Too Much Coach, Not Enough Boss - Some thoughts for leaders who know how to coach and also need to be boss.

Clara is a trained coach and a team lead. One afternoon, Jonas, one of her teammates, comes in frustrated. A project has stalled due to a senior colleague in another department not responding. Jonas has no standing to pressure this person to respond, yet Clara does.

Clara does what she's trained to do. She listens. She asks open questions. She ‘holds the space’.

Twenty minutes later, Jonas leaves feeling heard — and with no idea what to do next.

Sitting alone, Clara realizes something uncomfortable: she was so busy being a coach that she forgot to be his manager. Jonas didn't need someone to help him explore his experience of the problem. He needed someone with organizational access and decision-making power — which is her — to pick up the phone and unblock it.

She coached the symptom. She managed nothing.

This isn't a story about coaching being wrong. Clara's instinct to listen before fixing, to stay curious before jumping to solutions — that's genuinely valuable and too rare in leadership.

However, it points to something that doesn't get talked about enough: knowing how to coach and knowing when to coach are two different skills. Trained coaches in leadership roles are sometimes more prone to getting this wrong.

The coaching identity runs deep. It's not just a set of tools you pick up and put down. It shapes how you read a room, how you instinctively respond when someone walks in with a problem. The philosopher Robert Kegan’s work suggests that we don't just have identities — we can be had by them. They invisibly shape us.

What would coach-like leadership have looked like for Clara? Something like: "What do you actually need from me right now? I can think with you about this and see what you could address — or I can just make some calls —  or both."

That question stays curious, respects Jonas's autonomy, and names that Clara has leverage and responsibility a coach sitting outside the organization simply doesn't have.

The tension in one sentence: A coach provides space for you to think. A leader sometimes needs to step into that space and act.

Knowing which one the moment is asking for — that's harder and more human than either role alone.

If you recognized something of yourself in Clara's afternoon, Too Much Coach, Not Enough Boss was designed with you in mind — a 90-minute workshop for trained coaches who also lead people. This free workshop will be offered on June 16 from 4:30-6:00pm CET.

You can find more information about the workshop and register here.