Small Habits, Repeated, Build a Coaching Culture
- Nancy Maher
- Jul 17
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 25
Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement, according to Gallup.
You cannot mandate a coaching culture into existence.
You can send everyone on a leadership training course, print the values on the wall, and add coaching to the competency framework, and still watch nothing change on Monday morning. A coaching culture is not a programme you launch. It is a set of small habits, repeated by leaders, until asking instead of telling becomes simply how things are done around here.
The good news is that this is well within reach. Coaching is not about turning your managers into professional coaches, nor is it about coaching in every conversation. It is about adding coaching to the leadership toolkit and flexing into it when it helps. This is a practical guide to rolling that out across your team, starting with the habits that make it stick.
Contents
Coaching is a leadership tool, not a personality transplant
I will be honest: for years I thought I was coaching my team.
I asked questions, I cared, and I gave people plenty of my time. But when I looked hard at what I was actually doing, I was mentoring, constantly offering my own answers and steering people towards what I would have done. I was in advice mode and did not even realise it. Noticing that gap between the coaching I thought I was giving and the advice I was actually giving changed how I lead, and it is why I am sure this is a habit any leader can build.
Great leaders flex their style. Sometimes the moment calls for direction, sometimes for teaching, sometimes for mentoring from hard-won experience, and sometimes for coaching: staying curious a little longer and helping someone reach their own answer.
Coaching is simply one more tool in the kit, not a wholesale change of personality. Michael Bungay Stanier sums up the shift as a little more asking people questions and a little less telling people what to do. The skill your leaders are building is not a new identity; it is the judgement to read the moment and resist defaulting to advice mode. Our guide to a coaching leadership style unpacks what that looks like in practice.
🤔 Reflective question: In your last three one-to-ones, how often did you ask a genuine question before offering your solution?
A coaching culture is built on habits, not mandates
Here is what makes this achievable: coaching is conceptually simple.
A good coaching conversation can happen in ten minutes, in a weekly one-to-one or a corridor chat, and nobody needs a qualification to ask a better question. The hard part is not the technique; it is the habit, catching yourself in the half-second before you leap to the fix. Culture is not built in the town hall. It is built from hundreds of small moments in which a leader asks rather than tells, and those moments compound. If managers drive 70% of the variance in engagement, then how your leaders lead is the single biggest lever you have, and coaching is one of the most practical ways to pull it.
It clearly pays off. In organisations with a strong coaching culture, 72% report a strong link between coaching and employee engagement (ICF and Human Capital Institute), and those organisations also tend to see better retention and stronger revenue. The everyday benefits are just as real: people take more ownership, solve more of their own problems and grow faster, while you stop being the bottleneck every decision has to pass through. Our piece on cultivating a coaching culture goes deeper, but the principle is simple: repeated habits become culture.
Give your leaders a shared toolkit
Start with being coached
The most powerful item in the toolkit is coaching itself: being coached. When a leader experiences good coaching for themselves, whether that is 1:1 coaching or executive coaching with an internal or external coach, or a group coaching programme like EMPOWER where they practise alongside their peers, they feel the behaviours role-modelled first-hand, the deep listening, the open questions, the comfortable silence, and absorb them in a way theory alone cannot teach. It often takes being on the receiving end to really get it.
Being coached also quietly busts one of the most stubborn leadership myths, that a good leader should have all the answers. Once you have felt how powerful the right question can be, the pressure to always know the answer starts to ease. A good coaching workshop, like our Intro to Coaching workshop for senior leaders, is a strong way to kick-start this, giving people a shared language and their first real practice at coaching before the habit-building begins.
Beyond experience itself, a shared language and a few simple tools help the habit spread. Three are worth putting in every leader’s hands:
Taming the Advice Monster. Most of us jump straight into fix-it mode. Michael Bungay Stanier calls this the Advice Monster in his book The Advice Trap, and the antidote is not to stop giving advice but to delay it: ask one more question before you offer your answer. Two of the most useful are "What’s on your mind?" and "And what else?" Our summary of The Coaching Habit has more. His TED talk on taming it is a great 15-minute watch.
