December 2025
Monthly Brief – Coaching
Exclusively for Subscribers
Editorial Introduction
Across sectors, the idea of “managers who coach” has shifted from a leadership aspiration to a practical response to escalating role complexity. Recent management writing increasingly treats coaching less as a discrete activity and more as a day-to-day discipline that improves judgement, learning, and performance under time pressure, particularly in hybrid and technology-disrupted settings.
Executive Summary
This month’s evidence suggests three converging themes. First, managerial overload is now a central barrier to coaching, which has pushed organisations towards “low-lift” coaching behaviours embedded in routine work rather than formal sessions. Second, large-scale workforce research continues to frame the manager role as pivotal to engagement and human performance, while also highlighting gaps in preparedness for the people-management aspects of the job. Third, peer-reviewed research on coaching leadership and managerial coaching is becoming more specific about outcomes (such as innovation and performance) and about what it takes to develop “managerial coaches” over time, which strengthens the case for capability-building rather than one-off training.
Coaching Under Constraint: Moving from “Time-Intensive” to “In-the-Flow” Practice
A consistent message in late-2025 practitioner literature is that managers are expected to coach even when they are busy, yet the method must match the constraint. HBR’s recent guidance emphasises focusing coaching energy on high-leverage moments: repeatable decisions, core skills, and situations where learning will recur. Complementing this, “low-lift” coaching approaches recommend short, frequent interventions that maintain developmental momentum without creating administrative burden. This framing is important because it treats coaching as a behavioural habit that can be operationalised through brief questions, feedback loops, and structured check-ins, rather than as an additional meeting that competes with delivery. In practice, the managerial coaching agenda is increasingly being redesigned as a workflow pattern: managers create clarity, prompt reflection, and reinforce learning in moments where work is already happening.
The Middle-Manager Pivot: Why “Manager as Coach” is Being Repositioned as Core Work
The manager role is being publicly re-evaluated, especially as organisations adopt automation and redesign decision rights. Deloitte’s 2025 Human Capital Trends content on the future of the middle manager highlights that a substantial proportion of managers report feeling unprepared for the people-manager dimensions of their work, alongside limited technology support for those responsibilities. This aligns with broader reporting on declining manager engagement and expanding spans of control, which can erode the psychological bandwidth required for coaching-quality conversations. The strategic implication is that “manager as coach” is less a cultural slogan and more a design choice: if organisations want managers to develop people, then job expectations, tools, and measures must treat development as deliverable work, not discretionary effort.
Coaching Style Matters: Selecting an Approach that Fits the Person and the Task
Recent writing also reflects a more nuanced stance: coaching is not a single style of conversation. HBR’s discussion of coaching styles underscores that managers need judgement in choosing how to coach based on readiness, capability, and context. This is especially relevant in modern performance systems, where managers oscillate between supporting wellbeing, addressing underperformance, and enabling growth in fast-changing roles. A “one-size-fits-all” coaching script can unintentionally create ambiguity or avoidance, whereas style flexibility allows managers to remain both humane and performance-oriented. Over time, this line of thinking supports capability frameworks that teach managers not only questions and listening skills, but also diagnostic discernment: what the moment requires, what the individual needs, and what the organisation will later evaluate.
What the Peer-Reviewed Evidence is Clarifying: Innovation, Performance, and Mechanisms
The academic evidence base is increasingly explicit about outcomes and pathways. A 2025 study on managerial coaching and innovative work behaviour reports that the influence of managerial coaching differs across stages of innovation, appearing particularly consequential for implementation rather than for early idea exploration. This matters for organisations attempting to translate creativity into delivery: coaching becomes a mechanism for persistence, learning, and execution quality, not merely ideation. Complementing this, a 2025 review of coaching leadership style synthesises peer-reviewed evidence across decades and helps distinguish coaching leadership from adjacent constructs, strengthening conceptual clarity for research-informed practice. Together, these sources support a more disciplined evaluation stance: coaching should be assessed not only by subjective perceptions, but also by proximal outcomes (learning, confidence, problem-solving quality) and downstream outcomes (innovation implementation, performance, retention), chosen to fit the organisation’s strategic aims.
