Managers have many hats to wear. Supervisor, coach, instructor, mediator, advisor, and more. I see these interpersonal management activities as having meaningful – though often nuanced – differences. By understanding and applying these roles appropriately, managers can foster a work environment that promotes team satisfaction, increases productivity, and drives organizational success. However, the power of these distinct roles is often diluted as we tend to use many of these terms interchangeably.
To help explore these nuanced differences so that we can show up wearing the right hat, I have developed a classification model that I call the 'Managerial Interactions Matrix' (great branding, Jake, just rolls off the tongue…), to explore these roles against four variables:
Directiveness (Prescriptive vs. Exploratory) (Y-Axis)
Time/Issue Orientation (Problems Today vs. Future Possibilities) (X-Axis)
Number of participants typically involved (Size)
Formality of the activity (Color)
The Matrix below provides a visual representation of these activities. The exact degrees of differences are purely illustrative, as the activities are placed such that they are ordinally relative to one another based on how I am defining each activity (noted below):
Activity Definitions:
Supervising: Supervising involves overseeing and directing the day-to-day activities of employees or a team. Supervisors provide instructions, ensure tasks are completed on time and to standard, monitor performance, and provide feedback and guidance for improvement.
Counseling: This involves helping employees deal with personal or professional challenges that may be impacting their performance or well-being at work. Counseling focuses on understanding the employee's situation and providing guidance, emotional support, and possible remedies.
Arbitrating: In the context of management, arbitrating involves stepping in to resolve conflicts or disagreements among team members or between different parties. An arbitrator impartially examines the facts, hears out all parties involved, and then makes a final decision. It involves balancing fairness with the need for decisive action.
Mediating: Mediating involves facilitating discussions between two or more parties in conflict to help them reach a mutual resolution. Mediators don't make decisions, but rather guide the parties towards understanding each other's perspectives and finding their own solutions. Mediation is often as much about helping parties to build a better ongoing relationship as it is helping them find agreement on a specific issue.
Training/Instructing: Training in a managerial context involves imparting specific knowledge or skills to employees to enhance their performance. This could be related to a new software, procedure, policy, or soft skills like communication, management, and teamwork.
Teaching: Teaching goes beyond training to include imparting broader knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. It often involves not just disseminating information coherently, but also inspiring and stimulating curiosity beyond what’s on the agenda. Teaching often involves training and instruction, but goes further. Teaching involves more learner-directedness (and autonomy) and greater flexibility to deviate from pre-designed formal outcomes.
Consulting: Consulting involves providing expert advice and recommendations based on a deep understanding of the situation and relevant experience or expertise. Consultants analyze problems, develop solutions, and advise on implementation.
Advising: Advising is similar to consulting, but tends to be more ongoing and relationship-based. Advisors provide guidance based on their expertise and understanding of the individual or team they're advising, often helping them navigate complex or uncertain situations. Another possible distinction is that consulting is typically content-centric while advising is often more person-centric.
Facilitating: Facilitating involves coordinating and guiding group processes to ensure effective collaboration and decision-making. Facilitators help groups achieve their goals by managing dynamics, ensuring everyone's voices are heard, and keeping the group on task. A facilitator may have influence over the results of the group processes (e.g. a deciding vote) or may act purely as a vehicle for the group’s performance, entirely independent of the outcomes and choices.
Mentoring: Mentoring is a relationship-based activity where a more experienced individual (the mentor) provides guidance, advice, and support to a less experienced individual (the mentee). The typical mentoring relationship is commensalistic with the main goal of fostering the mentee's personal and professional growth. However in practice, mentoring can also involve some reciprocal guidance and knowledge sharing where mentees offer advice and support to mentors in some fashion.
Coaching: Coaching involves aiding individuals or teams in unlocking performance and potential. Coaches engage in empathetic listening, ask probing questions to challenge assumptions and unlock new ways of thinking, and help the coachee chart their own path forward. Unlike mentoring, coaching rarely involves offering outright advice and solutions. Instead, coaches focus on equipping the coachee to answer their own questions.
Different management circumstances call for different behaviors. There is no perfect mix of activities for a manager and some managers may never need to play certain roles. By grasping these differences, managers can deliberately slip on different “hats” and better serve their team members.