Walking Into The Transparent Barrier

During the fifteen seconds it takes for the spreadsheet to collapse and the video software to initialize, you see your own reflection in the obsidian void of the monitor and realize you look exactly like someone who just walked full-tilt into a glass door. It is a specific kind of facial expression: stunned, vaguely humiliated, and nursing a phantom pain where you thought there was a clear path. I know this look because I wore it yesterday after literally walking into a glass door at the local post office, an event that left me questioning both my depth perception and the architectural choices of the late nineties. In the corporate world, that glass door is the ‘Development Conversation.’ It is transparent, it is touted as progress, and it hits you in the face when you are moving too fast to realize it’s a barrier.

The Managerial Pincer Movement

Close the budget. It has 455 rows of conflicting data. Open the ‘Coaching Template.’ It has five empty boxes labeled ‘Aspirations,’ ‘Barriers,’ and ‘Next Steps.’ You have exactly twenty-five minutes before your next meeting with the regional VP, who does not care about your team’s aspirations but cares deeply about the 55 percent decline in shipping speed. This is the modern managerial pincer movement. On one side, you are squeezed by the quantifiable, cold metrics of production. On the other, you are expected to perform the delicate, qualitative art of coaching-a skill that requires the stillness of a monk and the patience of a saint, neither of which are provided in the company’s 15-page leadership handbook.

We have spent the last decade telling burned-out managers that the solution to their team’s disengagement is for the manager to become a better listener. We call it ‘servant leadership’ or ‘coach-like management.’ But for the person on the ground, it often feels like being asked to perform open-heart surgery while also being responsible for the hospital’s plumbing and the quarterly cafeteria budget. It is a secondary, unpaid emotional labor assignment stapled onto a job that was already 125 percent over capacity. When coaching is treated as a communication upgrade rather than a serious discipline, it doesn’t solve burnout; it accelerates it. It turns empathy into a KPI, and nothing kills genuine human connection faster than measuring it with a stopwatch.

Emulsion Stability: Forcing vs. Environment

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You can’t just force two things together because you want them to mix. You have to change the environment so they want to stay together.

– Astrid T.-M., Sunscreen Formulator

Astrid T.-M., a sunscreen formulator I know who spends her days balancing the volatile chemistry of UV filters, once explained to me the concept of ’emulsion stability.’ She deals with things like 15-micron particles of zinc oxide. If you add a high-potency active ingredient to a base that hasn’t been properly prepared, the whole mixture separates. The oil floats, the water sinks, and the product is useless. Management is currently trying to force ‘Coaching’ (the active ingredient) into ‘Extreme Overwork’ (the unstable base). Naturally, the emulsion is breaking. The managers are separating from their own humanity just to survive the day.

Treating Coaching as a Technical Craft

This is why I’ve come to believe that if we are serious about the coaching revolution, we have to stop treating it as a soft skill and start treating it as a technical practice that requires its own dedicated space and time. It is not something you do in the margins of a spreadsheet. It is a craft that requires a specific neurological state-one that cannot be accessed when you are in ‘fight or flight’ mode over a missed deadline. To do it well, you need more than just a template; you need a systemic shift in how the organization values your time.

You might find that true transformation only happens when you step away from the automated ‘leadership’ scripts and engage with a methodology that honors the complexity of the human mind, such as the professional training found at

Empowermind.dk, where coaching is treated as a rigorous discipline rather than a corporate afterthought.

The Guilt and the Siphoning

There is a peculiar guilt that comes with being a manager who is too tired to care. You feel like a failure as a human being because you find yourself annoyed that a teammate needs your help. You think, ‘Can’t they just do their job so I can do mine?’ This guilt is a liar. It’s not that you lack empathy; it’s that your ’empathy tank’ has been siphoned off to fuel the relentless machinery of the 45-hour work week. You are trying to offer a ‘premium’ human experience on a ‘budget’ emotional infrastructure.

Blaming the Zinc Oxide, Ignoring the System

Astrid T.-M. recently told me that when a sunscreen formula fails, they don’t blame the zinc oxide. They look at the emulsifier. They look at the temperature at which the ingredients were combined. They look at the system. In the workplace, we are constantly blaming the ‘ingredients’-the ‘uninspired’ employees or the ‘burnt-out’ managers-while ignoring the fact that the system is running at a temperature that makes stability impossible. If we want managers to be coaches, we have to stop giving them 155 new tasks every week and then wondering why they aren’t ‘holding space’ for their teams. Space cannot be held if it is already occupied by 255 open browser tabs and a mounting sense of dread.

I find myself returning to the image of the glass door. We keep telling managers to ‘be transparent’ and ‘be accessible,’ but we don’t realize that without the proper support, that transparency is just another wall they are going to crash into. We need to stop pretending that coaching is a ‘soft’ addition to the ‘hard’ work of business. It is the hardest work there is. It requires a level of presence that is currently being taxed into extinction by our digital tethers. If we don’t protect the time required for this work, we will end up with a generation of leaders who are experts at the language of coaching but have entirely forgotten the feeling of it.

The Most Radical Act: Admitting Capacity Limits

Perhaps the most radical thing a manager can do today is admit they don’t have the capacity to coach in the way the company demands. To say, ‘I care about your growth, but I refuse to give you a hollowed-out version of my attention.’ That honesty is more ‘coach-like’ than any template could ever be. It acknowledges the reality of the human condition. It stops the cycle of faked empathy. It demands a better system. We are not machines designed to output ‘support’ on a 15-minute cycle. We are organisms that require rest, focus, and genuine connection to thrive. Until we build organizations that recognize those 5 basic needs, our ‘coaching’ will continue to be nothing more than a cosmetic layer on a crumbling foundation, much like the sunscreen Astrid formulates-necessary, but only effective if it’s applied to a surface that isn’t already on fire.

If we want a workplace that feels human, we have to stop asking people to act like processors. We have to give them the room to actually breathe, to think, and to listen to the silence that exists between the 45 emails they just received. Only then can the emulsion hold. Only then can we stop walking into the glass.