Don’t Just Coach Your Employees—Teach Them

Don’t Just Coach Your Employees—Teach Them

8 minutes, 38 seconds Read
May 28, 2025

Sydney Finkelstein, a professor of management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, encourages leaders to approach their direct reports like teachers. As Finkelstein explains, being a teacher-leader means continually meeting face to face with employees to communicate lessons about professionalism, points of craft, and life. He says it’s easy to try and that teaching is one of the best ways to motivate people and improve their performance. Finkelstein is the author of “The Best Leaders Are Great Teachers” in the January–February 2018 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Key episode topics include:  leadership, mentoring, motivating people, developing employees, coaching, careers, managing people, performance management

  • Listen to the original HBR IdeaCast episode: Why Leaders Should Make a Habit of Teaching
  • Find more episodes of HBR IdeaCast.
  • Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at HBR.org.

Read More

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *