…Almost No One Does It
Most front line sales managers don’t know that coaching is their job.
They were the best seller on the team. That’s why they got promoted. And no one told them the work had changed, so they kept doing the thing they were good at, just from a higher position. Taking over important calls, rescuing stalled deals, directing the efforts of the people they lead.
They believe that’s management, individual contribution with a bigger title and more responsibility. The coaching that is so important for them to be doing never happens, largely because they never knew they were supposed to be doing it. Nobody ever told them it is the highest leverage tool available to them in driving their team’s performance. Nobody told them it was critical to their own performance.
It’s tempting to call this a training problem. Fix the onboarding for new managers and you’ve solved it. But ask where they are supposed to learn how to coach and it gets confusing.
Maybe it’s something enablement does, but they aren’t managers and they may not have had experience in coaching individual performance development. Perhaps, we think these front line managers should learn it from their managers. The problem is, their managers actually never learned it either, and for the same reason.
The higher you go, the thinking is the leadership job is less about developing the individuals reporting to the leader. More of their attention is focused on strategy, dashboards, hitting the numbers, and managing their own managers.
As leaders grow into more senior positions, the recognition of the importance of coaching was never developed. They learned by watching their own managers and if those managers never coached, they never learned about coaching.
It’s not that they don’t believe in coaching. They just never knew that coaching was a fundamental part of driving organizational performance. They never learned what high impact coaching was. They never understood the impact coaching has on individual and organizational performance.
It’s not that they don’t coach. Most managers do some version of it. They talk about what people should be doing; more outreach, prospecting. Better qualification or leveraging the methodology better. They talk about building better pipelines and the importance of hitting the numbers.
They do call, deal, pipeline reviews because their managers did those things to them. But too often, in doing these things, they are improvising. Doing what they think is the right way to do something, but making it up as they go. Or they are emulating what they experienced with past managers.
But what they do is rarely systematic. And often isn’t the right kind of coaching. They don’t know this, they can’t change it because no one is developing them at it. What’s missing isn’t effort or even good intent. It’s that none of their managers ever made coaching deliberate. As a result it’s something they never learned.
The absence isn’t malicious. It’s omission, repeated at every level, by people who never knew what they should be doing or its impact.
This isn’t because these leaders and organizations are clueless. Most are successful. They have become good at the things that constantly demanded their attention. The strategy, hitting the goals, structuring the organization, managing-up, and doing the work the job rewarded.
They aren’t failing, but something important is missing. And its absence is the difference between an organization that may be good, and consistent top performers. Those committed to constant learning, improving, adapting. You can run an organization for years and never recognize the cost. But when you start to see the organizations that understands this, seeing their performance and what you are missing, then the importance becomes clear.
Watch an organization that’s actually committed to coaching, an organization where coaching is embedded into their DNA. Development happens at every level. Managers are coached by their managers, who are coached by theirs. And in that environment every manager recognizes that coaching is the job. The difference between those organizations and the rest isn’t talent or discipline. It’s whether developing people was ever made systematic, or left to each manager to improvise alone.
Even the managers who do engage often confuse coaching with directing. They review the deal, see what’s wrong, say “do this and this,” and walk away believing they coached. They told people what to do. Telling someone the answer is not developing their people’s ability, but it looks close enough, at least in the short term, that we’ve stopped distinguishing the two.
And if you ask managers whether coaching matters, most will say yes. I don’t take the yes very seriously. If they read anything, they know that’s the answer they have to give. But watch where their time and attention go and we see what they actually believe.
Likewise, I’m not convinced that most managers believe coaching is important. I think most have never had to define or test what it is. But they know what they are expected to say.
Which means the real problem is not that we agree coaching matters and fail to do it. It’s that we misunderstand three key things: what coaching is, what it costs us not to do it, and who it’s for.
What it is: let’s start with it is not directing or telling people what to do. In this series, we will dive more deeply into what it is and what it isn’t. But for the moment, it’s a collaborative learning process, maximizing the person’s ability to perform in their current job and developing their ability to grow into bigger responsibilities.
The second one is what it costs, and the cost is hard to see. We tend to see current performance, but fail to recognize what the full potential might be. As a result, we don’t see the costs of not coaching.
