When Leaders Don’t Need Another Answer: Coaching, People and the Hardest Part of Business

I got lucky, genuinely!

I met Tatjana Kučerenko at an informal professional development event, and you know how it is with some people: somehow, you simply find yourself on the same wavelength.

What fascinates me about Tatjana is the combination of her extensive HR experience and the way she operates in such a nuanced, deeply human field. There is this almost stoic calm about her, while at the same time she brings an incredibly alive energy to what she does. You simply cannot miss it.

I’ll let Tatjana introduce herself properly, because fitting everything she does into one title would probably be unfair.

But there are a few things I have been especially curious to ask her, and I believe they are highly relevant to many B2B Marketing Digest readers.

Because businesses can have the best strategy, technology, processes and plans in the world. Eventually, someone still has to make decisions, lead through uncertainty, navigate different personalities and get people moving in the same direction.

And perhaps one of the greatest arts in business is still the art of leading people.

This conversation explores where coaching fits into that picture, when leaders need advice and when another answer may be exactly what they don’t need.

Tatjana, before we get into coaching, how would you introduce yourself and the work you do today?

You have quite a broad professional world around you: HR, working with people and organisations, coaching and active meditations. How have these different parts come together, and what connects them for you?

I've spent 20 years in HR - currently, I work as Head of Human Resources at a fintech company - and alongside that, I work as a coach, both within the organisation and privately.

I’ve always been curious: what actually helps a person perform and grow, and what gets in their way? HR taught me to see the bigger systemic picture - how structures and culture influence behaviour. Coaching flips that perspective around - helping us understand how individuals influence and shape the systems they are part of.

But there was still a missing piece: the deeper, often unconscious layer of the mind that can influence how we think, feel, and act. Active meditation is simply the fastest way I know to help someone step out of their mental noise into clarity.

So, HR works with the outer conditions, coaching with our conscious thinking and behaviour, and meditation with what lies beneath them. By bringing these three fields together, I help myself and my clients create meaningful change and achieve sustainable results.

Let’s start with something that is probably still misunderstood: what is coaching actually for?

There are consultants, mentors, trainers, psychologists and coaches, and from the outside the boundaries can become quite blurry. How would you explain the difference, particularly to a business leader deciding what kind of support they actually need?

This is probably the most useful point I can offer any business leader, because choosing the wrong type of support can waste time and money - and sometimes even make the problem worse.

Here’s the simplest way I explain it: each one answers a different question.

If you need information or expertise you don’t have, hire a consultant. If you need to build a skill, get training. If you need guidance from someone who has been there before, find a mentor. If something from your past is affecting how you function in the present, see a psychologist.

But if you already have the knowledge and resources to solve the problem, and you’re simply too close to it, too busy, or too caught up in your own thinking to see it clearly - that’s exactly where coaching earns its place.

And here’s what leaders often don’t expect: the harder the decision, the more valuable coaching can become. Because at the top, the answer rarely comes from having more information. It comes from creating enough clarity to see what really matters - and having the ambition and courage to act on it.

Senior leaders are rarely short of information or advice. So why can someone know perfectly well what should be done and still remain stuck? Is this one of the situations where coaching becomes particularly valuable?

Yes -  and it's a paradox I see constantly. Leaders are rarely short of information; often they have too much, from too many directions, or too little of the right kind. Either way, the result is the same: stuck. Too much input becomes noise instead of clarity. Too little is usually a blind spot - something they can't see because they're too close to it, or because seeing it means confronting an uncomfortable truth.

That's what coaching does that more information can't: it surfaces the blind spot. I'm not handing them a better answer - I'm asking the question that reveals what they've been avoiding. Once that surfaces, they usually already know what to do.

From there, we build out real scenarios -  what happens if you go this way versus that way, what are you actually optimizing for right now. That alone dissolves most of the stuckness, because indecision is rarely about lacking options - it's fear of choosing wrong.

And the part people underestimate: what happens after the decision. A good coaching process doesn't just get a leader to a decision -  it gets them to one they can stand behind, with a clear, peaceful mind.

So yes - a leader can know exactly what should be done and still be stuck. Knowing and acting with confidence are two different things. Coaching lives in that gap.

When does a leader need an answer, and when do they need better questions?

In business we are very accustomed to hiring expertise to tell us what to do. Are there situations where giving someone another recommendation can actually be less useful than helping them arrive at their own conclusion?

A leader needs an answer when the problem is genuinely outside their expertise - a new regulation, a technical risk, a market they've never operated in. That's not a moment for reflection, it's a moment for facts. Get the expert, get the answer, move on.

