Latest up date: 9 October 2025
Your people managers play an enormous role in improving and sustaining employee performance, and creating a culture of coaching can increase the impact of their efforts.
When you develop managers with the skills and behaviors to coach, you empower them to steer conversations, forge strong relationships, and unleash the full potential of your people.
Moe Ash, a learning expert and founder of The Catalyst, an L&D consultancy, is keenly aware of this. He recently sat down with the team here at Bridge, and our conversation touched on empowering managers and overcoming generational differences between leaders and younger colleagues.
Read on to explore how coaching skills can become a significant asset for your managers and your organization at large.
What Does Manager Coaching Entail?
Ask your employees about the factors that have the biggest impact on their career development, performance, or overall job satisfaction. For many, their manager is likely to be one of the most significant.
The research bears this out too. A survey conducted by Gartner finds that 77% of employees are increasingly looking to managers for support.
Empowering your managers as coaches with the necessary skills and behaviors can help them to provide this support and guidance. It’s also a powerful way for managers to promote purposeful training and development, correct behaviors, and work with employees to define their career goals and get them to where they want to be.
For teams, coaching communicates a shared vision and purpose, improving collaboration and trust.
Managers can weave coaching into a variety of existing scenarios, all of which assist in bolstering performance and development outcomes. These coaching conversations are likely to include some of the following elements:
- Sharing consistent, timely, and actionable feedback
- Setting achievable goals
- Improving role and goal clarity
- Helping identify and overcome roadblocks
- Preparing employees to advance within the organization
- Recognizing progress and achievements
If you’re introducing the concept of managers as coaches to your organization, it's important not to overwhelm people with too much new information at once.
“I think people get bombarded by different processes, by different templates, by different systems over time,” Moe says.
When every new training method is presented as the next big thing, both managers and their reports can become overwhelmed or demotivated. Building on top of what they're already doing is likely to be much more successful.
“What we really need to focus on,” Moe says, “is how people are currently operating. I'm not here trying to convince them of something different. I should be trying to make what they do a lot more streamlined, feasible, and convenient—to their subordinates and their stakeholders.”
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It's About Culture: Supporting Social Learning
A survey of 6,000 employees conducted by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that managers directly impact employees’ job satisfaction. Among employees dissatisfied with their development and progression, commonly cited factors included the poor quality of line managers and a lack of coaching and mentoring.
When a manager positions themselves as a coach, they can create friendlier, more open lines of communication. This shows employees that their development is a priority and empowers both manager and report to learn from one another.
Moe stresses that an organization's overarching culture is key to capitalizing on social learning.
“You need to let people talk,” he says. “You need to put communities into practice and reinforce learning. If you're thinking that people will learn better in silos—it's not going to work out.”
Instead, focusing on the continuous learning that occurs even in informal settings can be much more effective. If you're keen to empower managers as coaches across your organization, it's important to create spaces where they can frequently connect with their reports in a low-pressure environment.
In Moe’s view, an organization's culture will be one of the key enablers or blockers of social learning.
“A community where people start to level up together and develop together can build [between employees]. This can only work if the company is allowing it, if there's room for a learning culture,” he says.
The 4 Main Benefits of Empowering Managers to Be Coaches
When approached correctly, employee coaching has several practical applications, each with the potential to add measurable value.
1) Facilitating Employee Development
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development survey mentioned above found that managers greatly influence development outcomes. In fact, the quality of line managers and the support and training employees received were the most commonly cited factors in the report—40% of respondents mentioned them and stated that their careers have met or exceeded their personal expectations.
Coaching is valuable for both short-term behavior changes and long-term career development and growth. It prepares people for career advancement by uncovering their goals and equipping them with the skills and experience they need to progress within the organization.
A coach will typically work alongside recently promoted employees and those looking to move into management and leadership positions to identify strengths and challenges, then tailor guidance around developing skills and closing gaps.
2) Improving Employee Engagement
Employee experience matters, and Gallup estimates that low employee engagement levels cost the global economy $8.8 trillion annually. The primary cause of disengagement? A lack of managerial and leadership development.
While a lack of managerial development leads to low levels of engagement, there's a direct benefit to developing coaching capabilities among your people managers. According to Bridge-sponsored research, organizations prioritizing manager-employee coaching are more likely to see higher levels of employee engagement.
But you won't get these kinds of results if you don't educate your managers on what a proper coaching relationship should look like.
Moe explains how corrosive an authoritative or condescending approach between experienced staff and less seasoned or younger employees can be. He describes delivering a program on generational intelligence to help an organization smooth collaboration between older generations and Gen Z staff. A main feature was helping older leaders empathize with Gen Z subordinates—“to understand how they operate, how they think.”
Moe’s key takeaway from this project? Older colleagues should take the time to see things from younger people’s point of view and really parse their motivations in the workplace. He stresses how unhelpful an “actor-observer” attitude is. This cognitive bias means attributing your own actions to things beyond your control, but attributing other people’s actions to their personality. If a manager with this bias is late for a meeting, for example, they may attribute it to an outside factor, like traffic on the way to work. But they may judge a younger colleague or report them as rude or incompetent for being late to the same meeting.
Leaders should resist this type of mindset and try to get the full picture before making snap judgments that can hinder development and disengage younger generations from the workplace.
“The most important thing for managers is context,” Moe says.
3) Prioritizing Performance Goals
Further Bridge-sponsored research reveals that high-performing organizations are nearly three times more likely to recognize the critical role that managers play in driving business results. They’re also more likely to hold managers accountable by tracking coaching conversations.
Whether addressing gaps in skills or behaviors, setting expectations for goals, or improving accountability for deadlines, performance coaching bridges gaps in a supportive environment.
With the proper guidance, employees learn to solve problems, find new ways to approach challenges, and improve accountability toward goals. Integrating coaching into employee-manager discussions can make these goal-centric discussions an integral part of your performance management processes.
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4) Managing and Sustaining Change
Change is unavoidable, but coaching gives organizations actionable ways to implement and sustain initiatives that lead to long-term success.
A study of one company’s transformation found that employee perceptions directly impact the outcome. Specifically, successful change resulted when employees felt that they'd been supported through the process with frequent communication, positive empowerment, and adequate training.
As those most closely connected to their teams, managers play a key role in championing change initiatives, sharing a long-term vision, and answering any questions. During transitions, coaches communicate the scope of this change and support people in embracing it positively and seeing things from a different perspective.
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Increase the Impact of Your Manager Development Programs
Bolster your talent development efforts with a framework that turns your managers into effective coaches. Download our ebook, ‘How to Empower Managers to Be Coaches’, to learn more. And be sure to follow us on LinkedIn for more insights from L&D pros.
