Manager Coaching: Coach Your Managers, Then Teach Them to Coach

Manager coaching means two things: coaching for managers, and managers coaching their teams. Gene Hammett, co-founder of Core Elevation, says one-on-one coaching gives managers what training can’t: dialogue, reflection, and questions that build ownership. Managers then use the same approach with their people, by asking instead of telling.

That’s me, and I’ll tell you why I care so much about it. Managers who get coached learn to coach, and coaching their people is how ownership spreads through a company.

Know the Two Sides of Manager Coaching

I’ve had hundreds of conversations with founders about their managers. When founders ask me about manager coaching, they usually mean hiring a coach for a manager. When managers search for it, they usually mean something else entirely, which is how to coach the people who report to them.

You need both. They’re the same skill, seen from two different chairs.

The left column is what a manager receives. The right column is what that manager gives back to the team, and I can tell you from experience that giving it gets a lot easier once you’ve been on the receiving end.

So why put this much attention on managers? Gallup’s research on managers finds that 70 percent of the variance in how engaged a team is comes down to its manager. You likely have a few managers right now who were promoted for being great at the job and then had to work out developing into leaders alone.

Give Managers a Coach, Then Add the Training

Books don’t talk back. Coaching does.

Neither does a training video or a one-day workshop (even a great one). A coach answers you, pushes on you, and asks the next question, and that’s why the lesson sticks.

Here’s how I describe it to the founders I work with.

“One-on-one coaching is a dialogue conversation; it is reflection time; it is perspective shifting.”

A manager sits with a coach, talks through a real situation from that week, and gets asked the questions they haven’t had the time or the nerve to ask themselves. They see their own habits from a new angle. The shift happens inside them, so it lasts a lot longer than a slide they saw once in a conference room.

“The one-on-one coaching is a much deeper way for the message to get to the person and for it to stay, and they begin to shift inside out.”

I felt this myself. I still remember the knot in my stomach the day I signed my first big check for a coach, and the change started before we ever met, because I had finally put something on the line.

What a Coaching Session Looks Like for a Manager

A good session for a manager follows a simple rhythm.

1. 1The manager brings a real situation from the week, like a missed deadline, a tense conversation, or a decision they keep putting off.
2. 2The coach asks questions until the manager can see the situation more clearly, including their own part in it.
3. 3The manager reflects on what they would do differently and why.
4. 4The manager decides on one next step, in their own words.
5. 5The next session opens with what happened when they tried it.

Notice who does most of the talking. The coach brings the questions, and the manager brings the answers.

How Coaching Compares to Training and Mentoring

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of training. Training gives managers shared language and models, and good mentors share experience they paid for the hard way. The trouble starts when a company calls training coaching and expects people to change how they lead.

That’s why our Leadership On-Ramp combines three things: training, facilitation, and coaching. The training gives managers the models, the guided peer discussions let them test those models against other managers’ real problems, and the one-on-one coaching makes all of it personal. You can see how that fits into our broader leadership development programs.

Developing managers as coaches shows up in the numbers too. Gallup’s manager development guide reports that managers who get trained to coach and develop people lead teams with up to 18 percent higher engagement.

Stop Directing and Start Asking

Here’s the uncomfortable truth I share with almost every leadership team I work with.

“Most managers think they understand coaching,” I tell them, “but they really don’t.”

Ask a manager to picture a coach, and most of them picture a high school sports coach who told people what to do. I call that the “sports coach model,” and it’s the one most managers copy because it’s the only one they’ve ever seen. They walk into a one-on-one with the answer already loaded and spend the meeting delivering it.

I learned this one early. Back in 2001, I launched an online company built on nothing but an idea, and it grew to more than $7 million in revenue in four years.

Growing that fast taught me how much leadership matters, and how little time I ever saved by being the person with every answer. That lesson is a big part of why I coach the way I do today.

“You’re doing a lot of directing, and that does not create ownership; it does not create transformation; it creates more resistance, usually.”

What Telling Gets You

Telling feels efficient (and on a busy Tuesday, you’ll swear it is). You know the answer, you hand it over, and the work moves.

Telling may work in the short term. Over weeks and months, though, people learn that their thinking isn’t needed, so they quietly stop bringing it. Left alone, the habit grows into several of the signs of a bad manager I see in growing companies.

