The Best Managers Don’t Fix, They Coach — Four Tools to Add to Your Toolkit

Full plates. Flailing motivation. Team members feeling unfulfilled. Even though the new year has only just begun, many managers are wrestling with these very problems.

Over the years, Anita Hossain Choudhry (CEO of The Grand) and Mindy Zhang (former product leader at Dropbox and Oscar Health) have seen too many leaders get overwhelmed with responsibilities and burn out. After working with hundreds of startup managers as executive coaches, they’ve come to spot a familiar pattern.

“Think about your typical week as a manager. How many times did you help your direct reports by trying to solve their problem? The answer is probably as many times as you met with them,” they say. “Too often, managers feel the best way to add value is by fixing someone’s problem. ‘I know the answer, and I need to tell them,’ we say to ourselves. But over-relying on fixing constrains our ability to lead and robs our team members of growth opportunities.”

In their experience, many managers stumble into this pitfall because — especially in the startup setting — manager training is often inadequate (if it even exists). “Most managers haven’t been taught how to assess their style or shift their approach. Many bring the best of intentions, but frankly, simply end up winging it,” they say.

“But as a manager, you have a toolbox of skills, styles, and competencies to pull from. In order to be the best manager possible, you need to: (a) assemble a diverse and varied toolbox, and (b) wisely select the tool that will be most useful in a given situation. And we’ve seen first-hand that coaching is one of the least utilized and yet most effective management tools.”

Hossain Choudhry and Zhang are on a mission to change that. In this article, the duo unpacks why managers fall into the fixing trap and digs into the fundamentals of coaching, sharing four actionable tools you can start using immediately.

They distill the highlights of what they’ve learned in years of coaching training — all adapted to everyday management scenarios so you can see how to practically put them to use. (See a quick preview in the graphic below.)

Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!

-The Review Editors

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A podcast that dives deep into the stories of influential people from history (like this episode on Thomas Edison).

This manifesto on the metaverse.

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