When someone’s behavior becomes a problem, the first instinct is usually to explain it.
Someone is not delegating. Someone avoids difficult conversations. Someone gets defensive when challenged. Someone keeps pushing back on decisions.
Those are presenting problems. They are what you can see. What you cannot see yet is why.
The mistake is moving straight from what you observe to why it is happening without doing the work in between. Almost immediately, explanations appear. They are afraid of failure. They need control. They lack confidence. They are protecting their identity.
Sometimes those explanations are correct. The problem is that we usually do not know that yet, and we act as if we do.
The Trap I Fell Into
Years ago, I fell into a trap that many managers discover after learning a little coaching. I started trying to coach everyone. In my mind, I was helping people understand themselves better. In reality, some of them wanted coaching and some of them absolutely did not. I eventually noticed the eye rolls.
I had a manager who worked for me who was not following up with his employees. These employees would come to me and say they had spoken to their manager twice and had not heard anything back. At first I just noticed it. Soon a pattern emerged. When people went to him with issues he was not closing the loop.
So I started coaching him on it. We talked about how important closing the loop was, how to do it, and why it mattered. He paid attention, but most of the conversation was one way. He did not want coaching, but he knew he had to listen because I was the boss. Since it was mostly one way I went into the problem with the intention of changing his behavior instead of trying to understand it.
What I was missing was that I had started explaining before I had gathered enough information. The explanation came first. The coaching followed the explanation. That meant the coaching was aimed at the wrong target from the beginning.
The Same Behavior, Different Reasons
My assumption was that he did not know how to close the loop correctly. When we talked about it he gave vague answers, “I thought they knew”, or “I thought I did get back with them”. Those answers did not add up, but I kept coaching toward my explanation anyway.
Eventually I stopped trying to change the behavior and started asking about it. What I found out changed the whole conversation.
In his previous role he had been burned repeatedly by employees who did not like what he was telling them. They would go to his boss, and his boss would always side with the employees. So he learned to ignore them. Let them go to the boss. Wait to be told what to do.
He was not failing to close the loop because he did not know how. He was doing it deliberately because in his last environment it had protected him.
The presenting problem was the same. The reason behind it was completely different from what I had assumed.
The coaching had started before the real problem was on the table. That is the trap. When we coach toward an explanation we have not verified, we are not solving the problem. We are managing our assumption about what the problem is. The real coaching could not begin until I stopped telling him what to do and started finding out why he was doing it.
Understanding the reason did not excuse the behavior. He still needed to close the loop. But now we were solving the right problem.
The Takeaway
The presenting problem is what you can see. The reason behind it is what you need to find out. Those are not the same thing, and assuming they are is where the coaching goes wrong.
Before you explain the behavior, ask about it. Why have you not delegated this? What happens when you try? What is getting in the way? Have you already attempted that? Those questions are not sophisticated. They are useful because they force you to separate what you observe from what you assume.
The explanation may eventually be correct. The mistake is believing you already know what it is before the person tells you.