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‘ change leadership’ by encouraging vulnerability and helping leaders translate the change’ s purpose to foster commitment. Critically, coaching builds psychological safety necessary for honest dialogue and experimentation, which counteracts the traditional manufacturing aversion to‘ failing fast.’
By supporting middle managers and developing the workforce’ s behavioral flexibility, the ability to learn and adapt, coaching ensures that new technical systems are genuinely adopted and maximized by resilient, creative people.
Do you see any patterns in how manufacturing leaders approach transformation compared with other industries? Yes, manufacturing leaders exhibit distinct patterns, driven by the industry’ s deep-rooted culture of precision and physical assets. This strong emphasis on control and consistency makes it exceptionally challenging to embrace the experimentation approach necessary for innovation.
Consequently, manufacturing leaders often need to be coached to unlearn their core strengths and pivot toward fostering psychological safety and curiosity to empower their workforce and enable true system adoption.
What practical steps can organizations take to embed a coaching culture within their change initiatives? Organizations must train leaders to coach and integrate coaching into the change process itself. This starts by making‘ leader as coach’ training mandatory for all managers, focusing on deep listening and empowering questioning to foster psychological safety.
Crucially, leaders must model this vulnerability from the top. The change effort must then be designed using coaching principles, ensuring teams co-create the
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