Developing “Managerial Coaches” as a Learning Trajectory, Not a Workshop
The academic evidence base is increasingly explicit about outcomes and pathways. A 2025 study on managerial coaching and innovative work behaviour reports that the influence of managerial coaching differs across stages of innovation, appearing particularly consequential for implementation rather than for early idea exploration. This matters for organisations attempting to translate creativity into delivery: coaching becomes a mechanism for persistence, learning, and execution quality, not merely ideation. Complementing this, a 2025 review of coaching leadership style synthesises peer-reviewed evidence across decades and helps distinguish coaching leadership from adjacent constructs, strengthening conceptual clarity for research-informed practice. Together, these sources support a more disciplined evaluation stance: coaching should be assessed not only by subjective perceptions, but also by proximal outcomes (learning, confidence, problem-solving quality) and downstream outcomes (innovation implementation, performance, retention), chosen to fit the organisation’s strategic aims.
Measurement Discipline and Culture: Avoiding “Symbolic Coaching”
If coaching is defined as a leadership expectation, it must be measurable in a way that does not encourage performative behaviours. Some organisational guidance on coaching culture stresses that accountability systems often shape whether managers coach consistently, including whether coaching is linked to appraisal and whether senior leaders visibly model the behaviour. At the same time, caution is warranted: overly rigid measurement can reduce coaching to compliance. A more credible approach is triangulation: employee experience indicators (quality of conversations, clarity, fairness), operational indicators (development mobility, skill acquisition), and business indicators relevant to the function (quality, customer outcomes, innovation implementation). This stance also aligns with evidence that inconsistent managerial behaviour can be especially damaging, because unpredictability undermines trust and can spread through teams.
Technology, AI, and the Changing Coaching Interface
Two intertwined trends are visible. First, coaching is increasingly discussed alongside technology that reshapes how work is allocated and how performance is monitored. Deloitte’s analysis explicitly connects manager effectiveness to the availability (or absence) of enabling technology. Second, professional bodies are acknowledging that AI is becoming part of the coaching landscape, which raises questions about confidentiality, bias, and the boundary between developmental support and surveillance. A parallel research stream on digital coaching is emerging, which is likely to influence how organisations scale support while protecting trust. The constructive direction is not substitution of human coaching, but augmentation: better prompts for reflection, better scheduling and follow-through, and better access to resources—while keeping the manager accountable for relational quality, ethics, and contextual judgement.
Closing Note
The most credible late-2025 framing is that “managers who coach” is not a soft alternative to performance; it is a performance system that depends on human learning. However, it only works when organisations stop treating coaching as discretionary virtue and start treating it as designed work: with realistic role expectations, sustained capability-building, supportive tools, and measurement that rewards consistency and learning rather than theatre.
References
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Chaudhary, R. (2025) ‘6 Low-Lift Ways to Coach Employees in the Flow of Work’, Harvard Business Review, 3 November.
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Clutterbuck Coaching and Mentoring International (n.d.) ‘Creating a coaching culture’, CMI Briefings.
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Colgate, M. (2025) ‘The Importance and Application of a Coaching Leadership Style: A Review’, MDPI.
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Deloitte (2025) ‘Is there still value in the role of managers? (Future of the middle manager)’, Deloitte Insights, 24 March.
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Dhar, U. (2025) ‘A model of managerial coach learning and development’, ScienceDirect.
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Hu, J. (2025) ‘Motivating change-oriented behavior through coaching leadership’, PMC.
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Pajuoja, M. (2025) ‘Supporting innovating employees: how managerial coaching influences innovative work behavior’, Springer.
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CIPD (2025) ‘Coaching and mentoring | Factsheet’, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
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Valcour, M. (2025) ‘How to Be a Great Coach—Even When You’re Busy’, Harvard Business Review, 15 October.
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The Wall Street Journal (2025) ‘Why Are Managers So Miserable at Work?’, WSJ, (published 2025; reporting on Gallup findings).
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Business Insider (2025) ‘Managers are not feeling so hot right now…’, Business Insider, April.
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The Guardian (2024) ‘Jekyll and Hyde managers: why they are worse than consistently horrible bosses’, The Guardian, 19 November.
This brief was prepared by Dr Peter J. Chum, Managing Consultant of Professional Talent Management Limited, whose expertise in leadership, strategy, and organisational development underpins the analysis presented herein.