What Coaching Gets You

Coaching asks. Coaching is never driven by fear, and it’s never about cornering someone until they comply.

Coaching, as I see it, is “allowing the other person to see themselves in a mirror and decide how they want to move forward and take ownership of that.”

In other words, every time you hand over an answer, you also hand over the problem the next time it shows up. Is that what you want?

Run a Weekly Coaching One-on-One in Three Parts

Managers ask me all the time how to structure a coaching conversation. Keep it simple, with one conversation each week with each direct report, covering three things in order.

Weekly matters. The same Gallup guide tells managers to give meaningful feedback at least once a week, and a standing one-on-one is the easiest way I know to make sure that actually happens.

Your calendar is already packed, so a weekly coaching conversation with every person on your team probably sounds impossible. I hear that from almost every manager I meet. But you’re already spending that time answering the same questions over and over, so you may as well spend it teaching people to answer them.

Open with what’s on their plate this week. Let them tell you where things stand before you add a single thing.

• ●What are you working on that matters most this week?
• ●Where are you stuck?
• ●What have you already tried?

Every direct report should be working on one skill at a time, like delegating, giving feedback, or running a meeting. Ask how that skill showed up this week, good or bad.

• ●Where did you get to practice that skill this week?
• ●What would you do differently next time?
• ●What do you want to try before we talk again?

Most managers skip this part, and it’s exactly where ownership grows. Talk about where they want to go, what they’re afraid of, and where they keep getting stuck.

• ●What part of your role scares you a little right now?
• ●Where do you keep hitting the same wall?
• ●What would make the next six months a big win for you?

Give space in all three parts. Here’s how I put it.

“Not by telling them answers of what’s next, but by giving them space to transform themselves.”

If you’re running these meetings for the first time, the new manager tips on our site cover the first conversations with a team you just inherited.

Build Six Coaching Habits Into Every Manager

Coaching is a skill, and skills come from habits a manager repeats every single week. Here are the six I look for in managers who coach well.

Ask Before You Answer

The next time a problem lands on your desk, ask the person who brought it what they think first. Even if you know the answer, their attempt shows you how they think and gives them the first shot at owning the fix.

Listen for What They Are Afraid Of

Most stuck employees aren’t short on information. They’re afraid of getting it wrong, of a conversation they don’t want to have, or of looking like they don’t belong in the role.

When you hear the fear, name it gently and ask what would make it smaller. A lot of those fears trace back to the tough conversations most managers avoid.

Hold Up a Mirror

Reflect back what you heard. You could say, “You told me you want more responsibility, and you also passed on the last two projects. What’s going on there?” A mirror helps the person see the gap for themselves, which lands very differently from being told about it.

Give Them Space to Decide

Resist the urge to close the loop for them. End the conversation with their decision, in their words, about what they’ll do next. People defend the plans they make.

Borrow From Your Own Coach

The managers who coach best are usually the ones who’ve been coached. They copy the questions, the stories, and the tools their coach used with them, sometimes word for word. That’s one reason I think executive coaching is worth it for leaders below the C-suite too.

On Growth Think Tank, I’ve now interviewed upward of 1,200 fast-growth leaders, and my job in every one of those conversations is to ask a good question and then get out of the way. Your managers can learn the same move.

Come Back to It Next Week

Coaching compounds. Ask what happened with last week’s decision before you start anything new. The follow-up tells your people their thinking matters enough for you to remember it.

Ask Questions That Hand Ownership Back

Questions are a manager’s main tool. Here’s how the same moment sounds when a manager tells and when a manager coaches.

Look at what changes in the coaching column. The manager stops being the person who solves the problem and becomes the person who helps the employee solve it.

That matters because responsibility, accountability, and ownership are three different things, even though most leaders use them like synonyms.

• ●Responsibility is assigned, which means the task gets done.
• ●Accountability is measured, which means the target gets hit.
• ●Ownership is internalized, which means the person keeps caring about the result long after anyone stops checking.

Telling can get you responsibility and accountability. Only the person can create ownership, and good questions are how you invite it.

Avoid the Mistakes That Turn Coaching Back Into Telling

Most managers who try coaching for the first time slide back into telling within a few weeks. Good managers do it too (founders included). Here’s what that slide usually looks like, so you can catch it early.

