Why coaching your team might be the best thing you can do as a leader
In addition to my day job of leading a team of compliance professionals, l have the good fortune to be able to work within my organisation as a leadership coach.
In my organisation, there are hundreds of people leaders and several thousand individual employees. The organisation has big ambitions and it is the organisation’s people that need to deliver the growth required to fulfil those ambitions.
But to do so, those individuals need to be able to grow themselves, because make no mistake, the economic, political and technological challenges we will face in the next few years are unlikely to be like any we have faced before.
And, in my view, the single best way to facilitate the growth and development of people in the workplace is through leaders taking a coaching approach.
What does leader/manager coaching involve?
Coaching is usually a coach - client encounter. The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential."
But your team members are not your clients.
So, it is helpful to conceptualise leader coaching slightly differently. One useful definition is that it involves “a supervisor or manager serving as a coach or facilitator of learning, in which he or she enacts specific behaviours that enable his/her employee (coachee) to learn, develop, and improve their performance” (Ellinger et al, 2011). Therefore, key characteristics of leader/manager coaching are that:
It occurs within the hierarchical manager-team member relationship (unlike professional coaching which is peer-to-peer),
it focuses on helping employees learn, develop, and improve performance,
The manager acts as a facilitator of learning rather than as an instructor,
It involves specific coaching behaviours and skills,
It can happen formally or informally in everyday work interactions, and
It exemplifies a participative style of management/leadership.
In some ways coaching as a leader is harder than coaching as an independent coach.
When you are coaching your own team members, you have a direct stake in what they are doing, you’re close to what is involved, and you probably have strong ideas about what needs to be done and how. So, it is easy to slip into instructing or directing, instead of coaching.
In next week’s newsletter, I will look much more deeply at how to become an effective leader coach. But, first we’ll look at what the evidence tells us about why it is worth your while focusing on developing this particular leadership skill.
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The tangible benefits of coaching your team members
The research demonstrates that leader coaching:
Improves individual job performance – employees who experience their manager as a good coach show higher individual performance. Ribeiro et al. (2021)
Boosts innovative work behaviour (IWB) – managerial coaching strengthens four aspects of IWB: exploring problems, generating ideas, championing ideas and implementing them, with the strongest effect on implementation. Pajuoja et al. (2025)
Increases commitment and attachment to the organisation – coaching by managers is interpreted as supportive, leading to stronger emotional attachment, identification and loyalty to the organisation. Ribeiro et al. (2021)
Enhances skills, learning and capability development – coaching improves work-relevant skills (e.g. goal skills, interpersonal skills) and supports ongoing capability building and autonomy in daily work. Jones et al. (2016); Pajuoja et al. (2025)
Improves transfer of learning into on-the-job performance – because coaching is personalised and embedded in real work, it appears to translate learning into actual performance more effectively than many traditional training interventions. Jones et al. (2016)
Strengthens positive psychological outcomes – coaching is associated with gains in self-efficacy, confidence, motivation and wellbeing, along with reduced stress and more positive work experiences. Jones et al. (2016); Ribeiro et al. (2021); Pajuoja et al. (2025)
Builds higher quality leader – team member relationships – coaching behaviours (listening, supporting, constructive feedback) improve trust, relationship quality and satisfaction with the manager. Ribeiro et al. (2021)
Creates a more collaborative, learning-oriented and innovative climate – managerial coaching encourages co-operative problem solving, constructive handling of mistakes, and experimentation, helping unlock employees’ latent innovation potential. Pajuoja et al. (2025)
Has strong impact when delivered by internal coaches (including managers) – internal coaching can have stronger effects than external coaching, and coaching is effective across face-to-face and blended (e-coaching) formats, making leader-coach approaches scalable. Jones et al. (2016)
So, there is a pretty solid case for developing your self as a leader who coaches.
If you do this, you will drive improved outcomes in multiple ways, your team will become more capable and more committed, and your own job will become more satisfying as you move from being fixer to facilitator.
Next week, we’ll look closely at how you begin to develop your abilities to coach as you lead.
References
Ellinger, A. D., Hamlin, R. G., Beattie, R. S., Wang, Y. L., & McVicar, O. (2011). Managerial coaching behaviors in learning organizations. Journal of Management Development, 30(2), 76-93.
Jones, R., Woods, S., & Guillaume, Y. (2016). The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta‐analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89, 249-277.
Pajuoja, M., Viitala, R., & Henttonen, K. (2025). Supporting innovating employees: how managerial coaching affects four dimensions of innovative work behavior. Review of Managerial Science.
Ribeiro, N., Nguyen, T., Duarte, A., De Oliveira, R., & Faustino, C. (2020). How managerial coaching promotes employees' affective commitment and individual performance. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management.
More leadership inspiration
What is coaching? More on the definitions of coaching and how it differs from other similar development approaches.
65 Effective leadership questions. These will come in handy as you ask more and tell less.
How to listen to unlock. Listening is at the heart of coaching. This technique can help with the knottiest of problems.
What Next?
All of my posts for new leaders are here.
All my broader leadership posts are here.
How I can help you
Coaching - I have a few spots available for 1 to 1 coaching. I can help you with any of the people leadership challenges you might be facing. There are more details here.