An old dog realizes new tricks, revisiting an earlier coaching approach. Dig in as I show how interpretation, workplace conditions, and organizational consequences shape performance, and why coaching must examine more than the individual.
It's amazing what a brief conversation with an interesting connection on LinkedIn can provoke you to contemplate deeply about your past work. And recognize, quite frankly, a bit of cringe.
Quite a few years ago, well after completing a course on workplace coaching but in a time zone where the topic was important to me, I wrote a lengthy blog post (it is still in Starlight!) that attempted to capture what I had learned and even implemented. Like many pieces of writing rooted in what was a solid learning experience, it carried the confidence of a framework that had revealed something useful. The ideas and even the experiences seemed orderly, memorable and immediately applicable, which is the stuff that makes blog posts feel ready for the web.
At the centre of the article was a straightforward proposition: if we want to help people improve their performance, we should focus on behaviour. Behaviour, I wrote, is what a person says or does. It can be observed, described and compared with an expected standard. Judgment, by contrast, tends to be more subjective, less precise and far less useful to the person who is expected to do something with it.
The distinction still holds considerable value. Telling someone that they are “weak at budgeting” offers little more than a discouraging label, whereas observing that a particular project budget omitted its assumptions gives the person something tangible to examine. One statement pronounces upon the person; the other describes an aspect of the work. The first can easily provoke defensiveness, confusion or shame, while the second creates at least the possibility of a useful conversation.
I continue to believe that managers, facilitators and coaches should resist the temptation to replace careful observation with broad judgments about attitude, capability or character. Such judgments are often intellectually lazy, even when they are delivered with impressive managerial confidence. They compress a complicated human being and a particular moment of performance into a conclusion that may reveal as much about the observer as it does about the observed.
Still, while that original distinction remains valuable, I no longer believe that observable behaviour tells us nearly as much as I once thought it did.
The framework I wrote about distinguished among three broad reasons why someone might not demonstrate an expected behaviour. A person might not understand what to do, might understand but lack the motivation to act, or might possess both knowledge and motivation while being constrained by systems, structures or circumstances.
I came to remember those factors using the acronym EMU: Enablement, Motivation and Understanding. It was simple enough to recall during a conversation and practical enough to prevent one of the most common mistakes in organizational life — the assumption that every performance problem can be solved by sending someone to training.
That was, and remains, a worthwhile lesson. Organizations are often remarkably enthusiastic about educational solutions to non-educational problems. A team struggles with a poorly designed process, conflicting priorities, unreliable technology, unclear authority or a manager who rewards one behaviour while requesting another, and somebody eventually proposes a workshop. The workshop may be excellent, the facilitator may be charming, the sandwiches may be entirely respectable, and yet none of the conditions preventing the desired performance will have changed.
The EMU model reminded me that people sometimes need knowledge, but sometimes need something quite different. They may need working tools, clearer expectations, additional time, safer conditions, better coordination or the removal of an obstacle that has become so familiar nobody remembers it is an obstacle. Learning can increase what people know and, at its best, what they are capable of doing. It cannot by itself repair every condition that prevents knowledge from becoming action.
The coaching model also taught me to be cautious about advice. Rather than immediately explaining what should have been done, the coach was encouraged to help the person reconstruct the experience, examine the result, consider alternatives and make a commitment to a different course of action. The foundational thought was that people are more likely to sustain a change they have genuinely considered and chosen than one they have merely been instructed to perform.
That idea also continues to serve me well. A person who is always supplied with the answer may become more compliant without becoming more capable. Questions, when they are honest questions rather than instructions wearing a friendlier hat, can help people develop the ability to interpret experience, troubleshoot difficulty and make better choices without waiting for someone more senior to arrive.
The earlier model therefore contained much that was useful. It emphasized specificity, recognized environmental constraints, honoured reflection and placed considerable importance on observation, questioning and listening. What has changed is not my belief that these things matter, but my understanding of what surrounds them and what lies beneath them.
In the original post, I described the coach as needing to become something like a reliable human camera. The coach was expected to watch carefully, remember accurately and distinguish between what had been observed and what had merely been judged.
There was wisdom in the instruction, but far too much confidence in the metaphor. Human beings are not cameras. We do not passively record a complete scene and then play it back without alteration. We notice some things and fail to notice others. We organize what we see according to prior experience, expectation, interest, emotion and belief. We construct meaning while we observe, often so quickly that the interpretation feels indistinguishable from the event itself.
