Coaching and Accountability: Your 3-Tool Guide

A leader has one primary objective: to expand the capabilities of the people they lead by increasing their ownership and critical thinking skills. There are two levers that a leader can pull to do this. They can model, or they can coach.

The coaching continuum

The Coaching Continuum runs from “Tell” on one side to “Ask” on the other, and it can be used to identify coaching patterns in leaders. Those who rely on directive, one-sided interactions to manage their people will breed dependency and learned helplessness. Those who use inquiry-based conversation in their management will create facilitated self-discovery. Effective leaders use both ends of the spectrum. Where on the continuum do you fall?

Do you tell more than you ask?

Telling more than you ask is an inhibitor to development. Individuals who are micromanaged aren’t given the opportunity to think critically, develop autonomy, use discretion, and make decisions. While they may be proficient at doing what they’re told, they freeze in dynamic or emergent environments.

Leaders who hold tight to discretion, decisions, and ownership end up centralizing power. They hamstring their people and give them no room to grow.

Of course, there’s a time and a place for telling. Highly regulated, high-stakes environments where the margin for error is low may call for more direction than exploration. But even in these scenarios, there are surely moments of training, exploring, and testing where questions can and should be prioritized.

Do you ask more than you tell?

Leaders who ask more than they tell are force multipliers. When you lead with inquiry, you intentionally create space for an individual’s growth, opinions, and experience in the work that you do.

Ask yourself: Do you warm or chill the air as a leader? Do you encourage innovation, or stifle it? Do you let others use their critical thinking skills, or do you expect them to rely on yours?

Engaged employees feel accountable to their role. They need to speak up, innovate, and make things better. If you can banish fear and create a nurturing environment that allows people to be vulnerable as they learn and grow, they will perform beyond your expectations and theirs.

The full guide adds the two other diagnostic tools: The 3 Levels of Accountability, which maps the relationship between autonomy and accountability across task, process, and outcome levels — and shows you how to tell when someone’s ready to graduate from one to the next — and the Coaching & Accountability Matrix, a nine-box model that combines both frameworks so you can locate each person you lead and move them up and to the right toward full ownership.