One of the most rewarding parts of my job is when I coach senior managers. Compared to the multi-dimensional Rubik cube that is creating brand strategy, supporting a bright individual in one-on-one sessions is simpler and provides more immediate feedback.

Which is not to say that their problems are easy or trivial, just that lessons are often more quickly and easily learned. Sometimes, those lessons come from surprising places. That happened in a coaching session a couple of years back that I’d like to tell you about.

Mary is a senior commercial leader, in a European HQ, with several brand teams below her. Her strong personality is belied by a genuinely caring nature and a real affection for her teams. She sees developing young specialists into competent managers as both a joy and duty she takes very seriously. She was a driving force behind her company’s ‘fast track’ executive development programme. Her nature is a blessing for her team but a curse for her because she spends a lot of her time feeling frustrated. Her angst arises from the low yield of her management development efforts. Most of its intake fail to develop into well-rounded, competent managers with broad soft skills. This means a leaky talent pipeline and wastes the potential of many young managers. At our coaching session, this was what she wanted to discuss.

Good coaching is mostly listening, but it’s enabled and improved by asking the right questions that lead to more listening. I know it’s working when my questions beget frowns, furrowed brows and people saying: “I don’t really know.” I got exactly that response when I asked Mary if she could see a pattern among those young managers who didn’t make the grade. Eventually, after much thought, she said: “The pattern is that there’s no pattern. They each fail for a different reason. There is a typical success profile, but every failure is unique.” And that was our breakthrough that allowed us to learn from an unexpected teacher, Leo Tolstoy.

In his book ‘Anna Karenina’, Tolstoy describes how every happy family is happy in the same way, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. To be honest, 19th Russian literature isn’t my thing and I’ve not read it. But I loved how Jared Diamond used Tolstoy’s ideas in his book ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ to explain why most attempts to domesticate wild species fail (which connects with my work on evolutionary theory). In both animals and families, many things have to go right to get a good outcome, but only one thing has to go wrong to prevent the intended result. This has become known as the ‘Anna Karenina effect’ and it’s seen in many complex situations. It’s explained by the interconnectivity of the different traits required. Happy families share love, trust and respect, and each helps create the others. I told my mentee about this concept and asked if it helped her understand her problem. It did and her bright mind moved on quickly.

At our next meeting, she told me she had been looking at her management development issues as if they were separate. How could she improve young people’s empathy? Or their self-awareness? How could she make them strategically savvy? Or understand important concepts outside their specialist discipline? This fragmented framing of the problem had led her to design her programme as a neat set of standalone sessions delivered by separate external consultants. But the ‘Anna Karenina effect’ told her to reframe the problem and to work on the linkages between competencies. For example, empathy is built on self-awareness and the two are strongly correlated. Strategy savvy requires T-shaped skills that combine narrow, deep specialist expertise and broad, shallow, cross-functional knowledge. As with a happy family’s love, trust and respect, the many necessary capabilities of a young general manager don’t stand alone – they depend on each other.

Neither she nor I would slip Tolstoy onto our office bookshelves between Drucker and Handy. But Tolstoy’s teachings, via Jared Diamond and Brian Smith, transformed how her company looked at management development. Units are now grouped in coherent modules. Tutors are required to integrate their teachings. Young managers are assessed more holistically. More importantly, the company has a fuller, better talent pipeline and the potential of its young specialists is not being wasted. That is something that brings Mary much joy. And me too.