The same coaching works on one supervisor and not another because you are seeing the same behaviour driven by different reasons, and the reason is the thing you have to coach. Two people can take work back off their crew in exactly the same way, on the same shift, and need opposite conversations. Give them both the same instruction and you will fix one, offend the other, and conclude the second one is not coachable.
Twenty seven years in packaging and manufacturing operations taught me this the slow way. I had a standard talk I gave people. It worked often enough that I kept using it, and I never counted the ones it did not work on.
Why does identical behaviour need different coaching?
Because behaviour is the symptom and you are trying to treat the cause.
Think about a supervisor who checks every piece of work personally. That is one behaviour with at least four honest explanations. He is impatient and it is quicker. He has a high standard and genuinely does not trust the process yet. He does not want to put pressure on anyone by asking. Or nobody ever told him it was not his job any more.
Four causes, one behaviour. A single piece of advice cannot address four causes, so whatever you say will land squarely for some people and glance off everyone else. The frustrating part is that it works often enough to feel like a good technique.
How do you tell which reason you are looking at?
You ask about the moment rather than the pattern.
"Why do you check them all" invites a justification, and you will get a reasonable one. "Walk me through this morning, what happened right before you decided to check that job" gets you the actual trigger. People are usually honest and often surprised by their own answer, because most of this is habit rather than decision.
Listen for what they were avoiding. Being slow. Being wrong. Being a burden. Being caught not knowing. The thing they are steering away from tells you what to coach.
What do the common patterns look like on a floor?
These are the four I have run into most, with what actually moves each one.
| What is driving it | What it looks like on shift | What lands | What does not land |
|---|---|---|---|
| Impatience, wants it done now | Takes the job back the moment the crew is behind | Frame it as a bottleneck. He is the constraint and he will not like that | Telling him to be patient |
| A high standard nobody else meets | Re-checks finished work, redoes small things quietly | Get the standard written down and checkable so it lives in the process | Telling him to trust people more |
| Not wanting to burden anyone | Absorbs extra work without mentioning it, covers for people | Give explicit permission, and be clear that handing work over is not dumping | Praising him for being a team player |
| Never told the job changed | Still doing the old role plus the new title | Say it plainly and take the old work off him formally | Hinting, or assuming it is obvious |
Read the right-hand column carefully. Every one of those is a sensible thing to say, and every one of them makes the wrong person dig in.
Is this just personality, and can you do anything about it?
It is not personality in the sense of something fixed that you have to work around. It is a pattern in how somebody communicates and responds under pressure, and patterns can be recognised and worked with.
That is the reason I use DISC in this exact situation. Not to label anyone and never to decide who gets a job, but because it gives two people a shared, unemotional language for a conversation that is otherwise very easy to take personally. Telling someone they are difficult to give work to goes badly. Talking about how each of you naturally responds when the pressure comes on goes somewhere useful.
You can't intentionally change a behavior you don't recognize. That is the whole value of it, and it applies to the person doing the coaching just as much as the person being coached. There is more on how it works on the DISC page.
What does this change about how you coach?
Three things, and none of them take extra time.
- Ask before you advise. One question about the specific moment, before you say anything about the pattern. It costs a minute and it tells you which conversation to have.
- Say the same thing four different ways over time. If a message matters, it needs to reach four kinds of people. Repeating it identically only ever reaches the people it already reached.
- Notice who your coaching never works on. That group is not the problem. It is the group your default approach was never built for, and it is where nearly all of your remaining upside sits.
Where leaders get this wrong
They assume the people who respond to them are the normal ones.
If your natural style is direct and fast, the direct and fast people on your team will look like the good ones. They understand you immediately, they need less from you, and they will get more of your attention as a result. The careful person and the quiet person are not less capable. They are further from your default, and they are getting a worse version of you.
That is uncomfortable to sit with and it is the most useful thing in this piece. The supervisors you find easy are not necessarily your best supervisors. They are the ones who happen to speak your language.
Common questions
Is this just an excuse for people who will not change? No, and it should not become one. Everyone is still accountable for the behaviour. The point is only that the route to changing it differs, and picking the wrong route wastes months and burns goodwill.
Do I need to know somebody's style before I can coach them? It helps and it is not required. Asking what they were avoiding in the moment gets you most of the way there without any framework at all.
What if I coach the reason and the behaviour still does not change? Then you are probably looking at a capacity problem rather than a willingness one. Check what else they are carrying before you conclude anything about the person.
Does this apply above the supervisor level? More so, because the higher up you go the more people quietly adapt to your style rather than telling you it is not working for them.
If you are getting different results from the same coaching and cannot work out why, that is exactly the kind of thing worth an outside read. See Executive & Performance Coaching or book a free consultation.
- leadership
- communication
- disc
- supervisors