For example, a manager notices that an employee says very little during a meeting. The silence is observable, but the meaning of that silence is not. The employee may be disengaged, intimidated, unconvinced, carefully processing what has been said, uncertain about when it is safe to speak, worried that disagreement will carry a consequence, or simply unable to find an opening in a discussion dominated by faster or more powerful voices.
The behaviour matters, but it does not explain itself.
This realization has become central to much of my more recent work. Before people judge, decide or act, they typically construct an explanation. They gather limited evidence, connect it with what they already believe and form a story about what is happening. That story may be plausible and, from time to time, entirely correct. It nevertheless remains an interpretation assembled from incomplete information.
I have come to think of interpretive humility as the discipline of holding our first explanation as a hypothesis rather than a verdict. This does not require endless hesitation or the abandonment of judgment. It simply asks that we remember how quickly human beings can become certain about things they have only partially understood.
That insight changes the work of coaching. A coach should still ask what happened, but should also become curious about how the person made sense of what happened. The conversation may need to explore questions such as:
These questions move the conversation further upstream. They do not merely seek a better behaviour the next time a similar situation occurs. They examine the quality of the interpretation from which the behaviour emerged.
The original model divided learners into three memorable categories: those who did not know, those who did not want to act and those who could not act because the surrounding system prevented them. The categories were useful as a quick diagnostic aid, but I would no longer describe people in this way.
People are not “I don’t know,” “I don’t want to” or “I can’t” types. A particular behaviour, in a particular setting and at a particular moment, may be constrained by knowledge, motivation, opportunity or some combination of conditions. The same person may demonstrate remarkable capability in one environment and struggle conspicuously in another.
The “doesn’t want to” category deserves special caution because it invites one of the most common and consequential errors in workplace judgment. When someone knows what is expected but does not act accordingly, it is tempting to infer apathy, resistance or insufficient motivation. Sometimes that diagnosis is fair. Frequently, however, it is incomplete.
A person may know what should be done but lack confidence in their ability to do it. The knowledge may be difficult to retrieve under pressure, or the skill may be understood conceptually without having been practised sufficiently to become usable. The expected behaviour may carry political, relational or reputational risk. The person may be exhausted, overloaded or caught inside a culture where the official expectation and the rewarded behaviour bear only a passing resemblance to each other.
What appears to be reluctance may, in fact, be a rational response to the consequences the organization has created.
This is where some of my more recent thinking about workplace friction, capacity camouflage, adaptive overperformance and capability debt has changed the way I interpret individual performance. Organizations often appear to function because capable people compensate for broken conditions. They remember what systems fail to retain, repair weak handoffs, absorb ambiguity, work longer than should be necessary and quietly protect customers or colleagues from consequences that would otherwise become visible. I speak extensively about this in my new book, The Calm of Progress: Designing Organizations That Hold Their Own Weight.
Their overperformance camouflages the weakness of the system. Eventually, the organization begins to mistake extraordinary effort for normal capacity, and the people who have kept things moving are praised for resilience while being asked to continue carrying conditions that should have been repaired.
In such a setting, coaching the individual to become more efficient may not merely miss the problem. It may help the organization continue avoiding it.
My earlier framework acknowledged enablement, but I now place much greater weight upon it. Performance does not arise solely from the knowledge and motivation residing inside an individual. It emerges from an interaction among the person, the task, the relationships, the surrounding systems and the consequences that follow action.
A person may be entirely capable of a behaviour and still conclude that demonstrating it would be unwise. Consider an employee who has been encouraged to speak candidly but has watched previous dissent ignored, punished or quietly remembered when opportunities were allocated. Silence in that environment may not reflect a communication deficit. It may reflect an accurate reading of the organization.
This is one reason I have become increasingly interested in consequences. Organizations frequently describe culture through values, aspirations and carefully composed statements mounted on walls or introduced during orientation. People, however, learn culture through what happens after someone acts.
Which behaviours are rewarded? Which are tolerated? Which create inconvenience? Which result in additional work, social exclusion, lost opportunity or subtle retaliation? Which people are forgiven for conduct that others cannot safely attempt?
The consequences speak loudly, and they often speak more persuasively than the values.
A coaching conversation that ignores these realities risks becoming an exercise in persuading the individual to adapt more successfully to a system that has not earned their trust. That does not mean people have no responsibility for their choices, nor does it suggest that every difficulty can be attributed to the organization. It means only that responsibility should not be assigned before the conditions surrounding the behaviour have been examined with some care.
I also used to describe coaching as a largely non-directive process in which the coach helps another person discover the answer. I now think workplace coaching requires a more candid account of power and authority.
