The ideal manager is nothing short of a miracle.
They’re always available to their team; they understand what motivates each individual to perform, and they co-create performance objectives and targets that bolster each employee’s confidence and enable them to excel. They have empathy and emotional intelligence by the bucketload. They’re as happy discussing high-level organisational goals with their leader as they are engaging in effective 1:1 development discussions with their direct reports, or delivering engaging end-of-year performance reviews.
They combine deep subject expertise with a real passion for performance, and they’re always thinking about ways to get the most from themselves and their people, all while managing and effectively prioritising their own responsibilities as individual contributors.
Imagine if every single people manager at your organisation was like this. How great would that be?
It sounds ideal. But in the real world, managers are stretched, not superhuman.
The reality? They’re firefighting. Meetings pile up. Conversations with their people slip down the list. Feedback becomes reactive rather than developmental. Coaching takes a back seat to delivery. Over time, the intent to lead well gets buried under the pressure to perform and the usual side effects follow: disengagement, burnout, attrition, talent stagnation. You get the gist.
While managers are struggling to find time to lead, they’re also missing the support to grow.
Beneath it all lies the inherent problem: most managers aren’t being developed themselves. Recent research from the CMI and YouGov found that almost a third of UK managers haven’t developed their management or leadership skills in the past three years - a reflection of a system that isn’t effectively supporting manager development and growth in the flow of work - and according to Gallup, 44% of managers globally have received no formal training at all.
If we expect managers to engage, develop, and inspire others, we need to equip them with the frameworks that make it possible - not more shiny tools that put performance and development on a par with holiday requests or absence management.
They need practical, repeatable structures that make great leadership behaviours easy to deliver, every single day.
That’s where coaching frameworks for managers come in. They give managers a clear starting point for meaningful conversations, helping them to listen deeply, ask better questions, build trust and accountability with their teams. Over time, these conversations compound, turning capable managers into confident coaches and creating the foundation for real performance growth.
When managers aren’t supported to grow, even the best intentions can backfire. The “always-on” manager is a great example of the challenge.
On the face of it, this archetype ticks many of the boxes that HR is looking for in a good people manager. They’re available. They’re present. They offer direction and feedback. They know that modern business can change rapidly, and those changes require us to pivot rapidly.
In a world where we decry subject matter experts as having too little time to actually manage, the always-on manager makes it their business to embed themselves into the day-to-day work of their people.
Ironically, though, they do more harm than good. Their constant presence slips into helicopter management - telling rather than asking, directing rather than developing. It’s something we hear all the time. In reality, the always-on manager is simply a modern evolution of the command-and-control style of the twentieth century.
Managers don’t need to be there all the time. But when they are, they need to listen and ask the right questions. They need to be aware. And to reach that point, they need support to evolve from delegator to coach, moving beyond the narrow duty of directing tasks, towards the deeper responsibility of developing people - helping them build the confidence and capability to delegate, decide and deliver on their own.
Developing managers to move from delegator to coach is ultimately about deepening relationships and creating a culture of openness, empathy and trust that enables growth on both sides.
It’s at this point that the HR director starts looking nervously at their annual training budget, working out whether they need to take line managers out of their routine for several days a year and how they’ll prove success if they do.
We’re not dismissing training, of course: training is both an excellent tool and a smart facet of your employer brand. But it’s also time and resource-intensive, and often receives pushback from both leadership and the people it’s trying to help.
What we’re actually trying to achieve is an empathic relationship between manager and employee - a level of understanding and trust - with a clear set of goals and objectives to aim for.
If the manager is prompted with the right coaching questions and gives equal weight to the employee’s point of view by listening and responding to concerns and aspirations, that offers the right platform to set achievable but challenging objectives. Those objectives might require skills the manager can’t teach, of course, but what they can do is connect the employee to subject experts who can.
The key ingredient here is trust.
The employee needs to trust that the manager wants them to achieve and grow, just as the manager needs to trust that the employee will strive to hit their goals.
