Value People More than Tasks: Coaching as the Cornerstone of Modern Leadership
2025 promises to be another year of significant challenges for public media, and navigating these challenges hinges on our ability to leverage the full potential of our people. In the past, leaders could succeed if they primarily focused on tasks and achieved short-term goals. But in today’s diverse and dynamic workplaces, this approach isn’t enough. To drive organizational success, leaders must shift their focus to empowering their teams. This requires a fundamental shift in leadership style – a move towards becoming effective coaches.
Janeen Williamson is a seasoned DEIB practitioner, communications expert, former NPR executive, and current management coach who supports leaders to become more effective. She recently talked to Greater Public’s Ellen Guettler about the essential skills and mindsets needed for effective leadership in today’s public media environment. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ellen Guettler: What does it mean to be a growth coach?
Janeen Williamson: When we think of the boss or manager, they are the person who has the power. We traditionally think of someone who’s there to manage and delegate tasks. In today’s world, it’s really important that managers are not task-oriented but people-oriented. That’s where adding coaching to your management style comes into play. Coaching is about inspiring your employees and seeing how their growth is valuable to the bigger picture. It’s about unlocking people’s potential to maximize their own performance. It’s about helping them to learn rather than solving problems for them.
EG: And this hasn’t historically been a core competency of leadership?
JW: When I think about how I was able to rise to a management position in public media, it was because I was really good at being accountable to myself and the tasks that I was responsible for. I was a good doer, self-aware, and great at self-management. I knew how to manage a task or project to successful completion consistently. This was the path to promotion for many of my colleagues in public media, too. What I quickly learned was this did not make me a good people manager. I lacked social awareness and relationship management skills. I was promoted to leading people, but I was horrible at it. I didn’t know how to motivate my team, understand their passions, or connect the dots between how their day-to-day work connected with what was happening outside of their role. It was frustrating for me and my team. It wasn’t until a few years into being a manager, when my organization invested in professional development and manager training that the lightbulb turned on for me.
EG: When you received that training, you noticed a difference?
JW: I could see a difference after having just a couple of sessions on how to build a culture of trust with my team members. During my one-on-one time with them, I started having growth conversations about what they were passionate about and where they wanted to grow, either in the company or just in life in general. I was able to create a space where they felt like I cared not just about the task, but about what was important to them. And they began showing up differently, like stepping forward into a challenge instead of backing away.
This became even more valuable as my team became more diverse. I intentionally worked with my HR team to build a multi-generational, multi-ethnic, gender-diverse team. I quickly learned that the one size fits all leadership approach wouldn’t cut it. Coaching was the thing that strengthened our team. It also was something that made me feel more confident as a manager. I suddenly could see I had polarized thinking – someone was either a bad employee or bad at a task when in reality they needed more support. The problem isn’t that our employees are bad employees; it’s that we as leaders haven’t really understood what they care about or what they uniquely need so that you can pivot with them. Bringing in coaching practices helps to create the space to identify this with each person, which unearths the ability for them to play to their strengths.
Coaching is about inspiring your employees and seeing how their growth is valuable to the bigger picture. It’s about helping them to learn rather than solving problems for them.
EG: You mentioned that coaching is particularly valuable with diverse teams, including generational diversity. Can you elaborate on the different generations in the workplace right now, and evolving expectations from younger generations?
JW: In one newsroom, you could have an employee who’s a lifer and has been in public media for 14 years working alongside someone who is two years into their professional career. Each generation has unique expectations about what they need in the workplace. For example, Baby Boomers would stay with one company, toxic culture or not, for the length of their career. There was the expectation that sticking it out would be rewarded over time with the guarantee of a pension. Now, Millennials and Gen Z are the most diverse population in the workforce. They will not stick it out in a toxic culture, there are no pensions. Instead, what matters to them is being in an environment where people think about their wellbeing. They want people to check in, “Hey are you ok? How are things at home?” The expectation that they feel valued is now table stakes in the workplace. If they don’t find that, within 2-3 years, they’re moving on. You don’t have a long runway to convince someone to stay in the organization. Bringing coaching practices into my work helped me be a more inclusive and equitable manager. I was able to explore what well-being meant to each person, honor their differences. As a coach, you’re curious and compassionate, you see your employee as a complex human being who wants to succeed and wants to be valued and recognized.
Now, that doesn’t mean everyone is going to like the task they’re doing every time. It doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be moments when we have difficult conversations about the work. But it does mean that people are going to feel valued, want to be there, and put in additional effort when challenges arise.
EG: You also called out the myth of the “bad” employee. Can you say more about the link between feeling valued and work performance?
