On coaching, being coached, and the skill nobody thinks they need to practice
Dr. Allen Partridge | Director, Digital Learning Product Evangelism, Adobe
When I was twelve, I was absolutely certain I understood basketball. Not in the way a twelve-year-old understands basketball — tentatively, coachably, with room for correction — but in the way a kid with a fast processor and a sparkling dash of hyperactivity understands everything. Which is to say: instantly, superficially, and with total confidence.
My coaches didn’t stand a chance.
I’d grasp a concept before they finished explaining it. I’d be three steps ahead in my head while my feet were still learning step one. If you’ve seen the 1986 film Short Circuit, you know the robot: eyes wide, circuits firing, desperate for the next thing. Input. Input. Input. That was me on the court. That was me in the classroom. That, if I’m being honest, is still me in a meeting at 8:47 on a Tuesday morning.
That was me on the court. That was me in the classroom. That, if I'm being honest, is still me in a meeting at 8:47 on a Tuesday morning.
I’d love to tell you everything has changed since then. That maturity and a PhD and thirty years of professional experience have smoothed the edges. But as I’ve moved from being the person getting coached to the person responsible for coaching, mentoring, and leading a team of brilliant, creative, fiercely capable adults — I’ve discovered something uncomfortable.
The skill I was worst at as a boy is the skill I need most as a leader. Listening.
The Skill Nobody Teaches (and Everyone Assumes They Have)
Here’s what the research says, and it’s humbling. The Center for Creative Leadership found that employees’ perception of being listened to doubles — not improves slightly, doubles — when their leader listens and then takes action, compared to leaders who hear people out but do nothing (Bergeron, Rochford & Cooper, 2023). Active listening underpins 78% of successful coaching relationships, and teams with leaders who practice it are 40% more likely to stay engaged and report higher job satisfaction (Zenger & Folkman, The Extraordinary Leader).
And yet. Almost nobody trains for it. We train for presenting, for managing, for strategic thinking. We send people to leadership programs where they learn frameworks and models and acronyms. Listening? That’s the thing we assume we’re already good at. It’s the water we’re swimming in. Invisible precisely because it’s everywhere.
Listening? That's the thing we assume we're already good at. It's the water we're swimming in. Invisible precisely because it's everywhere.
The International Coaching Federation built their entire competency framework around this insight. Active listening is one of eleven core coaching competencies, nested inside a cluster they call “Communicating Effectively” — alongside powerful questioning and direct communication (ICF Competency Framework, 2019). Notice what comes first. Not the talking. The listening.
Why It’s Harder with High Performers
Here’s where it gets personal. My team — the evangelists I lead at Adobe — are not people who need to be told what to do. They’re experts. They’re creative. They’re successful. They have strong opinions backed by deep experience. Coaching them isn’t like coaching that twelve-year-old on the basketball court. It’s more like trying to conduct a jazz ensemble where every musician is already brilliant and already has ideas about where the song should go.
It's more like trying to conduct a jazz ensemble where every musician is already brilliant and already has ideas about where the song should go.
R. Keith Sawyer, the Morgan Distinguished Professor in Educational Innovations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found something fascinating about this dynamic. In his book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (2017, rev. ed.), Sawyer demonstrates that the most powerful creative flow experiences don’t happen in isolation — they emerge from collaboration. But group flow has a precondition that most leaders overlook: it requires that everyone plays an equal role in the collective performance. It can be blocked when the dynamics are off — not because talent is lacking, but because the relational infrastructure isn’t there.
With a team of high performers, talent is never the bottleneck. The bottleneck is connection. And connection is built through listening.
A study of sixteen agile coaches at Spotify reached a similar conclusion. Researcher Gisela Bäcklander found that the most effective coaches practiced what she termed “enabling leadership” — increasing context-sensitivity in others, surfacing conflict early, and facilitating constructive dialogue. What they valued most was being present, observing and reacting in the moment (Bäcklander, 2019, Creativity and Innovation Management).
That’s the antithesis of my twelve-year-old brain. The one that’s still in there, flipping channels.
Listening Is the Operating System
I used to think of listening as a soft skill — important but peripheral, like good manners or a firm handshake. I don’t think that anymore. I think listening is the operating system on which every other leadership capability runs.
Emotional intelligence? Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss, reviewing twenty-five years of research through the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, found substantial evidence that EI drives a wide range of leadership outcomes — from team performance to employee well-being (Goleman & Cherniss, 2024, Leader to Leader). But EI isn’t abstract. It becomes operational through specific behaviors, and the most fundamental of those behaviors is paying attention to what other people are actually saying and feeling. A comprehensive review in Human Resource Development Review found that leader emotional intelligence positively associates with problem-solving, ethical judgment, innovation capacity, conflict management, and knowledge sharing (Gerhardt, Bauwens & van Woerkom, 2025). Every one of those capabilities starts with accurate perception. Accurate perception starts with listening.
