A few months back, I wrote about what happens when the funding for the Coaching Professional Apprenticeship disappears.
The real question it raised wasn’t what replaces the levy. It was why so many organisations needed external funding to justify developing coaching capability; a decision they should have been making on its own merits anyway.
That question doesn’t go away once you’ve answered it. It just gets followed by a harder one. If you’ve decided coaching is worth investing in regardless of who’s paying for it, where do you actually start?
I get some version of this question a lot, including recently, on a podcast recording that’ll be out at the end of the summer. Here’s where my thinking actually goes.
Decide what you’re building, because they’re not the same thing
The first decision, and the one most often skipped, is whether you’re building coaches or building coaching skills. Those are not the same investment, and treating them as interchangeable is where a lot of this goes wrong before it’s even started.
Coaching skills, the kind every leader benefits from, are things like listening without jumping in, holding a pause a beat longer than feels comfortable, asking a question you genuinely don’t know the answer to. “Have you tried…” and “could you…” sound like questions. They’re suggestions wearing a question mark. The real test of an open question is whether you had any idea what the answer would be before you finished asking it. Every manager should have these skills. Most weren’t taught them, at school or anywhere else, which is part of why they default under pressure to the other pattern: someone brings a problem, and the fastest route to feeling useful is to grab the cape and fix it. It works, narrowly. It also means that person comes back to you with the next problem instead of working it out themselves, because you’ve just taught them that’s faster.
Being a coach is a different thing. It’s a role, usually with some kind of certification behind it, and it carries weight that a leader using coaching skills well doesn’t carry in the same way. Coaching has become a slightly fashionable word to put in a job title lately, regardless of whether the role actually is coaching, and that confusion costs you later. If you don’t decide, clearly, which one you’re building, you end up training everyone the same way. People who only needed a half-day on listening and questions get handed the identity and expectations of a coach. People who are genuinely stepping into a coaching role get under-supported, because the organisation assumes the training they all did together was equivalent. It wasn’t.
If you’re building coaches, build what holds them up too
If the answer is genuinely coaches, not just better coaching skills across the board, there’s a second decision that follows it, and this one’s about duty of care, not strategy.
Internal coaches sit close to the people they work with. They know the politics, the history, the things that never quite got said out loud. That closeness is exactly what makes them useful, and exactly what makes the role harder than it looks from outside, because the boundaries blur in ways that rarely get discussed before someone’s already standing in the middle of them. They carry confidentiality with nowhere to put it down. They see things they can’t act on and can’t unsee.
That’s what proper coaching supervision is for. Not line management supervision. Not a nice-to-have. Not a budget line that gets cut when things tighten, but the structure that lets someone hold this role without it costing them something quietly, over time. It’s the part that was always meant to be there, sitting underneath the parts that got the fanfare, and it’s the first thing to get treated as optional when the spending’s already been decided elsewhere.
If you’re certifying people internally as coaches and there’s no answer to where they take what they’re carrying, that’s worth pausing on before you do any more of it.
Decide what you’re actually going to reward
Here’s the part that explains why so many otherwise well-designed coaching initiatives quietly don’t stick. You can get the first two decisions right, train the right people in the right thing, build proper supervision underneath your coaches, and still end up with a coaching culture that exists on paper and nowhere in the room.
That happens because what’s measured is what’s managed. If a leader’s objectives, and the conversations in their one-to-ones with their own manager, are still built entirely around output and speed, coaching behaviour will lose to whatever actually gets rewarded, every time it’s inconvenient. The same goes for how mistakes get handled. If the instinct in the room is still to look for who got it wrong rather than what to learn and take forward, you can’t expect coaching to take root, because coaching depends on people feeling safe enough to not have the answer yet, and blame culture makes not having the answer yet feel dangerous.
There’s a harder layer underneath that too, which is about the leaders themselves. Leaders default to whatever’s familiar under pressure, and what’s familiar is usually fixing. It feels good to be useful. It feels good to have the answer. The shift coaching actually asks of a leader is a real one: it’s not about you anymore, it’s about what you achieve through the people in front of you. That’s an uncomfortable thing to look at honestly, more uncomfortable than redesigning a training programme, because it means examining your own default rather than someone else’s skill gap.
What I’d actually suggest
None of this is about which course to commission or which credential to look for. It’s closer to: decide what you’re building before you build it. If part of that is coaches, support them properly once they’re in the role. And be honest about whether what gets measured and modelled in your organisation will let any of this actually show up, or quietly work against it.
These questions slow things down. They don’t fit neatly into a launch date. But skipping them is usually where the good intentions of building a coaching culture fall down.
If you’re somewhere in the middle of working this out, whether that’s a live decision now or something you’re heading toward after the summer holidays, I’d be glad to think it through with you.