But most of the decisions that keep leaders up at night aren't like that. They already have the facts. What they're missing is clarity about what they actually want, what they're willing to risk, and which version of themselves they're trying to lead as. No consultant can hand them that - it has to come from inside.

And here's where another recommendation can quietly work against leader: it gives the leader someone else to blame if it goes wrong, and someone else's conviction to lean on instead of building their own. That might solve today's decision, but it weakens their decision-making muscle for the next one, and the one after that.

A good question does the opposite. It hands the ownership back. And a decision someone arrives at themselves, they defend differently than one they were simply given.

Can coaching make someone a better decision-maker?

Especially when there is no obviously correct answer, information is incomplete, different stakeholders want different things, and the leader still has to make a decision and take responsibility for it.

Yes - but not by giving them a better process for weighing pros and cons. Most leaders already have that. What coaching builds is their relationship with uncertainty itself.

When information is incomplete and stakeholders want different things, no amount of analysis removes the discomfort of choosing. At some point the spreadsheet runs out and it becomes a judgment call. Leaders who haven't made peace with that moment either freeze, or decide and then keep re-litigating it in their head for weeks.

We work on exactly that: what "good enough" means given what can actually be known right now, and separating what's genuinely theirs to weigh from what belongs to others - because carrying other people's stakes as your own is a fast way to freeze.

Over time, the leader stops treating each hard decision as a crisis and starts trusting their own judgment, even under incomplete information. That's what makes someone a better decision-maker - not a formula, but the confidence to decide well without needing certainty first.

From your HR experience, what do you see leaders most often misunderstand about people?

Are there patterns you have seen repeatedly, even among otherwise very capable and experienced managers?

The biggest one: they assume people are motivated by the same things they are. A leader who loves challenge keeps giving people more of it - and doesn't notice that for someone else, it just feels like pressure. We tend to manage people the way we'd want to be managed, not the way they actually need it.

Second: silence isn't agreement. In most teams, people don't say what they really think, especially to their manager. Not because they're hiding something, but because staying quiet feels safer. 

And third - even strong leaders underestimate how much their mood affects the room. If a leader is stressed, the team feels it, and starts managing that instead of doing their work. All three come back to the same thing: it's hard to see your own patterns from the inside. That's where coaching, or a good HR partner, really helps.

We talk a lot about employee motivation. But can coaching solve a motivation problem if the real problem is the environment? For example, if there is micromanagement, internal politics, lack of psychological safety, unclear expectations or poor leadership. Where does individual responsibility end and organisational responsibility begin?

No, if someone is micromanaged, unclear on expectations, or working in a place with no psychological safety, no amount of coaching will fix that. Coaching helps a person work with what's inside their control. It can't fix what's outside it.

What coaching can do is help someone see the situation clearly - is this actually fixable, is it worth staying for, and what can they influence versus what they can't. Sometimes that clarity leads to a hard conversation with their manager. Sometimes it leads to leaving. Either way, it's the person's own decision, made with open eyes instead of quiet frustration. Individual responsibility covers how someone responds to their environment. Organisational responsibility covers the environment itself.

How much does self-awareness actually matter in leadership? We hear the term frequently, but what does a lack of self-awareness look like in practice? And can a person become a genuinely good leader without being willing to examine their own behaviour and impact on others?

Self-awareness is absolutely fundamental to effective leadership. But for me, self-awareness is not simply about knowing your strengths and weaknesses. It is about understanding who you are as a leader, how you make decisions, what drives your behaviour, and, most importantly, how your behaviour impacts the people and environment around you.

A lack of self-awareness often shows up in very practical ways. It can look like a leader who is unable to receive feedback, who becomes defensive when challenged, who needs to control everything, or who constantly believes that problems are caused by other people. Sometimes it can be much more subtle — for example, a leader may not realise that their communication style creates fear, discourages initiative, or prevents people from speaking openly.

Leadership is a continuous development process. You cannot sustainably develop your people or your organisation if you are not willing to develop yourself. And that requires the courage to examine your own patterns, motivations, decision-making and blind spots.

What happens when the problem is the leader themselves, but they don’t see it? Can coaching help someone recognise that, or does coaching only work once a person is already willing to question their own assumptions?

Coaching can't force - it needs at least a little willingness to look. If a leader is fully convinced the problem is everyone else, coaching won't get far.

But "not seeing it" and "not willing to look" are different things. Most leaders who are the problem don't know it, simply because no one around them has ever said it plainly - people protect leaders from hard feedback, especially the more senior positions.

That's what a coach can do that almost no one else can: reflect it back without an agenda. Not "here's what's wrong with you," but "here's a pattern I'm noticing." Said that way, most leaders can hear it.

