Strong people can hide weak systems for a surprisingly long time. When ownership is unclear, they chase things. When a decision has not been made, they move it forward. When a process breaks, they create a workaround. When something falls between roles, they pick it up. The work gets done, so from a distance the operating model can look fine.
It is only later, when the same people start frustrating each other, that we notice the cost. By then it is tempting to label the tension as attitude or communication style, even though the behaviour may have been a rational response to ambiguity all along.
But fixing the system does not mean removing personal responsibility. Leadership requires judgement. If something does not make sense, I want people to say so. If a timeline looks unrealistic, challenge it. If the evidence is weak, ask for better evidence.
You can strongly disagree with a decision without needing to take the decision away from the person who owns it. The person making the decision has to tolerate challenge without treating it as disloyalty. The person challenging has to know when their role changes from influencing the decision to supporting the outcome.
For the person I was coaching, the takeaway was not to become less direct. I did not want to coach the challenge out of them. I wanted the challenge to become more deliberate. Push on the thinking, the evidence, the assumption or the risk. Then get very clear on where the decision lives.
The learning for me was more uncomfortable. I noticed how quickly even experienced leaders can personalise dysfunction. Somebody is frustrated, so we coach their attitude. Somebody is pushing too hard, so we coach their style. Somebody is resisting a decision, so we coach their collaboration. Those explanations are attractive because they give us a person to fix.
But what if the behaviour is partly a consequence of the environment we created?
A badly designed system is not permission to treat colleagues poorly. But it changes the order in which I want to diagnose the problem. Before I ask, “What does this person need to change?”, I want to ask, “What is the environment repeatedly asking this person to compensate for?”
Sometimes the right answer will still be a difficult coaching conversation. But I do not want coaching to become a way of making good people more tolerant of badly designed work.
Adapted from Before You Coach the Person, Inspect the System, originally published on Drift North.
