the past decades, the study of leadership has identified several other styles that focus on the intangible relation between leaders and followers and on developmental and self-fulfilling aspects of the work experience. They are generally referred to as humanistic styles. Humanistic leadership styles include authentic, servant, and shared leadership (Avolio et al., 2009). While each style is different, they are all characterized by recognizing the follower as an individual, empowering the followers, including them in decision-making, and building an authentic and trusting relationship. Eventually, the goal is for the follower to surpass the leader's capability one day.

The contemporary leader, therefore, needs tools and practices that can assist in reaching the goals of developing, engaging, and empowering the team. Managerial Coaching (Lawrence, 2017) is among the most popular tools. Research has suggested a link between the use of managerial coaching practices and several individual and organizational metrics (Ahmad et al., 2023; DiGirolamo & Tkach, 2019; Kapoutzis et al., 2023; McCarthy & Milner, 2020) such as task performance (Ribeiro et al., 2021), work engagement (Ladyshewsky & Taplin, 2017), and organizational commitment (Park et al., 2021).

The promises of managerial coaching led to a sharp rise in the popularity of dedicated HR programs (CPID 2015). However, many interventions are unsuccessful, and investigation is still needed to determine the antecedents of program effectiveness (Lawrence, 2017). For example, Mathew and Hakrob (2022) identify various inhibiting factors “including cultural differences and inappropriate coaching techniques, the lack of suitable and qualified coaches, the non-availability of time for both participants and the inability to build trust in coaching relationships” (Mathew and Hakrob, 2022, p. 67). Other authors focused on implicit managerial beliefs, suggesting that managerial coaching is facilitated when the managing coach can abandon a command-and-control leadership style in favor of a more collaborative one (Koskinen & Anderson, 2023; McCarthy & Milner, 2020). Also, managers who believe employees can learn and change behavior (growth mindset) are more likely to successfully engage in coaching practices (McCarthy & Milner, 2020). Finally, some characteristics of managerial coaching programs can moderate their success. For example, Rafferty and colleagues (2023) recently found that including 1:1 coaching sessions in training programs increases their effectiveness.