“Great coaching doesn’t happen in formal sessions alone — it happens in the everyday moments between leaders and their people. The most impactful leaders don’t create followers; they create coaches who empower others to grow.” Laurent Pierre, Jr.
Great coaching doesn’t happen in formal sessions alone — it happens in the everyday moments between leaders and their people.
The Conversation That Changed Everything
How leaders move from directing to developing — and why it changes everything about the teams, the talent, and the results you build.
I was about five years into my career at IBM when a senior leader pulled me aside after a meeting where I had confidently — perhaps too confidently — presented my analysis and recommendations. I expected feedback on my slides. Instead, he asked me a question I wasn’t prepared for:
“Laurent, what outcome are you actually trying to create for the client — and how does what you just presented serve that?” |
I opened my mouth. Then closed it. I didn’t have a good answer. And he knew it. But here’s what he didn’t do: he didn’t tell me the answer. He didn’t correct me in front of the room. He didn’t lecture me on client-centricity or strategy. He sat with the silence, gave me a half-smile, and said, “Think about it. Come find me when you’ve worked it through.”
That single conversation — five minutes, one question, zero answers given — reshaped how I think about leadership, strategy, and the purpose of every recommendation I’ve ever made since. It wasn’t what he told me. It was what he didn’t tell me that made all the difference.
Fast-forward twenty years. I was leading a large global team, and a high-potential senior manager on my team had just delivered a solid but safe proposal. I could see exactly what was missing. Every instinct in me wanted to fix it right then and there — I had the experience, I had the answer, and I could have saved us both time.
Instead, I asked: “Walk me through your thinking. What’s the boldest version of this idea look like?”
What came out of her next twenty minutes of thinking was a solution I hadn’t considered. She expanded her own frame, owned the outcome, and delivered a result that exceeded what I would have handed her. Six months later, she was promoted.
That’s what a coaching culture does. It multiplies thinking. It multiplies ownership. And ultimately, it multiplies results.
What a Coaching Culture Is — and What It Isn’t
Let’s start with a clear definition, because this term gets misused constantly.
A coaching culture is an environment where leaders at every level prioritize developing people’s thinking and capability over simply telling them what to do. It is a deliberate, consistent practice of asking before telling, listening before speaking, and developing before directing.
Now let me bust the myth that kills this idea before it starts.
Myth vs. Reality The myth: “Coaching means being soft on performance. It’s all questions and no accountability.” |
A coaching culture does not mean:
- Avoiding hard decisions or difficult conversations
- Answering every performance issue with a reflective question
- Abandoning your expertise or your instincts
- Making every interaction a therapy session
It means you have added a powerful new tool to your leadership repertoire — one that develops people’s judgment rather than just their compliance. And in a world where organizations need people who can think, adapt, and lead in uncertainty, that distinction matters enormously.
Why Most Organizations Don’t Have a Coaching Culture
Here’s the honest truth: most organizations say they value coaching. Very few actually build a culture around it. After more than three decades leading teams across IBM, Microsoft, NielsenIQ, and now Precisely, I’ve seen the same barriers show up again and again — regardless of industry, geography, or company size.
Time Pressure Is the First Excuse
“I don’t have time to coach.” I’ve heard this from managers, directors, and SVPs alike. And it’s understandable. The pace of business today is relentless. But research from Harvard Business Review shows that leaders who coach actually spend less time firefighting over the long run, because their people develop the judgment to handle problems themselves. The short-term time investment has an outsized long-term return.
Leadership Style Legacy
Many leaders were promoted because they had the answers. They were the smartest person in the room, the fastest solver, the decisive executor. And now they’re expected to hold back their expertise and let others discover what they already know? That’s genuinely uncomfortable. As Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular noted in their landmark Harvard Business Review piece, “The Leader as Coach,” leaders often resist coaching because it deprives them of their most familiar management tool: asserting their authority.
Reward Systems That Prize Answers Over Questions
Most performance management systems reward output. They reward hitting the number, closing the deal, solving the crisis. They rarely reward the manager who asked a powerful question in a 1:1 that unlocked a breakthrough six months later. Until organizations start measuring and rewarding coaching behaviors, they will always be swimming upstream against their own incentive structures.
By the Numbers — International Coaching Federation |
Yet despite this evidence, the adoption of coaching as a core leadership discipline remains inconsistent. Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024 — and that 70% of the variance in team engagement can be attributed to the manager. The manager is the single greatest lever. And coaching is the skill that lever runs on.
The Leader-as-Coach Framework: 4 Moves Every Leader Must Master
I’m not a fan of frameworks that look elegant on a slide but disappear by Monday morning. This one is built from real leadership moments — things I’ve practiced, failed at, refined, and now teach.
1 Ask Before You Tell
Before you share your perspective, ask a question that opens the other person’s thinking. Not a trick question. Not a leading question designed to get them to your answer. A genuine, curious, powerful question. “What’s your read on why this isn’t working?” “What would you do if you weren’t worried about what I’d think?” “What haven’t you tried yet?” These questions unlock original thinking and build the habit of self-directed problem-solving. That compound interest pays off every time they face a challenge when you’re not in the room.
2 Listen to Understand, Not to Respond
Most leaders listen with one ear while composing their response with the other half of their brain. Coaching requires a different quality of attention — one where you are genuinely curious about the other person’s experience, not just waiting for your turn. This means tolerating silence. It means letting a thought complete itself before you jump in. And it means noticing what’s not being said as much as what is. The most important data often lives in the pause.
