Here is a question worth sitting with: when you enter a coaching conversation, do you coach from the windshield or the rearview mirror? How you answer it will tell you more about your team's trajectory than any performance review ever could.
This week's "Mind what Matters" post is written for anyone who has even one person they are entrusted to lead and develop. It doesn't matter what industry you are in, what training you have had, or what your job description says. If you are a leader, this is for you.
The Question Every Leader Needs to Answer
Over the past couple of weeks we have received great feedback on our blogs about questions and questioning. That theme continues here, because the single most clarifying question a leader-coach can ask themselves is this one: Do I coach from the windshield or the rearview mirror?
Before you answer, sit with a few more questions that will sharpen your self-assessment.
- When you think about your last five coaching sessions, whose agenda was at the center of the conversation?
- If you were to analyze your calendar over the past 90 days, how much of your time was spent coaching to facilitate growth for your team members?
- When you finished your most recent performance review process, was your shared commitment to move forward or to keep looking back?
These are not easy questions. They are the right ones.
Coaching Is an Adventure, Not an Audit
About two weeks ago, a couple of friends and I took an adventure motorcycle ride from Cincinnati to Nashville. Our objective was simple: go on an adventure, avoid highways as much as possible, and spend the day taking in all the beautiful landscapes through southern Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. If you're picturing the movie Wild Hogs, you're not far off.
The trip was magnificent. We traveled on winding roads, stopped at local diners like Jerry's outside of Lexington, and passed some of the most beautiful farms you can imagine. A normal 4.5-hour drive stretched into 10-plus hours, and not one of us cared for a second. That Nashville ride was a training trip for a larger cross-country adventure we have planned for September.
As I was staring at those roads, something occurred to me about coaching. What if we coached people the way we were taking each other on that adventure? What if we helped team members fulfill their personal vision, perform at levels they haven't reached yet, and pursue goals they don't even think are possible today? Coaching can be exactly that kind of adventure, where the path is full of amazing stops, winding turns, setbacks, adjustments, laughter, and yes, maybe even a few tears.
The Windshield vs. the Rearview Mirror
Here is what that motorcycle ride taught me about coaching. To get where we were going safely, I had to keep my attention focused through the windshield, looking forward. Not backward through the rearview mirrors.
Think about what happens when you spend too much time looking through the rearview mirror while driving. One friend put it plainly: "You will end in a terrible crash." How many of our coaching conversations end in something that feels exactly like a crash, because we spent too much time dwelling on what already happened instead of developing what comes next?
This simple reframe changed my coaching mindset. I believe it can do the same for you.
Rearview coaching is not entirely wrong. The mirrors exist for a reason. Looking back to identify a pattern, to understand why something broke, or to acknowledge a genuine win all have a place. The problem is when the rearview mirror becomes the primary lens. When a coaching session is mostly a retrospective on what went wrong, with no forward trajectory attached, the team member leaves that conversation feeling managed, not developed.
Why Rearview Coaching Ends in a Crash
The brain is not neutral in a coaching conversation. Research on the neuroscience of feedback shows that when people feel their past behavior is being evaluated rather than their future capability being developed, the threat response activates. The limbic system perceives retrospective critique as social danger, and the brain shifts resources away from the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for learning, planning, and behavior change.
In other words, when you coach through the rearview mirror, you are inadvertently triggering the exact brain state that makes growth less likely, not more. The person sitting across from you may nod and take notes, but their nervous system is in a protective posture, not an exploratory one.
Windshield coaching creates a different neurological environment. A forward-oriented conversation, one rooted in possibility, aspiration, and the team member's own goals, activates the reward and motivation circuits. The brain becomes curious rather than defensive. That is where real development happens.
Five Principles of Development-Based Windshield Coaching
These are not complicated. They are consistent. That is the point.
- Schedule dedicated development-based coaching time, and protect it. Don't cancel. A coaching conversation that gets pushed every week sends a message louder than anything you say in the room: your development is not a priority.
- Plan development-based coaching sessions before you walk in. Don't wing it. A prepared coach signals investment. Know what you want to explore, and come ready to ask questions that open doors rather than close them.
- Consider the employee's perspective first. Don't lead with your agenda. The best windshield coaches are genuinely curious about where their team member wants to go, not just how they are measuring up against what the leader already decided matters.
- Look back only when it serves the forward conversation. Don't dwell in the rearview mirror. The past is useful data. It is not the destination. Use it to inform direction, then return your eyes to the road ahead.
- Enjoy your coaching sessions. Coaching is not supposed to feel like a deposition. When a leader and a team member are both genuinely engaged in where this person can go, the conversation has energy. That energy is a signal that you are doing it right.
Protecting Your Blind Spots Without Living There
There is a nuance worth naming. On that motorcycle ride, I was grateful for my rearview mirrors. Both of them. They allowed me to check my blind spots, to make sure I was not missing something that could cause a problem. The mirrors were not the enemy of the windshield. They were a supplement to it.
The same is true in coaching. Looking back has value. Acknowledging what did not go well, identifying a behavior pattern that is creating friction, or recognizing an unresolved skill gap are all legitimate uses of the rearview. The distinction is that you check the mirrors to protect the journey, not to steer by them. The windshield is still the primary view. The future is still the direction.
Leaders who get this right tend to use a simple ratio: spend the majority of any coaching conversation on what is possible ahead, and a smaller portion on what happened before. There is no universal percentage, but if your team member is leaving more of your conversations feeling assessed than developed, your mirrors are doing too much of the steering.
Wherever Your Eyes Go, the Team Goes
When you are learning to handle a motorcycle, one of the first things an instructor tells you is this: wherever your eyes go, the bike goes. If you fixate on a pothole, you will hit it. If you look at the line you want to travel, the machine follows. It is not metaphorical. It is physics.
Leadership works the same way. Where a leader focuses their attention in coaching conversations, their team members tend to follow. If a leader's gaze is always backward, cataloging errors and revisiting shortfalls, the team orients around avoiding mistakes rather than pursuing possibility. If the leader's gaze is through the windshield, forward and curious, the team learns to look there too.
The most powerful question you can bring into your next coaching conversation is not "What went wrong?" It is "Where do you want to go, and what is in the way?" That single shift changes the neurological and emotional texture of the conversation from evaluation to exploration.
That is what Windshield Coaching is. And it can change everything about how your team develops.
If this perspective resonates and you want to explore what a coaching culture built on these principles looks like inside your organization, start a conversation with the Braintrust team. We work with leadership teams every day to build exactly that.
