Coaching: A Key Model of Leadership

Abstract

There are two principal ways to fall short. One is to fail at what we attempt. The other is to fail to attemptwhat really needs to be done. Much of the discussion around leadership today represents a failure of the second type.We thinkweknow what leadership needs to be and criticize ourselves and others when we fail to deliver on it. In fact, however, the real problem with much leadership education today is a mismatch between needs and leadership models. A defective model of leadership is the leader as commander. Many people assume that leaders, almost by definition, know what needs to be done and how it should be done and simply assign other people the task of doing it. When things don’t work out, such leaders say to themselves, “If only thesepeoplewoulddo exactly what I tell them, everything would work out fine.” The major problem with this model is its failure to grasp the full extent of what leaders cannot know. Most organizations as sprawling as a radiology department, a hospital, or a health systemare simply too complex for one individual to understand in depth. The decisions to bemade on a daily basis number at least in the hundreds, perhaps the thousands, and no single leader can be sufficiently informed, let alone in the right place at the right time, to make them. At some point, colleagues must make important decisions without their leader’s input. Another defective model of the leader is that of mentor. Mentor was an experienced andwise counselor inwhose care the Greek hero Odysseus left his young son Telemachus when he departed Ithaca to fight in the Trojan War. In contemporary terms, a mentor is someone who helps guide a more junior colleague’s development and career.