Does your organisation require managers to coach their people? You are not alone, most do, but few organisations explain what it looks like in the workplace and fewer still provide coaching skills training.
Ask a room of managers whether coaching their team matters and most hands go up. Ask them when they last had a conversation with a direct report where they did not offer a solution, and the room gets quiet.
This is the coaching gap, and it is remarkably consistent across sectors. Coaching capability appears as a statement in leadership frameworks, position descriptions and values statements but organisations are often puzzled when the behaviour itself is not present. This might lead to questioning managers commitment, but research and experience show it is often not that. Capable, well-intentioned managers struggle to coach for reasons that have little to do with how much they care.
Reasons capable managers struggle to coach
1. They were promoted for having the answers
Most managers earned the role by being the person who solved things, being technically capable and confident. Coaching asks them to withhold the exact capability that got them there, removing the part of the job they are often most comfortable with.
2. Coaching competes with delivery
A coaching conversation can take ten minutes and pays back in future outcomes. Telling someone the answer takes ninety seconds and pays back immediately with outputs. With increasing demands and workload for managers, it is not surprising they make a rational short-term trade where outputs win.
3. They have no way of knowing how they are going
Managers get feedback on results, budgets and deadlines. Almost no one gets feedback on the quality of their developmental conversations. Without a mirror, specific feedback and opportunities to self-reflect, managers struggle to improve and build on the capability.
5. The system rewards the behaviour it says it does not want
Organisational systems often promote, recognise and reward based on output therefore ‘telling’ managers what it actually values. Individual skill cannot outrun a system pointed the other way.
24% of executives significantly overestimated their coaching ability — rating themselves above average while the colleagues who worked with them ranked them in the bottom third.
Ibarra, H. & Scoular, A. (2019). The Leader as Coach. Harvard Business Review — study of 3,761 executives.
That finding highlights a key element of the problem. It is not that managers refuse to coach. It is that many believe they already are, and nothing in their work environment is designed to tell them otherwise.
The shift from manager to coach
The familiar manager vs leader debate can sometimes oversimplify what effective leadership requires. Managers still need to allocate work, set standards, make decisions and hold people accountable. The real challenge is not choosing between managing and leading, but knowing when to direct and when to coach.
Coaching is better understood as an approach, something a manager deliberately steps into and out of, several times a week. The skill is recognising which approach the moment calls for and moving between them effectively.
There is no hierarchy between the two, both roles are legitimate; the failure is being stuck in one.
| MANAGER | COACH |
|---|---|
| Provides the answer | Asks powerful questions |
| Solves the problem presented | Unpacks what the real problem is |
| Listens to respond | Listens to understand |
| Speaks first | Speaks last |
| Takes responsibility | Assumes employee capability |
Coaching skills managers can realistically build
These are learnable skills, not personality traits. Each one is observable, which means each one can be practised, given feedback on, and improved.
| SKILL | WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE |
|---|---|
| Questioning | Asking powerful questions and noticing when leading statements or closed questions are advice wearing a question mark. |
| Active Listening | Listening to understand what the real issue or the topic being avoided is, rather than listening to respond and fill a gap where you think your answer goes. |
| Understanding Context | Judging when someone needs direction rather than exploration. Recognising when a conversation has stopped being about work capability and needs a different response. Reading the staff member’s readiness and knowing the boundary. |
The reason many Managers struggle to coach isn’t because they have never heard the theory or don’t agree with its importance. They struggle because the climate to consistently practise using the skill does not exist in their week. Building mangers’ coaching capability requires providing them with the opportunity to observe others, practise and receive feedback.
For organisations investing in leadership development in Brisbane, the challenge is not simply teaching managers another coaching model. It is creating the conditions for them to practise, receive feedback and build coaching into the way they lead.
At TMS Consulting, our coaching capability development focuses on:
- Observing real conversations, debriefing what actually happened and closing the feedback loop that produced the blind spot in the first place.
- Providing space to practise using real cases where getting it wrong costs nothing, rather than experimenting on a direct report during a live performance conversation.
- Developing a shared understanding and common language so standards and expectations are consistent.
- Supporting leaders to embed the practice into their operating rhythm so it survives beyond the workshop.
How you will know it worked
Visible sponsorship and investment in time for managers to build, use and maintain these skills, signals that development conversations are the work, not a bonus activity for quiet weeks. The signals worth tracking are behavioural, and they show up in the months, not weeks afterwards:
- People bring problems earlier and half-solved, rather than late and fully escalated
- Decisions get made a level lower than they used to be, enabling senior leaders to truly focus on strategy and long-term objectives
- One-on-ones shift in content from status updates to innovating and collaborating
The uncomfortable conclusion
If managers in your organisation are not coaching, the most likely explanation is not a skills deficit in your managers. It is that nobody has named the shift they are being asked to make, taught them how to move between the two approaches, given them any feedback on how they are going, or changed the incentives that quietly reward the old behaviour.
All four of those are fixable. None of them are fixed by another reminder that coaching matters.
If your organisation is looking to strengthen managers’ coaching capability, explore our leadership training Queensland programs or speak with our team about a tailored approach.
Source
Ibarra, H. & Scoular, A. (2019). The Leader as Coach. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-leader-as-coach