We can see research about performance differences in orgs that coach effectively and those that don’t. But that data is always remote. It’s not about us and it’s impossible to bridge that gap. “Will my team be 19% better because I’m coaching them?”
You can’t see the cost of not coaching, because it is hidden in missed potential.
A seller who’s never developed stops getting better. They reach a level and stay there. They might have been better, but no one worked on it. Because they’re still doing the job, no one notices what they didn’t become.
The manager who only does the work stays a doer. The team never grows past what that manager can personally handle, because no one under them was ever developed to do more.
None of this looks like failure. The numbers can be fine while it’s happening. So when a team stops improving, we don’t trace it back to the coaching that never happened. We blame the market, the product, the territory. Anything that comes with a number attached. The people who could have been more, and weren’t, never show up in the report at all.
The third is who it’s for, and this is something almost everyone gets wrong. We treat coaching as remedial: “Catch something people are doing wrong and fix it.” There can be a stigma attached to coaching. Strong performers get left alone as we focus on people who are struggling.
Coaching isn’t how you fix people who are failing. It’s how anyone gets better in doing their job. It’s how we take top performers and help them achieve new levels of performance. It’s doing the same with medium and lower levels of performance. It’s based on the commitment to curiosity, continued learning and improvement.
But the part that gets missed entirely is that it isn’t only for the person being coached. It develops the coach. Helping someone else reason through a problem forces you to understand the reasoning yourself, to see your own people clearly, to sharpen your own judgment. The manager who coaches well gets better at leading. Coaching is collaborative learning, and both people in the room are learning.
I want to be careful this doesn’t turn soft. Saying coaching is about growth rather than correction doesn’t make it gentle or aspirational. It doesn’t imply a willingness to ignore real performance gaps. Growth requires honesty about where someone is weak. It’s about identifying the gap and not about assigning blame. The directness and candor must always be there, what changes is the orientation that underlies it.
This is also why coaching has to be regular, and the reason has nothing to do with logging more minutes. So many of the reports we read focus on the time spent coaching, building the argument that more time shows greater impact.
The thing we develop in high impact coaching; the judgment, reading a situation or the customer, how someone thinks through a deal, how they look at their jobs and their own performance, is continuous. It never stops and has nothing to do with whether an individual gets 32 minutes a week or more or less.
Coaching is ongoing, it never stops. When we look at development, it’s one of continuous learning and improvement. As a result, coaching is continuous. We coach in every review and meeting, windshield time or standing in line at Starbucks represent opportunities to help our people and ourselves learn and grow. It’s not that we spent an hour in a one on one, but it’s that we and the people we coach are committed to learning and growing and look for those opportunities.
This post is the first in a series. I will be doing deeper dives into these issues and more. But before I go further, it’s important to be clear about what each person actually owns in these coaching conversations.
For the manager coaching: Your job in a coaching conversation is not to fix this deal. Your job is to develop the person in getting better at managing this deal and every deal that follows. And to get sharper in how you engage people in changing their thinking.
If coaching only happens when someone is failing, you’ve conceded your best people’s growth and taught everyone else that being coached is a mark against them. The orientation you bring: “I am here to catch what’s wrong…,” or “My job is to develop how this person grows…,” sets what the conversation can be before either of you says a word.
For the person being coached: Coaching is not a performance judgement. It’s the fastest path you have to improve, and you’re the one with the most to gain from it. But it only works if you look for that which is most helpful; the deal you’re unsure about, the call that went sideways, the struggle with the pipeline. Treat the conversation as evaluation and you’ve limited your own growth.
Here are a couple of things to reflect on. Think about how genuine development happens in your organization. Is it something that actively engages everyone or is it focused on people in trouble? Is it something that’s embedded into the operating culture of the organization?
Think, also, about your own personal development, whether you are an individual contributor or a leader. Are you actively committed to your own development and performance? Are you actively seeking honest feedback and the opportunity to learn and grow?
I will be doing a much deeper dive into coaching and developing a culture of continuous learning, development and improvement in the coming posts.
Afterword: Here is a fascinating AI generated discussion of this post. I particularly like the discussion around “missed potential.” Enjoy!
