Is Being A Great Manager A “Coachable” Skill?

Earlier this year, I wrote a Forbes column explaining how corporate leaders should motivate their employees. It answered the age-old question: What makes a great manager?

The column draws on the seminal work of Frederick Herzberg, who published Work and the Nature of Man in 1966. Herzberg wrote one of the most important Harvard Business Review essays of all time: “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?” His extensive research made clear that the answer is unambiguous.

In short, many of today’s companies have taken valuable steps to improve their workplace culture, but even some of the best actors haven’t gone far enough. Most of the steps that companies take—increasing pay, expanding benefits and perks, renovating the workplace, and so on—play a pivotal role, but they are ultimately only capable of reducing dissatisfaction. They are “extrinsic factors,” in Herzberg’s words, because they are not inherent to the work itself.

Improve the intrinsic work environment, however, and leaders can actually increase satisfaction. These are the only factors that increase positive satisfaction on the job and, by extension, productivity, morale, and teamwork writ large:

• A feeling of being valued, with your voice and contributions sought out by managers
• A feeling of being challenged to excel and develop
• The opportunity to grow the breadth of one’s job, with more discretion achieving its objectives
• An appreciation and respect for the company’s contributions to broader society

Employers can’t fake their way through employee empowerment. They can’t just create empowerment in a lab with a 10 percent raise or remote work flexibility. Higher job commitment and lower turnover result from workers—on a very personal level—feeling motivated to succeed in a professional context.

Sharing Herzberg’s conclusions with managers over the decades, I’m often asked the “nature versus nurture” question: Can people be taught to become great managers? Or are they just born with “it”?

It’s like asking whether or not athletes are simply born that way, or if they’re made that way through practice, coaching, and their experiences. Here’s the good news, based on my own experience: Great managerial skills can indeed be taught and learned.

Of course, as with sports, there are better candidates than others. Some high school basketball players are better-suited for Duke or Kansas, while others are better off in Division III. There are inherent capacities that make some people better corporate leaders than others. Drive, energy, and focus can’t always be taught or learned. Neither can the capacity to communicate with high efficacy or relate to people on an emotional level—the ability to show compassion and empathize.

But, assuming that a leader possesses a basic toolbox of personal skills, professional development is possible. It can be brought out by good coaching. I recently reached out to the Churchill Leadership Group, which offers executive coaching on a global scale, and their research is insightful. According to Churchill, people with “coached” managers report higher satisfaction and better performance than those with “un-coached” ones.

In many ways, the right coaching comes down to reorienting a manager’s thinking. Many leaders expect extrinsic factors, such as increased pay or more time off, to do the trick and take their workplace culture to the next level. But the right coach can push a manager to go even deeper, beyond the surface level and into the realm of intrinsic value. Coaching can put managers in the mindset of improving a job’s inherent aspects, by putting them in the shoes of the person doing that job.

One example may be for a manger to open up a weekly conference to employee input, giving workers a 15-minute platform for voicing their opinions and brainstorming new ideas. Another may be to hold biweekly meetings with employees one-by-one, collecting feedback that can be turned into actionable changes in daily workflow. Perhaps a manager can host a monthly roundtable explaining how the company is contributing to society in a positive way—from recycling plastic bottles to improving public health outcomes or simplifying the grocery shopping process.

On top of that, managers need to demonstrate to employees—through their actions, not words—that their company is a place for robust growth and development. Workers need to see proof that they can climb the ranks, and not just hear about it. Employees never want to feel “stuck.” If the workers who excel are truly rewarded with an elevated role and heightened responsibilities, the company is walking the walk on workplace culture. Anything less is just hot air.

Managers can be taught to think intrinsically. They can learn more than extrinsic value. That’s how “best practices” turn into good management—and a great culture.