Is there a danger that coaching becomes another way of trying to “fix the employee” when something is actually wrong with the organisation?

I find this particularly interesting from your dual HR and coaching perspective. How do you recognise the difference?

This is exactly why I think sitting in both HR and coaching seats matters. From the coaching chair alone, you only see the individual in front of you - you don't automatically see the system around them. From the HR chair, you see patterns across the organisation that no single coaching conversation would ever reveal.

Here's how I recognise the difference: I look at whether the same "issue" keeps showing up in different people. If one person struggles with motivation, that's worth exploring with them individually. If five people from the same team, under the same manager, all get sent to coaching for "motivation" or "resilience" - that's not five individual problems. That's one organisational problem with five faces. 
In B2B organisations, many people become leaders because they are excellent specialists. A brilliant engineer, lawyer, salesperson or marketer may suddenly become responsible for other people. What is the biggest shift they need to make when expertise is no longer enough?

The shift is from being right to being useful. As a specialist, your value came from having the best answer - the strongest argument, the cleanest solution. That instinct doesn't disappear just because you're now managing people, so a lot of new leaders keep doing what made them successful before: jumping in, solving it themselves, correcting people's work. It feels responsible. It's actually the opposite - it teaches the team to stop thinking, because the leader will fix it anyway.

The real job becomes making other people good, not being the best person in the room. That means asking questions instead of handing over answers, tolerating someone doing it differently than you would, and sometimes watching a mistake happen that you could have prevented, because that's how the person learns to own it.

This is often the hardest transition I see, because nobody trained them for it - and their whole identity was built on being the expert. Letting go of that isn't a loss of standards. It's the actual start of leadership.

What role does trust play between a leader and a team?

And once that trust has been damaged, can it genuinely be rebuilt, or are there situations where the consequences are difficult to reverse?

Trust is the foundation everything else runs on. With it, people bring you their honest thinking and real effort. Without it, you get compliance instead of commitment - people do only what's asked and stop telling you what you actually need to hear. And that erosion is quiet; by the time a leader notices, it's usually been building for months.

Yes, trust can be rebuilt - but not through an apology or a "let's move forward" speech. It's rebuilt the same way it was broken: through a repeated pattern of behaviour, not a statement. And it comes back slower than it left, which the leader has to accept without getting frustrated at the pace.

Where it gets genuinely hard to reverse is when the breach is about integrity rather than competence. A bad decision, people can forgive - that's just leadership under uncertainty. A lie, or saying one thing and doing another, is different, because it damages safety, not just trust.

And sometimes the honest answer is that it isn't rebuilt - the leader steps back from that relationship or that role. Not every breach is meant to be repaired, and pretending otherwise just keeps everyone stuck longer.

With AI changing how we work, which distinctly human leadership capabilities do you think are becoming more valuable rather than less?

If information, analysis and even recommendations become increasingly accessible, what will differentiate strong leaders?

The irony is that AI removes the parts of leadership that were never the hard part. Getting information, running analysis, generating options - that was always table stakes work, and it's about to be free. What's left is exactly what AI can't do: judgment under uncertainty, and the human relationship that makes people willing to follow you into it.

Judgment matters more, not less, because when everyone has access to the same analysis, the differentiator becomes who can look at ten reasonable options and decide - and be accountable for it. That's a leadership skill, not an information skill.

Self-awareness becomes more valuable too. AI will hand a leader a mirror constantly - data on their team, their decisions, their blind spots - and a leader who can't sit with an uncomfortable truth about themselves will just ignore the mirror. The leaders who grow will be the ones who can actually use that feedback instead of deflecting it.

And the most underrated one: the ability to make people feel seen. As more of the work becomes mediated by AI, the moments of real human attention - someone noticing you're struggling, someone genuinely curious about your thinking - become rarer, and rarer things become more valuable. That's not a soft skill anymore. It's the thing that keeps people choosing to work for a human leader instead of just a system that tells them what to do.

Finally, after everything you have seen through HR, coaching and working with people: what is one thing you wish more leaders understood about human beings?

That people rarely resist the change itself - they resist feeling controlled, unseen, or unsure where they stand. Almost every "difficult" employee, every frozen initiative, every quiet resistance I've seen traces back to one of those three, not to laziness or bad attitude.

Leaders keep looking for the fix in strategy, process or better communication of the plan. But the real fix is almost always simpler and harder at once: make people feel like they have some say, that their effort is actually seen, and that they know where they stand with you. Get those three right, and most of what leaders call "people problems" quietly disappear on their own.