When I think about what the title manager connotes, to me it’s the idea of someone that is telling you what to do, that’s inspecting your work. It’s basically just managing your time and making sure that you are a productive cog on behalf of the company. It espouses to me, at least, a bit more of a transactional sense.

Then when I think about relationship, the idea that you should care deeply about the lives of your reports, that your role is servant, servant leadership. You are here to serve them, and to serve them not just transactionally in terms of hey, what are your road blocks in terms of releasing these company deliverables, but rather serve them holistically in terms of what are your life goals, what do you care about, what do you actually want to achieve, and really helping them to attain those things. That, to me, is much broader than what manager connotes.

And so we felt like coach was a better word in terms of at least what we could come up with to help break people out of that mindset of management and help emphasize the more holistic set of responsibilities we felt they should have as a leader.

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