Creative problem solving? You can’t solve a problem you haven’t fully heard. Integrity through logic? Logic requires premises, and premises come from understanding — not assuming. Ethical accountability? You can’t hold yourself accountable to standards you haven’t bothered to understand from the perspectives of those affected.
It all flows through the same channel. And that channel is the willingness to shut up and pay attention.
The Part Nobody Talks About: Listening to Machines
Here’s where my story takes an unexpected turn.
This past weekend, I was deep in a coding session — working on a 3D project with spring bone physics. Something was wrong. Performance was degrading badly, but I couldn’t see why. Thousands of processor cycles were being consumed by something invisible.
Now, the old me — the twelve-year-old basketball player, the one who knows before he knows — would have charged ahead. Would have assumed the problem was in the obvious place. Would have started rewriting code based on instinct and confidence.
Instead, I asked. I described the symptoms to my AI collaborators. I listened to their questions. I answered with specifics rather than assumptions. They probed further. I provided logs, context, details I might have dismissed as irrelevant. And cooperatively — through a back-and-forth that looked remarkably like a good coaching conversation — we uncovered a leak in the spring bone system that was causing thousands of wasted calls. Not where I would have looked. Not what I would have guessed.
This wasn’t a one-time thing. It’s a pattern I’ve noticed consistently: the same listening skills that make coaching conversations productive make AI collaboration productive. Ask clearly. Listen to what comes back. Resist the urge to override. Provide context instead of conclusions. Follow the thread.
And I've noticed the inverse, too. The people who struggle most with AI tools — the ones who complain that the technology "doesn't work" or "doesn't understand" — often exhibit the same patterns in human conversation. They speak at, not with. They provide instructions instead of context. They interrupt the process before it can develop. The input-input-input brain, refusing to pause for output.
This isn’t a coincidence. Listening is listening. The medium changes. The skill doesn’t.
Coaching Is Learning to Be Coached
There’s an irony I don’t take for granted. The product my team and I spend our days evangelizing — Adobe Learning Manager — is built on the same principle I’ve spent a lifetime struggling to embody personally. Its AI doesn’t push a standard curriculum at every learner and hope for the best. It observes behavior, infers context, and recommends what’s actually relevant to where someone is right now. It’s active listening at organizational scale — the platform equivalent of a coach who pays attention before prescribing.
I find that poetic. And motivating. Especially on the days when my own listening muscles are tired.
Because here’s what I’ve learned, standing on this side of the coaching relationship: the best thing I can do for my team isn’t to be brilliant. It isn’t to have the answer before they finish the question. It isn’t to be three steps ahead.
The best thing I can do is model what it looks like to be coachable.
To ask instead of assume. To pause instead of pounce. To treat every conversation — with a colleague, with a collaborator, with a machine — as an opportunity to understand something I didn’t understand before.
That twelve-year-old on the basketball court thought he knew everything. He was wrong about almost all of it. But he was right about one thing: input matters. He just had the direction backwards.
The real input isn’t what’s racing through your head. It’s what someone else is trying to tell you, if you’d only stop long enough to hear it.
*A few months ago, I wrote about the personal side of this struggle — the interrupt cycle, the neuro-spicy brain, the ongoing work of getting out of my own way. If this piece resonated, that one might too. *https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/its-me-im-problem-allen-partridge-njcoc
I lead the Digital Learning Product Evangelism team at Adobe, where we work at the intersection of AI, learning science, and human-centered design. I’m always interested in how other leaders are navigating the challenge of coaching high-performing creative teams. Let’s talk.
References
Bäcklander, G. (2019). Doing complexity leadership theory: How agile coaches at Spotify practise enabling leadership. Creativity and Innovation Management, 28(1), 42–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/caim.12303
Bergeron, D. M., Rochford, K., & Cooper, M. (2023). Actions speak louder than (listening to) words: The role of leader action in encouraging employee voice. Center for Creative Leadership Research Insights. https://cclinnovation.org/actionsspeaklouderthanwords/
Gerhardt, K., Bauwens, R., & van Woerkom, M. (2025). Emotional intelligence and leader outcomes: A comprehensive review and roadmap for future inquiry. Human Resource Development Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/15344843251342689
Goleman, D. & Cherniss, C. (2024). Optimal leadership and emotional intelligence. Leader to Leader, 2024(113), 7–12. https://doi.org/10.1002/ltl.20813
International Coaching Federation. (2019). Updated ICF Core Competency Model. https://coachingfederation.org/core-competencies
Sawyer, R. K. (2017). Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration (rev. ed.). Basic Books.
Zenger, J. & Folkman, J. The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers Into Great Leaders (2nd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
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