SkarpChapter 1 of 3
Coach, Teach, Direct, or Unblock? Choosing the Right Manager Response
Decide whether a team member needs a question-led coaching conversation, direct instruction, additional context, or removal of an organisational obstacle.
1. Diagnose the Situation, Not the Person
Diagnose before responding
A stuck engineer may have a capability gap, a context gap, an urgent delivery constraint, or an organisational obstacle. The same visible behaviour can have different causes.
Four response modes
Coach builds judgment. Teach transfers know-how. Direct creates immediate alignment. Unblock changes conditions outside the engineer's reasonable control.
Management is part of the system
In Sweden, systematic work-environment management includes organisational and social conditions in daily operations. Repeated confusion or overload is a signal to inspect the work system.
2. Notice the Ambiguous Signal
The visible problem
Nora has not started a database migration and says she is still comparing approaches. Her manager could mistake indecision for a lack of confidence or judgment.
Evidence changes the diagnosis
The team lacks an acceptable-downtime decision, security review availability, and access to production-like test data. These are context and dependency problems.
Avoid individualising a system failure
Question-led coaching alone would not create authority, reviewer capacity, or test access. It would make Nora carry a problem the organisation owns.
3. Use the Four-Route Decision
Coach
Coach when context, authority, and baseline skill are present. Use questions to expose options, evidence, assumptions, and trade-offs rather than supplying the answer.
Teach and direct
Teach a missing technique or domain model through a concrete example. Direct when an incident, compliance concern, or irreversible deadline requires immediate alignment.
Unblock
Unblock when priorities conflict, authority is missing, dependencies stall, or resources do not match demands. Begin with the constraint that most limits safe progress.
4. Run a 90-Second Diagnostic
Pause before giving advice
In your next one-to-one, ask these questions before selecting a response:
- "What outcome are you trying to achieve, and what is currently unclear?"
- "Which option would you choose if you had to decide today?"
- "What knowledge, access, approval, or authority is missing?"
- "What happens if we wait one day?"
- "Is this difficulty unique to you, or likely to affect others?"
Interpret the answers
A reasoned option suggests coaching may work. Inability to name a method suggests teaching. A shrinking safe window suggests direction. A missing approval, conflicting priority, or recurring dependency suggests unblocking.
Do not turn this into an interrogation. Share your tentative diagnosis: "I hear a dependency problem more than a design-skill problem. Is that accurate?"
5. Apply the Diagnosis to Nora
Remove the real constraints
Elias obtains the downtime decision, a security-review delegate, and sandbox access. He resolves constraints that Nora cannot independently remove.
Set a safe boundary
He directs a reversible migration approach and prohibits a destructive schema change that week. Direction is narrow, explicit, and proportionate to production risk.
Return judgment to the engineer
After teaching the team's rollback practice, Elias asks Nora to propose rollout signals and a rollback threshold. The engineer now has conditions in which judgment can develop.
6. Escalate Patterns, Then Follow Up
Practice versus requirement
Mentoring, small pull requests, and decision logs are sound practices, not legal prescriptions. Do not use coaching as a substitute for resolving known organisational risks.
Current Swedish provisions
AFS 2023:2 has applied since January 1, 2025 and replaced AFS 2015:4. It addresses demands, resources, role clarity, methods, and priority clarity.
Close the loop
When a blocker recurs, involve affected people through established processes, act on the cause, and check outcomes such as stalled reviews, priority clarity, and release safety.
7. Review the Response Modes
Flip the cards and identify the constraint each response is designed to address.
- Coach
- Use questions to develop judgment when the engineer has enough context, authority, and baseline capability.
- Teach
- Transfer a missing method, technical skill, domain model, or team practice.
- Direct
- Make an explicit decision when time, safety, incident response, or compliance risk requires it.
- Unblock
- Remove a dependency, authority gap, access problem, conflicting priority, or resource mismatch.
8. Choose the First Response
Select the response that addresses the primary constraint first.
A developer can explain two sound implementation options, but cannot proceed because two product leaders have assigned contradictory priorities. What should the manager do first?
- Unblock by resolving the priority conflict and making decision ownership explicit.
- Coach by asking the developer to rank the options again.
- Teach the developer a more detailed prioritisation framework.
Show Answer
Answer: A) Unblock by resolving the priority conflict and making decision ownership explicit.
The developer already demonstrates reasoning capability. The binding constraint is an organisational conflict outside the developer's authority. Resolve it first; coaching or teaching may be useful later, but neither creates an authoritative priority.
Key Terms
- Direction
- A manager makes and communicates a decision, including its boundary, owner, rationale, and review point.
- Context gap
- Missing information about goals, constraints, stakeholders, system history, or decision criteria.
- Capability gap
- A missing ability to perform or reason through a task with an appropriate level of independence.
- Unhealthy workload
- A sustained imbalance in which work demands exceed available resources and recovery is insufficient.
- Organisational obstacle
- A constraint created by priorities, authority, access, dependencies, resourcing, or operating processes rather than individual effort.