The Landscape: From Directing to Coaching
We started to notice the trend towards “manager as coach” beginning to pick up speed about 4 years ago. Now it is clearly a widespread (but still quiet) revolution in the field of leadership.
Why is this happening?
For most of the 20th century, the gold standard of management was control: directing, inspecting, and ensuring that every deliverable met a singular standard of excellence. The ideal manager was the expert problem-solver who could fix anything.
But over the last decade, that model started to crack, exposing the need for a new approach.
McKinsey & Company describes the new era of leadership as one focused on empowerment and capability-building rather than “command and control.” Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends reports that organizations adopting coaching cultures outperform peers on agility, retention, and innovation. Gallup’s global research on engagement tells the same story: employees who experience frequent, coaching-style conversations from their managers show higher performance, satisfaction, and loyalty. Harvard Business Review calls this shift “The Leader as Coach” — describing how today’s best leaders guide and develop rather than direct and redo.
The shift is happening because complexity and need for scale at speed broke the old model.
Modern organizations are flatter, faster, and more dependent on collaboration than ever before. The world no longer rewards leaders or managers for having all the answers — it rewards those who can grow others to find answers of their own.
And for founder-led or smaller companies, this shift isn’t a luxury trend they can seek to implement “one day in the distant future” — it’s a survival strategy. When every resource counts, the difference between “redoing work” and “building capability” can define whether a business scales or stalls.
That brings us to a subtle but costly managerial habit: backstopping.
What “Backstopping” Really Means
In baseball, the backstop is the net behind the catcher — the last line of defense that keeps the ball from flying into the stands.
In leadership, backstopping happens when a manager becomes that safety net — quietly redoing or overhauling a team member’s work to make sure nothing “gets past” them.
It sounds noble. But over time, it teaches the team to rely on the net instead of improving their throw.
Have You Ever Caught Yourself Thinking…
“Ugh, it’ll just be quicker if I do it.”
“I don’t want them to feel bad — I’ll clean it up quietly.”
“This one really matters — I can’t risk it being wrong.”
If so, you’re in good company. Most high-performing leaders feel this reflex — an impulse stemming from conscientiousness and high standards.
But pause for a moment.
- What’s actually happening underneath that decision?
- Are you supporting… or are you subtly backstopping?
When Support Turns Into a Signal
After a few rounds of “quiet fixes,” people learn. They start handing in work that’s just good enough, unconsciously counting on you to make it right. What began as support becomes a signal — that excellence lives only in the boss’s hands.
In organizational terms, backstopping erodes autonomy and psychological safety, two of the strongest predictors of team performance. Research by Amy Edmondson at Harvard shows that teams learn and innovate best when leaders coach openly and respond non-defensively to mistakes.
And meta-analyses on autonomy-supportive leadership confirm that when employees feel trusted to own outcomes, motivation and performance rise measurably.
When the Helper Becomes the Limiter
Every time we redo someone’s work, the unintended message still comes across on some level, “I don’t trust you to get this right.”
The irony is that the very trait that makes conscientious leaders dependable — their commitment to excellence — is also the one that can quietly hold their teams back. Modern leadership research reinforces this: Deloitte and Gallup both find that directive, correction-heavy styles create dependency, while coaching behaviors build engagement and agility.
Breaking the Cycle
What if, instead of correcting, you chose to coach in the open? What if you allowed the imperfect version to go out, followed by a brief debrief:
- What worked?
- What didn’t?
- What would we tweak next time?
Define success so clearly at the start that your role afterward becomes guidance, not rescue. Praise progress publicly and refine privately. Let people feel the pride — and the learning — that comes from true ownership.
For the Direct Report: How to Break the Cycle from Below
What if you’re on the other side of this dynamic — watching your manager redo your work? It’s tempting to give up and let them. But the antidote to backstopping isn’t retreat; it’s ownership.
Try reframing:
- “Before I dive into this next project, can we align on what great looks like to you?”
- “Would it help if we did a midpoint check-in so I can adjust before the final draft?”
And when your work is edited, ask:
- “I’d love to understand what you changed — what can I learn for next time?”
That single question does more than recover feedback; it reclaims your agency. Because backstopping is always a two-person pattern — one born of over-protection, the other of quiet surrender. When either party chooses ownership, the cycle begins to shift.