• ●Questions that are really answers. “Have you thought about calling the client?” is advice with a question mark on the end. Ask “What are your options?” and let them find the call.
• ●Status updates dressed up as one-on-ones. If the whole meeting is a project review, you never get to the skill or the growth journey. Move the status check to a shared doc and protect the conversation.
• ●Coaching that only shows up in a crisis. When the only coaching conversation happens after a mistake, people learn to dread it. Weekly coaching on ordinary weeks builds the trust you need for the hard ones.
• ●The rescue at the end. You ask good questions for twenty minutes, then hand over your answer in the last two. Let the person leave with their own plan, even if it isn’t the one you would pick.
• ●A manager with no coach of their own. Managers who have never been coached have nothing to copy. They default to the sports coach model because it’s the only one they’ve seen.

Watch Ownership Spread Down a Level

Here’s a pattern that shows up again and again in our programs.

Before. Managers come in believing they coach well. In practice, they’re directing.

After. They copy the approach, the questions, the stories, and the tools with their own teams, and ownership spreads down a level.

SHRM’s research on people managers points to the same ripple. In its study, 87 percent of highly effective managers said the supervisors reporting to them were among the best managers in the organization, compared with 69 percent of less effective managers.

Saint Hung, CEO of Universal Processing, said much the same once his sales managers finished Leadership On-Ramp. His point, shared on our site, is that you can’t substitute for a team whose foundational skills are in place, since those people go on to empower the rest of the company.

Spot the Managers Who Need Coaching Most

You don’t have to coach every manager at once. Start with the ones showing these signs.

• ●Their team brings every decision to them, even small ones.
• ●Their one-on-ones are status updates or get canceled when things get busy.
• ●They’re the best problem solver on the team, and they’re exhausted.
• ●Strong people on their team have gone quiet or started looking elsewhere.
• ●They put off the tough conversations until a small issue becomes a big one.

None of these signs makes someone a bad manager. They usually mean a good performer got promoted and nobody ever coached them on how to lead people.

Choose Manager Coaching That Changes Behavior

If you’re a founder or HR leader shopping for manager coaching, you’ll find plenty of offers that use the word coaching. Use this checklist to sort them.

Then ask any provider these questions before you sign anything.

• ●How much of the program is one-on-one coaching, and how much is content?
• ●Who are the coaches, and how were they trained?
• ●How do managers practice coaching their own direct reports during the program?
• ●What do managers bring to each session?
• ●How will we know our managers are coaching differently, beyond a satisfaction survey?

Be patient with the answer to that last one. Real behavior change takes months of practice, and any provider promising a quick transformation is selling you something else.

Roll Out Manager Coaching Across Your Company

Why now? Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace data puts global manager engagement at 22 percent for 2025, five points lower than the year before. Gallup ties most of the recent drop in employee engagement to that slide in manager engagement.

Your managers are carrying more and getting less support. Here’s how to change that, one level at a time.

Start with the managers themselves. A manager can’t give a coaching experience they’ve never had, so begin with one-on-one coaching for them.

Make the three-part conversation a standing meeting between every manager and each direct report. Protect it the same way you’d protect a meeting with your biggest customer.

In your own one-on-ones with managers, ask which question, story, or tool from their coaching they used with their team this week. The question keeps the borrowing going.

Gallup suggests rating managers partly on how well they grow talent and get people ready for bigger roles. Look at who on each team now solves the problems the manager used to solve.

Frequently Asked Questions

Founders, HR leaders, and managers keep asking me versions of these five questions about manager coaching.

Try One Better Question This Week

I started with a simple idea, which is that coaching is a dialogue. Everything else in this article comes back to that.

You’ve heard “ask more questions” a hundred times. But are you doing it in your one-on-ones this week?

Take five minutes right now. Grab a pen, write down the name of everyone who reports to you, and next to each name write the one skill they’re building and one question you’ll ask them about it.

If you lead managers, get them a coach and give them a weekly one-on-one structure to copy. If you’re a manager, share this article with your CEO or HR leader and ask what coaching you could get. What if the fastest way to grow your managers is one better conversation a week?

When did you last ask before you told? Which of your managers has never been coached?

Lead with courage.