Coaching as a leadership style has been mainstream for more than two decades — long enough that most senior leaders claim to practise it, and long enough for the evidence to accumulate about what actually works. The evidence is somewhat sobering. Most attempts to build coaching cultures in organisations produce modest results or fail entirely. Understanding why is more useful than prescribing what to do instead.

1. Overestimating your own coaching competence

Studies consistently show that managers overestimate their coaching ability relative to how those they coach experience it. A 2016 Harvard Business Review study found that nearly a quarter of executives in their sample rated their own coaching competence significantly higher than their coaches rated it — and those who overestimated by the most tended to be the worst coaches in the sample.

The Dunning-Kruger effect operates acutely here. Coaching competence — real coaching competence — requires a developed capacity for self-awareness, genuine curiosity about others, and the discipline to hold back your own perspective in favour of theirs. These are skills that can be developed, but they are not acquired by attending a single training event. Believing they have been is perhaps the most reliably counterproductive assumption in leadership development.

2. Treating coaching as the answer to every situation

Daniel Goleman's influential work on leadership styles identified six distinct modes — coaching being one of them — and argued that effective leaders develop fluency in all six and the judgment to choose appropriately. The coaching style is powerful for developing autonomy, building long-term capability, and navigating complex personal challenges. It is considerably less useful for delivering urgent feedback about underperformance, handling compliance issues, or managing crisis situations.

Organisations that declare a universal commitment to coaching sometimes produce leaders who are so committed to the coaching frame that they ask questions when people need answers, facilitate when people need direction, and coach when people actually need to be told something clearly. The goal is situational fluency, not ideological consistency.

3. Expecting transformation to happen quickly

Leadership culture changes at the speed of behaviour, not of policy. A training programme that creates theoretical understanding of coaching will not produce coaches. It will produce people who know what coaching is. The gap between knowing and being is wide, and crossing it requires sustained practice, reflection, feedback, and patience — typically measured in years rather than months.

Abrupt behaviour change by senior leaders also tends to confuse rather than inspire teams. A manager who has led hierarchically for a decade and suddenly begins asking open questions and withholding answers is likely to create anxiety rather than empowerment. Teams need time and support to develop the capacity to function with greater autonomy; this cannot be forced or rushed.

4. Not modelling it from the top

Coaching cultures do not develop in organisations where the senior leadership team operates non-collaboratively, makes decisions unilaterally, or treats its own development as complete. The signal sent by leaders who are unwilling to be coached themselves is powerful and consistent: coaching is for other people.

Leaders who engage with their own coaching, who are visibly learning and developing, and who speak honestly about what they find difficult create an organisational context where the same behaviour becomes normal at other levels. This is modelling in its most literal sense.

5. Assuming internal coaches are a cheaper substitute for external ones

Internal coaches offer genuine advantages — contextual knowledge, existing trust, shared reference points. But internal coaching programmes carry risks that are consistently underestimated. Internal coaches operate within the same system as their coachees. Their judgment is affected by the same political dynamics, the same cultural assumptions, and the same pressure that their coachees experience. The confidentiality that makes coaching safe is harder to guarantee internally. And internal coaches typically have significantly less training than external professionals.

This does not mean internal coaching is not worthwhile — the evidence suggests that organisations that combine internal and external coaching produce better outcomes than those that rely on either alone. But building an internal coaching capability as a substitute for external investment, rather than a complement to it, tends to produce a programme that looks like coaching without delivering its benefits.

Coaching can be transformative. Getting it right is more demanding than most organisations expect, and more rewarding when the investment is genuine.