I’ve been asking people a question lately: where did you learn to coach?
Most people pause. Then they tell me they didn’t, not really. They picked it up watching their own manager, good or bad, or they just figured it out as they went… Which is interesting, because: Forrester’s 2025 Future of Work Survey found that employees with a manager they’d describe as a coach are 1.7 times more likely to say they plan to stay at their company. Forbes reported that organizations with strong coaching cultures see a 48% increase in organizational performance. And Gallup puts a number on what’s at stake when that’s missing: replacing an employee runs 50% to 200% of their annual salary.
When I started out, I was learning coaching processes straight from the banks, organizations that built entire employee development systems around it. They cared about skill development, sure. But they were just as deliberate about developing the person behind the skill set. Coaching wasn’t an afterthought. It was the engine.
I later completed my formal training through the Co-Active Training Institute, one of the most rigorous coach training programs in the world, and it confirmed what I’d already learned in those early years: the best coaching has never been about the skill. It’s about the person.
I keep wondering what happened to that. Somewhere along the way, a lot of coaching narrowed down to the task at hand: hit this number, fix this behavior, close this gap. The person underneath it all gets less airtime than the skill.
None of that is about technology. It’s about people staying because someone in a leadership seat actually coached them, developed them as a person, not just their output. That’s what gets built in a real coaching relationship, one aimed at the person, not just the skill in front of them.
I’m curious if that matches what you’re seeing too.
It’s also the question behind a new workshop I’ve built: Coach the Coach.
Inside, I walk you through the same framework I’ve used with leadership teams at national hotel and real estate portfolios, a top-tier pension fund, and one of Canada’s largest institutional property owners, the GROW model, but taught the way I coach it in the room, not the watered down version you’ll find in a slide deck.
Goal: not what you think they need. What they actually want to achieve.
Reality: what’s really happening right now, without you rushing to fix it.
Options: your job is to stay quiet longer than feels comfortable and let them generate the ideas.
Way Forward: real commitment, with a date attached and a confidence check.
That’s the structure. Simple, but so effective. And, by the end of the day, you’ll have learned it and practiced it, so you can implement it right away with your team.
If your managers are coaching the task and not the person, you’re not fixing the root of the problem, you’re just pushing it down the road.
Reach out to learn more!