3 Reflect Back — Help People See Themselves More Clearly
One of the most powerful things a leader-coach can do is hold up a mirror. “When you said that, I noticed your energy dropped — what’s going on there?” “You’ve mentioned the word ‘afraid’ three times in five minutes. Is that the real issue?” Reflecting back what you observe — without judgment, without interpretation — helps people access clarity about their own thinking and patterns that they often cannot see on their own. This is the move that deepens trust fastest.
4 Challenge with Care — Push People Toward Their Growing Edge
Great coaches don’t let people stay comfortable. They push toward what I call the growing edge: the boundary between what someone knows they can do and what they’re not yet sure they can do. But the push must come with support, not pressure. “I think you’re capable of more than this proposal shows. What would it look like if you trusted yourself more?” That kind of challenge — rooted in belief rather than criticism — is what transforms capability into confidence.
How to Embed Coaching Into Everyday Leadership
Here’s where most coaching programs fall apart: they treat coaching as a separate activity — a formal session, a special conversation, a quarterly check-in. That’s not a coaching culture. That’s a coaching event.
Real coaching culture is built in the cracks of everyday leadership. Here are five specific moments where you can integrate it immediately:
- Start your 1:1s with a question, not a status update. Instead of “give me your update,” try “what’s the most important thing we should talk about today?” That single shift transfers ownership of the agenda — and the thinking — back to your direct report.
- Use project debriefs as development conversations. After a milestone or deliverable, resist the urge to tell people what went wrong. Ask: “What would you do differently? What did you learn about yourself in how you handled the hard moments?” The debrief becomes a coaching session — and the learning sticks.
- Turn hallway conversations into micro-coaching moments. When someone brings you a problem, pause before solving. Ask: “What’s your instinct on this?” Even a 90-second coaching exchange before you weigh in builds a habit of independent thinking.
- Develop your people in front of others. When a team member shares an insight in a group setting, invite them to go deeper: “That’s interesting — say more about that.” This coaches both the individual and signals to the whole team that developing thinking is valued here.
- Model learning out loud. One of the most underused coaching behaviors is sharing your own growth edges. When leaders say “I got this wrong and here’s what I learned,” they give their teams permission to be learners too. Safety is the soil that coaching culture grows in.
Coaching High Performers to the Next Level
There is a particular kind of leadership failure I’ve seen happen quietly across every organization I’ve ever been part of: the high performer who stops getting challenged.
They’re delivering. They’re reliable. They’re not in crisis, so they don’t get attention. And slowly, almost invisibly, they start to coast. Their ambition dims. Their innovation slows. And one day you’re in a talent review and someone asks, “Whatever happened to [name]?” And the honest answer is: we forgot to invest in them.
High performers don’t just want feedback — they want to be seen. They want someone who believes they are capable of things they haven’t done yet. Coaching is precisely that tool.
The Danger of Coasting |
Use coaching with your high performers to:
- Surface unexpressed ambitions and map a path toward them
- Assign stretch challenges that live just outside their current capability
- Invite them into strategic conversations where their perspective genuinely shapes direction
- Explicitly name the leadership qualities you see in them and ask them to reflect on how they want to grow those qualities
The leaders in your pipeline won’t emerge on their own. They need someone who believes in their potential before they fully believe in it themselves. That’s the coach’s role.
When Coaching Isn’t Enough — Knowing the Distinction
I want to be direct about something, because I think it’s important to say clearly: coaching is a development tool, not a performance management substitute.
There are moments in leadership where the coaching approach is exactly right. And there are moments where it is the wrong tool — and using it in those moments is not kindness, it’s avoidance.
| Situation | Right Approach |
| Person has the capability but hasn’t unlocked their own thinking | Coach — ask questions, develop judgment, build ownership |
| Crisis or urgent situation requiring immediate expertise | Direct — be decisive, share your knowledge, be clear |
| New team member learning the fundamentals | Direct and coach — teach the basics, then shift to coaching as competence builds |
| Persistent performance gap with a clear pattern | Manage performance directly — coaching is not a substitute for accountability |
| High performer ready for expanded scope | Coach toward the stretch — unlock ambition, challenge assumptions |
The best leaders I know are situationally fluid. They don’t default to one mode. They read the person, the moment, and the context — and they choose the right tool. Developing that judgment is itself a lifelong coaching journey.
The ROI of a Coaching Culture — and Why It Matters Now More Than Ever
We live in a moment of genuine organizational crisis around engagement. Gallup’s 2024 data shows that only 21% of employees globally are engaged at work — and that disengagement is costing the world economy an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity annually. In the United States, employee engagement hit a 10-year low in 2024, with only 31% of employees engaged.
At the same time, the same data shows us the solution: 70% of the variance in team engagement is attributable to the manager. That means the single highest-leverage action any organization can take is investing in developing its managers into coaches.
What the Research Shows |
In my own experience leading global customer support organizations and large technology teams, the teams that performed most consistently at the highest levels were never the teams with the most directives from above. They were the teams where people understood the “why,” owned the “how,” and felt seen as capable human beings — not just headcount on a roster.
Metrics matter. I’ve never run a team that didn’t hold itself to rigorous performance standards. But metrics are the output of culture. And coaching culture is the input that drives the output you actually want.
Your Next Move Starts This Week
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Laurent Pierre Jr.
SVP, Global Customer Support at Precisely | Global Technology Executive | Author, The Unfinished Work
Laurent Pierre Jr. brings more than 30 years of global technology leadership experience across IBM, Microsoft, NielsenIQ, and Precisely. His leadership philosophy is simple: metrics matter, but people matter more. Through The Future Ready Leader, he shares the frameworks, stories, and hard-won insights that help people leaders build teams worth leading — and careers worth having.
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