Coaching vs Directing: Choosing the Right Leadership Response
Ask a room of project managers whether to coach or direct and the answer comes back coach, with a slight air of having been tested on it. Directing has picked up a reputation as a failure of leadership, which is a convention absorbed from preparation material rather than anything the practice supports.
The choice is situational, and the situation has four readable conditions in it. Not one of them is about what kind of leader you would prefer to be.
Four conditions, not a preference
Competence. Does this person already know how to do the thing? Not whether they are capable in general, which is a different question, but whether they have handled this particular kind of decision before and have something to reason from.
Clarity. Do they know what good looks like here? Somebody can be entirely competent and still be facing a case at the boundary of the written criteria, where the answer depends on something nobody has told them.
Time. How long until the decision has to exist? Coaching takes between forty minutes and a fortnight depending on what is being learned, and that time comes out of something else.
Consequence. What happens if they get it wrong? Not how important the decision feels, but what a wrong call actually produces: a day of rework, an awkward conversation, a regulatory finding, somebody hurt.
The clear cases settle themselves. Competent, clear, plenty of time and modest consequence: coach, and step back further than feels comfortable. Inexperienced, unclear, no time and serious consequence: direct, and directing there is the responsible act rather than a lapse.
Directing well
Section 3.6 of The Standard for Project Management describes accountable leadership as including the judgement about when to decide, and the practical difference between directing well and directing badly runs to three sentences.
Say that you are directing. "I am going to make this call, not work it through with you" costs four seconds and removes the ambiguity that does the damage. What people resent is not being overruled. It is not being able to tell whether they were consulted or performed at.
Say why. The reason is almost always the time or the consequence, and both are perfectly understandable. "This has to go tonight and a wrong answer is a finding" is a complete explanation, and nobody needs a longer one.
Say what would change it. This is the part that turns a decision into development. "Next time, if you can show me the three cases you compared it against, this one is yours" tells somebody exactly what competence looks like here, which is information they cannot get any other way.
Two deviations, a fortnight apart
A validation officer in a pharmaceutical company, about eighteen months into the role, was running the installation qualification on a new filling line. Partway through he found a deviation: an instrument calibration certificate naming a different serial number from the one on the instrument in front of him.
The question was whether that was a documentation error, closable with a note, or something needing a formal investigation. He had seen four cases like it and this one sat at the boundary. The batch window was Thursday, the line was set up and holding, and a wrong call would be a regulatory finding at the next inspection.
The project manager directed. She read the certificate, asked two questions, said it needed the formal route, and said why: a serial mismatch could indicate the wrong instrument had been used for the calibration, and that possibility could not be closed with a note. Then she sat with him for twenty minutes after the decision had gone, on what she had looked at and in what order.
A fortnight later a similar question came up on a different instrument, with a fortnight of float and no regulatory exposure. She coached. It took an hour and a half across two conversations, and he reached the same conclusion she would have. He also disagreed with her on a detail and turned out to be right, which is the part that does not happen when somebody is being directed.
Neither response was better leadership. They were answers to two different situations, and the officer got more out of the pair than he would have from two of either.
For a PMP® candidate, the four conditions come out of the situation before any response is chosen. An inexperienced team member facing an urgent decision with real consequence is not asking for a coaching conversation, and an answer that supplies one has applied a convention without reading the case. A competent person with time in hand is the reverse. The clock and the consequence come first, because those two settle most of them. Situations where the conventional answer is the wrong one are the kind a structured PMP exam preparation course is full of.
On a live project, the over-coaching failure is worth watching for, because it is invisible from the inside. A team that cannot get an answer within a useful time stops asking, and the decisions still get taken, by people with less context and no accountability for them. If nobody has brought you a decision in a fortnight on a project of any size, the reason is unlikely to be that everything is going well.
Interested in going further?
Directing has a poor name and is the responsible answer rather more often than the convention allows. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through situations where the leadership response depends on the clock and the consequence.
Accountable leadership and the judgement inside it are set out in The Standard, in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A043: When Should a Project Manager Escalate?
A038: Accountable Leadership: Leading Without Command and Control
A039: Servant Leadership in PMP: When It Fits and When It Doesn’t
A197: Before Escalating: What Should a Project Manager Check First?
A007: The Standard for Project Management vs the PMBOK Guide
PMP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