Sometimes the coach is also the manager, and the conversation exists inside a relationship where one person has more influence over work, opportunity, evaluation and reward than the other. There may also be a legitimate professional standard, legal obligation, safety requirement, client commitment or organizational expectation that cannot simply be treated as one possible interpretation among many. In those circumstances, the manager does not enter the conversation without a position, and the outcome may not be entirely open.
This makes it useful to distinguish coaching from several neighbouring practices that are often bundled together under the same friendly label. Instruction explains what must be done. Feedback describes what occurred and how it differed from an expectation. Mentoring offers experience and advice. Performance management establishes accountability for required outcomes. Developmental coaching helps a person think, learn and choose more effectively.
These approaches can support one another, but they should not be disguised as one another. A manager should not ask a long sequence of apparently open questions when only one answer will ultimately be accepted. That is not empowerment; it is a guessing game, and a rather exhausting one.
The more honest approach is to clarify what is fixed and what remains open. The organization may legitimately own the required outcome, while the employee retains meaningful agency in understanding what happened, determining how improvement can occur, identifying support and deciding how the learning will be carried forward.
The earlier model encouraged the coach to help the learner understand the implications of poor performance. Questions about intention, consequence and impact were meant to make the discrepancy sufficiently meaningful that change would follow.
I continue to believe these questions are valuable. It can be important to ask whether the outcome matched the person’s intention, who else was affected, what consequences have already occurred and what might happen if the pattern continues. Reflection becomes thin when it avoids significance.
What I would no longer do is describe the purpose as amplifying pain.
That language reflects an older view of change in which discomfort is deliberately increased until the person becomes motivated to move. It can turn the coaching relationship into a subtle exercise in pressure, particularly when the coach also holds organizational authority.
The purpose should not be to manufacture distress. It should be to help the person see the situation fully enough to make a sound choice. That includes consequences, but it also includes values, competing obligations, uncertainty, constraints and the person’s own understanding of what matters.
The goal is not submission. The goal is clearer judgment.
My earlier article began with behaviour. Today, I would begin slightly further upstream.
Workplace coaching should help people improve what they notice, how they interpret experience, how they reason under pressure and how they translate judgment into action that can survive reality. Behaviour still matters because organizations cannot function on insight alone. Eventually, something must be said, decided, attempted, stopped, continued or changed.
Yet behaviour is the visible edge of a larger process. People notice what is happening, construct an interpretation, become more or less certain, anticipate consequences, decide and act. The system then responds, and that response teaches them what is safe, useful, rewarded, inconvenient or futile.
Good coaching can enter this cycle at several points. It can sharpen observation, question premature certainty, expand the decision frame, surface hidden constraints, generate alternatives, clarify consequences and support a realistic commitment. It can also reveal that the person is not the only thing requiring change.
This last possibility matters. Coaching has sometimes been used as though the organization were a fixed and largely innocent container within which individuals must learn to perform more effectively. My experience has made me increasingly reluctant to accept that assumption. Organizations create conditions, distribute consequences and shape the practical meaning of behaviour. Sometimes the coaching conversation should lead toward personal change, but sometimes it should expose a process, expectation or cultural condition that has become unreasonable.
After all this evolution, I continue to return to several lessons from that original coaching course. I would still encourage coaches and managers to be specific, to describe what was seen or heard before assigning meaning, and to listen longer than feels natural. I would still caution against giving advice merely because one happens to have some available, which is a surprisingly common occupational hazard among experienced people.
I would still help someone reconstruct an experience, examine the difference between intention and outcome, consider consequences, generate more than one possible response and make a commitment that is realistic in the conditions where it must be carried out. I would also be clearer about what is required, what remains open and what support the organization owes the person it is asking to change.
The most important shift in my thinking is that coaching is no longer, for me, primarily a method for correcting suboptimal behaviour. It is a discipline for improving the quality of the thinking, interpretation and conditions from which behaviour emerges. That makes coaching both more demanding and more humane. The coach must pay attention not only to what the person did, but to what they noticed, what they believed, what they feared, what they understood, what the environment permitted and what the organization taught them through its consequences.
Years ago, I wrote that learning ultimately addresses behaviour. Today, I would put it differently. Learning changes what people are able to notice, understand, judge and do, while coaching helps them bring those capacities into conscious and practical use.
Wise organizations should remain open to the possibility that when good people struggle to act well, the work is not always to repair the person. Sometimes the circumstances need coaching too.
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