The point is this: you can invest time, money, and effort in training a subset of your managers to think like coaches. But it’s far more effective to give all managers a structure that prompts them to coach, consistently and confidently in the flow of work. Over time, coaching behaviours may become second nature, or they may not. With the right framework, that doesn’t matter. It is the coaching structure that does the heavy lifting.
The GROW model of coaching has been around for some years now, but its principles are still used by some of the world’s most prominent businesses - Google is one example, but there are many others.
GROW boils the coaching process down to four distinct stages:
Typically, GROW is applied to work situations. At OpenBlend though, our approach is more holistic: we feel that an employee is not only a resource but an individual with their own motivations, needs and passions both within and outside the context of work. By understanding an employee’s unique motivators, a manager can support, develop and enable them to perform in a far more comprehensive and rewarding way.
Perhaps as importantly, GROW provides a shortcut to that all-important trust we keep mentioning. It helps to get everyone on the same page. For this to work, everyone needs to be honest about the situation they’re in and the goal they’re aiming for. At the same time, the manager has a great opportunity to give their people context and a sense of purpose as their goal/objective/priority is linked to the broader picture: where the business wants to go. The employees understand where they fit in the grand scheme of things, and this gives them clarity on how they’re contributing to organisational success.
For some HR leaders or people managers, this may not seem like such a hard culture to create. After all, the literature on coaching and performance management (or development) is almost ubiquitous. Hybrid working models (for example) encourage many managers to have virtual check-ins more regularly. Your business may be ready for this right now.
But we also know that - for some - this can seem like pie in the sky. Decades of annual performance reviews can be a hard habit to kick. Your entire structure of reward, succession and ranking may be based around an old-school approach. And some senior leaders may be indifferent to the idea of change (it’s worth remembering that people who have achieved success under a legacy system will be less inclined to admit there’s anything wrong with it).
So, based on what we’ve learned, here are six practical coaching tips you can share with your teams to start embedding a coaching-led culture. No sign-off from the top needed (for now).
Real coaching starts with inquiry. If your managers are doing more than 90% of the talking, that’s the first habit to break. Encourage them to ask more open questions - “What’s your perspective?” or “What options do you see?” - to prompt reflection, autonomy and ownership. These are core principles in the GROW model and motivational interviewing.
Resist the urge to fill every pause. Giving people time to think triggers deeper reflection and signals that their perspective matters. This technique, used by trained coaches, builds psychological safety and draws out more considered responses.
Active listening means playing back what you’ve understood, “So what I’m hearing is…”, not to agree, but to show you’re engaged and to help them clarify their own thinking. It’s one of the simplest, most powerful tools in a coach’s repertoire.
Problem-talk keeps people stuck; goal-talk moves them forward. Catastrophising never helps. Shift the focus from “Why didn’t this work?” to “What does success look like?” That small change reorients conversations toward solutions — the hallmark of a true coaching mindset.
The best coaches stretch people just beyond their comfort zone, but with empathy. Use constructive challenge (“What’s holding you back from trying that?”) alongside encouragement (“I know you can handle this”). That balance builds both capability and confidence.
End 1:1s by co-creating next steps. Ask, “What will you do before our next 1:1?” or “What would help you make progress?” Turning insight into commitment reinforces accountability, which is a key component of behavioural change.
Managers with an adopted coaching mindset are a wonderful resource to have. They encourage better performance and more continuous development. They bring teams together. They help people to understand their place and purpose in an organisation, they show them how they’re contributing to success, and they help them to connect with people who can upskill and develop them.
Seeing the whole person allows for an even more effective connection, with all the benefits of motivation, wellbeing, and engagement that come with it. It’s not easy to change people. Managers - and some employees - may resist. But the truth is this: with the right coaching frameworks, people don’t need to overhaul everything at once. Change doesn’t start with grand initiatives; it starts with better conversations. And with the right coaching frameworks in place, those conversations happen naturally.
The OpenBlend platform enables those conversations to happen regularly, in the flow of day-to-day work. To find out how it can embed a coaching culture in 1:1s across your business, and improve productivity across the board, book a demo or get in touch.