By Julie Ferris-Tillman
Like many, I claim to be a “Jill of all trades,” although I know that adage has more meat than we typically consider. Shakespeare’s line was “A jack of all trades, a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” This applies even more to managers and leaders, because it takes facility with many skills to achieve a leadership role, but once in that position, your future success and growth rely on mastering just a few of those skills.
I have a squirrel’s career path. It’s never strayed too far from the initial trail—professional communications and strategic thinking—but there have been more than a few diversions to harvest nuts as I spotted them. I’ve realized that the most useful core of my career is my time spent teaching.
Initially, I taught in my Roman Catholic parish’s CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) program. I led camp programming for kids. I upped the ante and officially donned the title of teacher through my graduate programs, learning as a TA, then an instructor, and then a tenure-track professional. My graduate focus included research and concentration in pedagogy, the method and practice of teaching.
Deep research into how people take in and share information, and how communities learn, informed my classroom performance and guided me in writing assignments that would foster learning. And this attention to how we think and learn improved my own learning. Democratizing a classroom means absorbing from the students. When “knowledge is power,” I was trained to focus on sharing that power equally.
Professors get student evaluations, and those scores are something we report in tenure files or annual reviews. In the workplace, those scores are our ROI, the outputs and outcomes our team produces. More productivity is often equated with the quality of your leadership. The quality of your leadership is often measured in the years you’ve been leading, or a productivity trend that only goes up. As team size increases, so does output. Great outcomes emerge, and your leadership gets accolades.
One of the most valuable lessons in my career came when I realized I wasn’t the one doing the teaching. I was learning from someone on my team, and it hit me hard: Leadership today isn’t about logging the most years. It’s about being open to learn from anyone at any stage. That shift—from boss to teacher—is the difference between managing people and helping them grow.
We’re all working in multigenerational, AI-driven environments where change feels constant. If managers want to lead well, they need to think like teachers: Recognize learning styles, find the lessons that stick, and create spaces where knowledge is democratized.
Why Managers Need to Understand Learning Styles
Teachers know that not every student learns the same way. Some people need to see a process in action to understand it. Some need to hear a description of that process, and others need to try it for themselves. Great teachers flex. They don’t insist on one method; they adjust until the lesson lands. Managers should do the same.
This can be a challenge in a work world that asks us to constantly streamline, where efficiencies are turned into huge reductions of context or simply checkmarks on a group task board. There’s little to see on such a board, and the only lesson available is “You didn’t complete your task on time.” The process of “optimizing” can steer off course and become the equivalent of unintentional busy work.
For companies, practices that can achieve common matrices or deliverables are useful; standard operating procedures are essential. But working with them in your team requires you to recognize how team members can master them. Do the tasks need to be explained repeatedly, using already existing guidance? Or do they need new explanations? Do team members need full context to understand the procedure and its reason for being? If leaders don’t stop to recognize how teams take in and master information, procedures become impenetrable rules that hold back teams and drive burnout.
The Learning Within Feedback: Lessons That Stick
Teaching and learning happen in every moment, and feedback is one of the most recognizable ways managers can show intentions, empathy, and share knowledge. Education researcher John Hattie, in a study published in 2007 with co-author Helen Timperley (“The Power of Feedback,” Review of Educational Research), says feedback is one of the most powerful drivers of achievement when it’s clear, timely, and specific. That’s the difference between a teacher redirecting an argument in the moment versus waiting until it goes awry on the final exam. In work terms, it’s the difference between waiting for an annual review and giving a quick coaching note during the project itself.
And psychological safety matters. A 2022 Harvard Business School study by Henrik Bresman and Amy Edmondson (“Exploring the Relationship between Team Diversity, Psychological Safety and Team Performance: Evidence from Pharmaceutical Drug Development,” HBS Working Paper Series) showed that diverse teams only performed better when they felt psychologically safe. Without that sense of safety, diversity has no effect on boosting outcomes. Teachers call it classroom culture. Managers can call it Tuesday. If people can’t admit mistakes or ask “dumb” questions, they can’t learn. As a manager, your team is your classroom: You gather together regularly, you achieve goals together, you learn together and you, as a team, are a knowledge hub.
Managers must be willing to learn as they go. They must learn from their team where the roadblocks are and evaluate whether everyone on the team has the same barrier to understanding. For example, could it be how you as a manager communicated the task or the need? Feedback flows both ways, and it often doesn’t come when a leader says, “Anything I can do?” The leader is responsible for observing the team’s strengths, abilities, and barriers and learning new ways of coaching, framing the work, or allocating the time.
Coaching Is Teaching, Not Correcting
Too many managers confuse coaching with correcting. Coaching is about noticing the opportunity, not just the error. A 2022 meta-analysis from the Journal of Work-Applied Management (“The Effectiveness of Workplace Coaching: A Meta-Analysis of Contemporary Psychologically Informed Coaching Approaches”) found that workplace coaching significantly improves not only performance but also confidence and well-being. We are living through a moment where work is shifting. A massive upskilling is before us, and global economic shifts are changing supply and demand. Layer with that new generational perspectives on the value of work and community and “confidence and well-being” become outcomes a leader should work toward to secure talent, performance, and effectiveness.
