Why Every Leader Needs to Coach and What Makes it Work

Think about the leader you'd want coaching you through a challenging period. It would probably be someone who could sit with you in a difficult conversation without passing judgement and without trying to offer ‘fixes’. They would likely be the one that built and maintained trust with you because you could tell they were paying attention, and because they asked thoughtful questions, balancing high support with constructive challenge.

That's coaching that makes a lasting impact, drives positive change and feels deeply rewarding, and most organisations say they want more of it. The challenge is that wanting it and being equipped for it are two different things. Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace research found that only 44% of managers worldwide have received the training required to do their jobs, and coaching-style development is one of the first casualties. It's not that managers lack the will, it's that coaching well takes a set of emotional capacities that are hardest to access when time is short and pressure is high.

There's another more hopeful finding within the same data, though. Gallup also found that teaching managers effective coaching techniques boosted their performance by 20 to 28 percent. So, this isn't a case of coaching being a nice-to-have that only naturally gifted leaders can pull off. It's a learnable capability that is worth investing in. Which raises the real question for this month's newsletter: what actually makes a leader capable of coaching well?

Coaching is one of the four pillars of the EQ-i 2.0 Leadership Report, alongside Authenticity, Insight and Innovation. It isn't a single skill so much as a cluster of emotional capacities that can be deliberately built. This month we're exploring why coaching matters so much, what tends to get in the way of it, and which EQ-i 2.0 competencies are worth developing to do it well.

What Gets in the Way

If coaching is this valuable, why don't more leaders default to it? The honest answer is that most leaders are trying to coach while fighting a very strong internal pull in the opposite direction. Leadership coach Michael Bungay Stanier calls this pull the "advice monster", the reflex to jump straight to a solution the moment someone brings you a problem. It's an understandable reflex. Most leaders were promoted, at least in part, because they were good at having answers, so reaching for one feels like doing the job well.

Through an EQ-i lens, this reflex usually isn't a character flaw so much as a pattern involving a couple of specific subscales. It often shows up where Emotional Self-Awareness is underdeveloped in the moment, the leader doesn't notice the pull to jump in as it's happening, so there's no opportunity to choose differently. It also tends to pair with a more directive style of Assertiveness that hasn't yet been balanced by Reality Testing, meaning the leader states their view confidently before they've actually checked whether they understand the real problem. Once you know what you're looking for, this is much easier to catch.

Coaching Is ‘How’, Not ‘What’

There's a simple distinction worth highlighting here: emotional intelligence is how we do our jobs, not what we do. Two leaders can hit the same targets, run the same meetings and deliver the same results, and still be operating completely differently underneath. One may be building trust and adapting well under pressure, while the other gets to the same outcome at a much higher cost to the people around them.

This is exactly why an EQ tool can be such a useful way to open a coaching conversation with your people. Rather than starting with what someone got done this quarter, which tends to pull a conversation straight back into task talk, you can start with how they're showing up: how they connect with others, how they influence, how they make decisions, how they manage stress, and how they cope with what the environment is currently asking of them. That's often a much more productive conversation to have, and a harder one to have well without some structure behind it.

Which is really the case for building your own emotional intelligence alongside your coaching skills. Coaching gives you the shape of these conversations while emotional intelligence gives you the ability to actually open them, read what's underneath the surface, and respond to it in a way that lands.

The Coaching Pillar: Six Subscales Worth Building

So which competencies are worth building first? On the EQ-i 2.0 Leadership model, six subscales sit underneath the Coaching pillar, and each one is something a leader can deliberately develop rather than something you either have or don't.

Empathy

Empathy is usually the first thing people associate with coaching, and for good reason. It's the capacity to sense what someone else needs before they've fully articulated it themselves, and to respond to that rather than to the version of the conversation you'd assumed you were having.

Interpersonal Relationships

Interpersonal Relationships is the trust infrastructure that makes any of this possible in the first place. Coaching conversations only work when the other person believes they're safe to be honest, including about what isn't going well. This subscale is about building and sustaining that kind of relationship over time, not just being likeable in the room.

Reality Testing

Reality Testing keeps a coaching conversation anchored. It's the ability to see a situation as it actually is, rather than through the lens of how it should be, how it used to be, or how the leader would prefer it to be. A coach with strong Reality Testing can hold both compassion and clarity at once, which is often exactly what a difficult conversation needs.

Assertiveness

Assertiveness is what allows a leader to say the true thing clearly, without dressing it up so heavily that it loses its meaning or delivering it so bluntly that it lands as an attack. Good coaching depends on this kind of candour. Feedback that's too softened to be useful isn't kind, it's just quiet.

Emotional Self-Awareness

Emotional Self-Awareness is the leader's own instrument, so to speak. Before you can accurately read what someone else needs from you in a pressured moment, you need to know what's happening in your own emotional state, and how it might be colouring what you're about to say.

Self-Actualisation

Self-Actualisation is, in some ways, the quiet engine underneath all of it. It's a leader's own ongoing relationship with growth and potential, the sense that people, including themselves, are always still becoming. Leaders high in Self-Actualisation tend to genuinely believe in other people's capacity to develop, and that belief is often what a coaching conversation is actually built on.

Habits Worth Building

The reassuring part is that coaching is a habit, not a personality trait, which means it can be built through small, repeatable actions rather than a wholesale change of character. Here are a few worth focusing on:

• Open before you diagnose. Rather than starting a conversation with an observation ("here's what I think is going on"), start with a genuinely open question. This draws on Empathy and Interpersonal Relationships, because it signals to the other person that you're there to understand their situation, not to confirm a conclusion you've already reached.
• Ask once more before you offer a view. Michael Bungay Stanier's favourite question here is simply "and what else?", asked before moving to advice. It's a small habit with an outsized effect, because it draws on Reality Testing to slow down the leap from a first impression to the fuller picture, and it draws on Assertiveness too, since choosing to hold back is its own kind of assertive act, not a passive one.
• Close by handing the insight back. Ending a coaching conversation by asking what the person is taking away, rather than summarising it for them, draws on Self-Actualisation. It reinforces their own capacity to arrive at growth, rather than positioning the leader as the source of it.

None of this asks a leader to set aside their expertise. It just asks them to hold back a little more in the moments that call for coaching rather than directing.

Reflection

• Think of a recent moment when someone brought you a problem. Did you notice the pull to jump straight to a solution, and what did you do with it?
• Of the three habits above (opening before diagnosing, asking once more before offering a view, closing by handing the insight back), which would be easiest for you to start building, and which would take the most conscious effort?
• Is there someone whose thinking you've been doing for them rather than helping them do it themselves? What would it look like to hand that back to them this week?

None of this requires a leader who has it all figured out. Coaching well under pressure is about knowing what you're working with, in yourself and in the person you’re coaching, and choosing your response deliberately.

Building Both Skills

Building coaching skill and building emotional intelligence are, in the end, two sides of the same investment. The coaching skill helps a leader open the right conversations. The emotional intelligence helps them hold those conversations well and know what they're picking up on while they do. And for leaders who take it a step further and become EQ-i 2.0 certified themselves, there's a genuine bonus on top: they're then equipped to help build emotional intelligence in their own people too.

Sources:

Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2025 -https://www.gallup.com/file/workplace/659528/state-of-the-global-workplace-2025-download.pdf

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More, and Change the Way You Lead Forever, Michael Bungay Stanier