A Note for the SJ Traditionalists
If you identify with the Traditionalist temperament — valuing duty, reliability, and doing things “the right way” — backstopping can be a particularly deep reflex. It comes from responsibility, not ego. But what feels responsible in the short term — redoing work to ensure quality — can become irresponsible in the long term when it stifles others’ growth.
In the old command-and-control world, fixing others’ work was a virtue. In today’s coaching-driven world, real responsibility means producing results through others, not instead of them. Leaders who master this shift — from control to capability — embody the future of work.
For Founders and Fast-Growth Managers: The Hidden Cost of Backstopping
If you’re leading a startup or a small, high-growth scale up, backstopping isn’t just a bad habit — it’s a growth limiter. Every time you step in to “save” a deliverable, you trade short-term certainty for long-term scalability. You become the constraint.
McKinsey’s leadership studies show top-quartile leaders spend roughly 50% more time on development and delegation than on direct problem solving — and their teams outperform peers by 2× on revenue growth.
So ask:
- How many hours this week did I spend redoing versus developing?
- If my company could scale at the rate of my tolerance for imperfection, how big could it get?
Backstopping may preserve quality in the moment, but it quietly prevents others from ever matching yours. And in a start-up or scale-up, that’s the difference between building a business and becoming its bottleneck.
The Real Work of Leadership
In this framework, our highest calling as leaders isn’t to protect our people from failure, but to equip them to handle it. As the leadership literature keeps confirming — from HBR’s “Leader as Coach” to Deloitte’s human-performance models — leaders who build capability rather than enforce compliance outperform across every measurable dimension.
- Would your workload shrink if you trusted the process as much as the outcome?
- Would your team’s initiative grow if they felt truly responsible for results?
That’s the turning point — when you stop backstopping and start leading.
Adapting the Shift to Different Types
As every leader eventually learns, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to coaching. How you move away from backstopping depends on who you’re developing.
Some people crave independence from the start; others need reassurance that you’re still there in the wings. That variation isn’t random — it stems from each person’s cognitive preferences and temperament.
- SJ Traditionalists thrive on clarity and structure. When you stop backstopping, you must replace control with predictability — clear expectations, defined standards, and visible checkpoints. That helps them feel safe enough to take ownership.
- SP Experiencers learn by doing. Give them space to test, adjust, and iterate. Coaching them means keeping feedback fast, light, and practical — in the moment, not in post-mortem.
- NT Conceptualizers want logic and efficiency. To earn their trust, articulate why you’re shifting your approach and how it will increase their leverage and impact. They respond to autonomy paired with intellectual respect.
- NF Idealists are growth-driven but harmony-sensitive. They’ll respond best to developmental feedback framed as encouragement rather than correction — “Here’s how you can stretch” rather than “Here’s what’s wrong.”
The principle is the same — move from fixing to developing — but the path there depends on the individual. Coaching with the other person’s type in mind is not softer management; it’s smarter calibration to how each person grows best.
Closing Reflection
Delegation isn’t a transfer of tasks — it’s a transfer of trust. And trust can’t grow in a space where someone else is always there to prevent mistakes. So the next time you’re tempted to “just fix it,” pause and ask:
Am I ensuring success for this project… or for this person?
The difference is everything.
References
- “All about teams: A new approach to organizational transformation.” McKinsey & Company. Published October 2024.
- “What it really means to lead more effectively through empowerment.” McKinsey & Company. Published ~2018. (McKinsey & Company)
- “High-performing teams: A timeless leadership topic.” McKinsey & Company.
- “How to be an adaptive leader.” McKinsey & Company. Published September 4, 2022.
(McKinsey & Company) - Edmondson, A. C., “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” MIT study. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
- “How to Build Psychological Safety in the Workplace.” Harvard Business School Online Blog. (Harvard Business School Online)
- “Research: To Excel, Diverse Teams Need Psychological Safety.” Harvard Business Review. March 2022. (Harvard Business Review)
- “The Relationship between Psychological Safety and Management Teams’ Effectiveness.” PMC / NCBI article. (PMC)
- “Empowering employees as change champions: A bottom-up approach.” Gerent Blog. (gerent.com)
- “New leadership for a new era of thriving organizations.” McKinsey & Company. May 4 2023. (McKinsey & Company)
- “Organizational evolution and getting empowerment right.” McKinsey & Company.
One Comment
It’s great to see the focus shifting towards empowering teams through coaching. Building trust and guiding employees rather than just managing them makes a huge difference in both performance and satisfaction. I’m curious, what do you think are the biggest obstacles for organizations when trying to make this shift?