Learning styles play a role here too. If someone learns best by talking it through, coach verbally. If they’re a visual learner, sketch it. If they learn by doing, let them try, reflect, and try again. The best teachers adapt. The best managers should too.
I’ve had some managers who say, “I have an open door!” or “Just put time on my calendar!” Those leaders forget that not all team members will attend “office hours” unsolicited. Nerves, confidence, energy style, and learning style can all affect whether a team member takes the initiative to ask for feedback. By following learning styles and observing how team members take in and use information, leaders can see that initiating a conversation with some employees is the best way to reach them, instead of insisting, “Well, they’ve never come to me for help.”
Building Two-Way Learning Loops
Classrooms are full of peer teaching because it works. Business can learn from that. Reverse mentoring—when junior employees teach senior leaders—is just another form of peer teaching. A 2024 study in Current Psychology (“Breaking Barriers: Exploring the Impact of Reverse Mentoring on Change Adaptation Behavior Through Sequential Mediation of Cognitive Flexibility and Resilience”) found that reverse mentoring helped senior leaders become more adaptable and resilient. For younger staff, it gave confidence and visibility. Both sides walked away smarter.
That’s the real shift. Managers don’t need to be the sole source of knowledge. They need to set up loops where knowledge travels up, down, and sideways.
Why This Matters for Women in Particular
Teachers know students thrive when they see people like them succeed. The workplace is no different. A 2019 study in PNAS (“A Network’s Gender Composition and Communication Pattern Predict Women’s Leadership Success”) showed that women MBAs with both broad networks and a close inner circle of female peers were 2.5 times more likely to land high-ranking jobs compared to women without that circle. For men, centrality alone was enough. For women, context and trusted allies mattered.
The lesson for managers: Build spaces where women can share know-how and experiences. Create platforms where stories travel. It’s not performative, it’s structural.
The Manager’s Pedagogical Mindset
Here’s how to bring the teacher mindset into your day-to-day:
Clarify objectives. Teachers explain what “good” looks like. Managers should too. Write a definition of done, spell out criteria, and set checkpoints. And within that, grow team members’ business savvy by also mapping the context of the work and how it connects to the overall big picture of the business, company, sector, and industry. Feedback works best when it’s timely and task-specific.
Use formative assessment. Teachers check students’ progress before the final exam. Managers can do the same for their team members. Run a 15-minute weekly “teach-back” where a team member demonstrates unfinished work and asks for input. Rotate the mic. Build safety. Agile offices build for this process in their daily standups. Identifying blockers allows you to explore the “how” of team members’ work and revise work approaches.
Coach, don’t correct. Ask “What’s your learning style?” Adjust your coaching. Some people need words, some need sketches, some need practice. Many are framing their work in context. Sharing the big picture or the reasons why there are changes in structures or paths can be valuable to broad thinkers who work intuitively. The right method makes the message stick.
Start two-way loops. Pair a senior employee and a junior employee on a project. Give them equal teaching roles. Reverse mentoring boosts adaptability and confidence, and it makes knowledge travel in unexpected ways.
Make empathy the curriculum. Empathy isn’t soft. It’s the glue that holds growth together. Studies on perceived organizational support show that when people feel supported, their satisfaction, performance, and loyalty rise. Ask what support looks like before offering it.
Treat AI like a teaching assistant. Use AI to draft rubrics, summarize meetings, or generate practice questions. Let it handle the busy work. Then spend your time on the human part—empathy, clarity, coaching.
Managing Your Own Growth
Here’s the uncomfortable part: Teachers never stop learning. Neither should managers. Sharing know-how means being willing to admit what you don’t know and learn in public. That might feel risky if you were trained to equate tenure with authority. But research says the opposite. High-quality management practices, trust, and coaching deliver measurable results in performance and retention.
And let’s not forget mentoring. Meta-analyses show that mentored employees report higher pay and satisfaction, and mentors themselves report more engagement and performance. Teaching grows the teacher. That’s true in classrooms, and it’s true at work.
Closing the Loop
When you lead like a teacher, you stop relying on “I’ve been here 25 years” as a badge of authority and start sharing the authority of know-how. You set clear outcomes. You check for understanding early. You coach in the way people learn best. You trade the solo lecture at the front of the room for many voices in a circle.
Your team feels it as clarity, growth, and trust. Research shows they’ll stick around longer and perform better. The business benefits. But the best payoff is the same one teachers get: watching people surprise you with what they can do next.
Julie Ferris-Tillman is manager, communications-media relations at the Mayo Clinic, and was VP and B2B tech practice lead at Interdependence Public Relations.