I used to think the best managers were great coaches.

Now I think the best managers are great systems architects.

Most “coaching” at work is vibes. A few call recordings. A polite comment on a doc. A calendar slot where both people are exhausted. It feels supportive. It does not scale. And it rarely changes the actual work.

Meanwhile, the work itself — emails, redlines, specs, demos, forecasts — can be observed, scored, and improved in real time. Not by a heroic manager with infinite context, but by a stack of small tools wired to the actual artifacts. Experience and coaching are not disappearing. They are getting embedded.

Managers do not go away. They change jobs. They stop being advice givers and become architects of the system that makes everyone better every day.

Coaching, the old way (and why it breaks)

My old playbook looked like this: listen to a sales call, skim a contract, nudge a PM on clarity, remind someone to use the playbook, rinse, repeat. Half the time I was late. The other half I was biased by recency or loudness. The “coaching” was episodic and personality driven. It worked, one person at a time, when I happened to catch something.

Then we wired coaching into the workflow. Every outbound email got a tone and clarity pass before sending. Every standard NDA redline got a first draft suggestion plus links to the rationale. Every product spec was checked against our template before PRD review. Every forecast line item reconciled to contract reality, not rep optimism. Suddenly I had fewer “teaching moments” in one on ones because the system did the teaching at the moment of work.

What managers stop doing

• Drive by feedback

• Memory based evaluation

• Reinventing onboarding

What managers start doing

• Define the standard with templates and examples

• Wire the checks into the workflow

• Measure the delta (cycle time, error rate, rework)

• Update the rails when the pattern changes

A Coaching OS for Legal and Ops

Think of coaches as circuits. Tiny, focused checks that fire at the right moment.

• Intake triage: auto route, auto reply, six bullet summary

• Clause finder with rationale: suggested redlines with precedent

• Contract summary: push SKU, term, price, renewal flag, and ramps into CRM and billing

• Spec linting: checklists for scope, risks, and metrics

• Forecast guardrails: math tied to contract stage, not rep confidence

• Post close hygiene: reconcile provisioning with entitlements

None of this replaces judgment. It saves judgment for the 10 to 20 percent that matter.

Is this micromanagement with robots?

Only if you design it that way. Good systems suggest by default and require only when risk appears. They leave lanes for human review. They log everything. The goal is not obedience. The goal is to make good work inevitable.

Metrics that prove it works

• Coaching coverage: percent of artifacts that get suggestions

• Coaching latency: time to first suggestion

• Rework rate

• Standardization percent

• Time to yes

• Exception rate and cost

If your dashboard does not include these, you are still managing by charisma.

A manager’s 30, 60, 90

Days 0 to 30: Put rails where the work happens. Pilot three workflows. Log everything. Publish weekly coaching deltas.
Days 31 to 60: Wire to truth. Sync contracts to CRM to billing. Define off limits, copilot, and autopilot lanes. Hold weekly “show the mess” sessions.
Days 61 to 90: Promote two workflows to default. Delete one manual step. Tie a leader’s KPI to contract health.

If you cannot delete a step, your system is theater.

What changes for leaders

You will spend less time saying “try harder” and more time editing guardrails. The job becomes designing the schema, deciding the lanes, publishing the diffs, and protecting the truth. Because the system coaches every artifact, your one on ones shift from “did you see my doc” to “what did we learn.”

The uncomfortable truth

High performers do not need more pep talks. They need frictionless feedback at the moment of work, plus a manager who spends their energy on the system instead of the sermon.

AI will not take your job. It will take your excuses.

If you lead a team, build the coaching system that makes great work the default. If you are on a team, ask for the rails and contribute examples that make them better.

Start with one artifact this week. Ship a tiny check. Measure the delta. Not perfect. Real.

Because your manager will not coach you. The system will. And you are in charge of the system.