JW: If you think of a time when you didn’t like your manager, it was probably because in some way they devalued you, your ideas, or your work. When you’re working with people who come from different backgrounds, how you manage makes an impact on how they feel valued and how they’re able to succeed. I think about my own experience as a woman of color in spaces that were often predominantly white and predominantly male. I had male bosses who did not ask me why I didn’t speak up in meetings. In fact, I once had a male boss who told me, “I need you to talk more in meetings.” He wasn’t cognizant of the complexities of my lived experience as a Black woman in the industry, which didn’t make speaking up easy for me. If he had asked me why I wasn’t talking in meetings, I would have explained that the last three times I spoke in the meeting, I was talked over, and my ideas were disregarded. At that point, I didn’t feel comfortable or safe speaking up in meetings because I didn’t feel respected or valued.
If he had taken the time to ask why, maybe we could have worked together to find a way to increase my confidence. Or maybe he could have been an executive sponsor for me in those meetings and said, “Janeen, what do you think about this issue? I know we talked about this in our one-on-one, can you share your ideas?” That would have given me support and encouragement to stop shutting down every time I walked into a conference room.
EG: Telling you to speak up wasn’t going to get your best ideas. But being curious about your experience might have.
JW: Exactly. His way of solving my problem was to tell me what to do. Managers are not there to solve every problem. Often, people who are problem-solvers and fixers have been promoted into management roles. But the most impactful managers that I’ve had are the ones who were curious, asked questions, taught me how to fish, which encouraged me to build confidence in my own abilities.
The key is asking questions that identify what the everyday opportunities are for growth. Those questions can be as simple as, “How did you come to that solution?” Or “Tell me about what brought you excitement about that project.” Or even “Help me understand what was challenging for you in that experience.” These are probing prompts not just about the task, but about the employee’s critical thinking, lived experience, and processing skills. Managers need to understand where their employees are coming from. Effective coaching means caring more about the person and their growth than you do about their tasks.
EG: That’s such a key distinction. A manager is not there to delegate tasks, but is there to value the employee, and facilitate connections toward their potential.
JW: That’s right. I think when you’re a manager, you have an opportunity to actually share the power. Just because I am the manager or the boss in the situation doesn’t mean that I can’t learn from you. In previous forms of toxic culture, it was, “Well I am the person in charge.” When you’re an inclusive manager who embraces coaching, you are sharing the power and saying, “I can help you benefit from what you already know.” That’s helping people find autonomy. You are creating bridges between your employees and higher management, up to the executive level, you are bridging the gaps.
Effective coaching means caring more about the person and their growth than you do about their tasks.
EG: Public media is in a time of high stress on the heels of a contentious election season, while most organizations are wrestling rapid and complex changes in the media environment. How does coaching help in times of high stress?
JW: One of the things I learned from our time during the pandemic was that an inclusive manager can go beyond empathy and actually have compassion. Empathy is “I feel your pain, I see that you are struggling,” which is nice, but compassion is saying “I’m here to help you, let’s talk about it and let’s figure it out together.” In fact, I coach my leaders to listen 3 levels deep.
The first level of listening is when you’re just listening to the voice in your head. You’re waiting for your chance to jump in and speak, you’re focused on your own reactions.
The second level is when you’re listening intently to what the person is saying. You’re not distracted by how to solve this, how you can get this person out of your office, whatever it may be. You’re actually listening to understand, you’re listening to hear the person and the story they’re telling.
When you’re an inclusive manager who embraces coaching, you are sharing the power and saying, “I can help you benefit from what you already know.” That’s helping people find autonomy.
What I really focus on with people is listening at the third level, which is listening beyond the words. What’s their body language? What’s not being said? What’s the tone and feel of the message? Are they shifting in their seat? Are they pausing and hesitating? Did their voice go up when they said a person’s name? That act of compassion by listening three levels deep is actually something that can alleviate the stress that someone is experiencing. It builds trust and credibility with your team and is going to make them actually excel at their job. They’re going to want to be there.
EG: And, as you said, being valued can boost performance.
JW: Especially for people of color or people in marginalized communities who haven’t had that safe space at work. When a manager steps up and provides compassion, they can really excel. While it seems simple, it actually takes a lot of practice to get to that level of listening deeply. You have to make sure you are not going into conversations with all of your stress and baggage hanging over you; that you’re not coaching from a place of frustration. This means thinking about your own personal care so you can go into a one-on-one with an employee and totally be focused on them. When you do, it really can change the dynamic of the relationship with the direct report. In fact, it can change the dynamic of the culture.
Janeen Williamson works with her team, Media Bridge Partners, to help nonprofits and media organizations take culture change and transformation to the next level. They’ve worked to infuse belonging and inclusion practices into strategic planning, staff retreats, and executive and management coaching. They look forward to helping even more organizations bring more belonging and inclusion into their work cultures in 2025.
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