A simple structure: TGROW. For one to ones, reviews and career conversations, TGROW (Topic, Goal, Reality, Options, Way forward) keeps a leader exploring before rushing to solutions and hands ownership to the other person. Our TGROW guide has the full question set.
A bank of good questions. Great coaching runs on great questions. Keep a shared list your leaders can borrow from, like our questions great leaders ask their teams.
Underneath all of it sits listening, the foundation of every coaching conversation.
💡 Tip: Give every leader a one-page TGROW cheat sheet and encourage them to keep it visible. A prompt on the desk is one of the simplest ways to make a new habit stick.
How to roll out a coaching culture
Tools alone will not shift a culture. Two things move it: the habits you build in yourself, and the way you help your leaders build theirs.
Start your own coaching habit
Your leaders watch what you do far more than what you say, so the culture starts with your own habits. A few worth building:
Open your one-to-ones with a question
Ask one more question before you advise
Use the TGROW cheat sheet
Pause before you respond
Notice your Advice Monster
Block 15 minutes to coach
Help your leaders build the habit
Your bigger opportunity is the leaders you lead. Help the habit spread across the team:
Run an Intro to Coaching workshop for your senior leaders
Role-model coaching in your own one-to-ones
Run a TGROW lunch and learn
Start a book club around The Advice Trap
Build a shared coaching language
Provide leadership development support that includes coaching
If coaching is new to your leaders, or they are not yet sure how it could help them, a shared workshop is often the best entry point. An Intro to Coaching session gets everyone on the same page, gives them a common language and a first go at coaching, and turns it from an abstract idea into something they have actually tried. That shared starting line is often what gets a coaching culture moving.
Whatever you choose, make it safe to be imperfect. Nobody tames their Advice Monster overnight, and a culture of psychological safety is what lets people practise, stumble and keep going. Pick one or two of these to champion first, because a single visible habit that leaders actually adopt will travel further than any glossy launch.
🤔 Reflective question: Which one of these could you start this week, with just one of your leaders?
Know when not to coach
Coaching is a tool, not a rule, and part of flexing your style is knowing when to reach for something else.
Encourage your leaders to skip the coaching questions when the answer is genuinely obvious, when time is short, in a crisis or safety issue, during a formal disciplinary process, when psychological safety is low, or when someone simply is not in the mood to be coached. Naming these openly gives people permission to coach when it helps and to be direct when that is what the moment needs. It also builds the trust a coaching culture depends on. Coaching at the wrong moment can feel evasive, like withholding an answer you clearly have, so the judgement of when to use it matters as much as the skill itself.
How to tell it’s working
You will feel a coaching culture before you can measure it. A few signs it is taking hold:
People bring thinking, not just problems. They arrive with a view or some options, rather than waiting to be told what to do.
Questions outnumber instructions. One to ones and meetings carry more "what do you think?" and less "here is what to do."
Advice comes later, if at all. Leaders pause before they fix, and often find they did not need to.
Ownership sticks. People leave conversations owning the next step, so less work lands back on your desk.
None of this appears overnight. Look for the trend, not the perfect week.
Start small, start now
You will not build a coaching culture with a mandate, and you do not need one.
You build it the way every culture is built: through small habits, repeated, until they become how you do things here. Ask one more question before you give advice. Open a one to one with "What’s on your mind?" Catch your own Advice Monster once a day. Do it yourself, make it easy for your leaders to do the same, and celebrate it when they do. That is how a coaching habit becomes a coaching culture.
🤔 Reflective question: What is the one coaching habit you want to be known for, six months from now?
Ready to help your leaders build the habit for good?
Shaping your wider culture too? Explore our workplace culture work.
References
Gallup, State of the American Manager (2015).
International Coach Federation and Human Capital Institute, Building a Coaching Culture.
Michael Bungay Stanier, The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap.
