Not every conversation needs to become a coaching conversation.
I probably ought to start there, because once people become interested in coaching — particularly leaders who are learning to use coaching skills — there can be an understandable temptation to coach absolutely everything. Someone asks a relatively straightforward question and suddenly they’re being invited to explore what the question means to them, what possibilities they’re noticing and where they feel it in their body.
Sometimes they really just need to know where the bloody spreadsheet is.
But there are other conversations that begin in much the same way and then, almost imperceptibly, become something else. Someone comes into your office to ask about a project and mentions that they’re struggling with a colleague. A person stays behind for a few minutes after a meeting. Someone says, “I’m fine,” in a way that makes you wonder whether they’re fine at all. A colleague asks what you think they should do, and something about the question makes you hesitate before answering.
These are what I think of as coachable moments.
They aren’t coaching sessions. Nobody needs to produce a contract, schedule fifty minutes or announce that coaching is about to commence. They’re simply moments in ordinary working life when there is an opportunity to respond differently.
The interesting part is noticing them.
The moment before the answer
Most of us become quite good at answering questions.
It’s useful. Organisations need people who can solve problems, make decisions, share expertise and occasionally tell somebody what needs to happen next. If you’re leading other people, there will be plenty of situations where withholding an answer you already know isn’t empowering; it’s just irritating.
But knowing something doesn’t necessarily mean that saying it is always the most useful thing you can do.
Someone comes to you with a problem. You can see a solution almost immediately. Perhaps you’ve encountered exactly the same situation before and know what worked. The answer is sitting there, ready to go, and giving it would probably make the conversation considerably quicker.
The coachable moment is sometimes the tiny pause before you do.
Does this person need my answer, or do they need the opportunity to find theirs?
That’s a very different question.
There are situations where my experience genuinely matters and it would be absurd to pretend otherwise. There are also situations where immediately giving someone my solution quietly removes something from them: the opportunity to think, experiment, take responsibility or discover that they already know considerably more than they thought they did.
The skill isn’t refusing to give advice.
It’s noticing when advice is actually what is needed.
Listening changes what becomes possible
Coachable moments are surprisingly easy to miss because they rarely announce themselves as important.
They often arrive halfway through another conversation, buried amongst operational detail. Someone changes tone. They repeat a word. Their certainty disappears for a moment. They say one thing and then immediately qualify it. Or perhaps you simply notice that the question they’re asking isn’t quite the question they appear to be asking.
That requires a different kind of listening.
Not forensic listening, where you’re desperately trying to retain every detail so you can prove later that you were paying attention. And not the sort of listening where you’re actually preparing your response while the other person continues making noises.
It’s listening with enough attention to become curious about what you’re hearing.
Sometimes that means asking another question rather than answering the first one. Sometimes it means reflecting something you’ve noticed. Sometimes it means allowing a silence that would normally be filled. And sometimes it means recognising that you’ve wandered into territory that doesn’t belong in an impromptu workplace conversation at all.
The point isn’t to turn yourself into a coach.
It’s to become slightly less automatic about what you do next.
A coachable moment often begins in the space between hearing a problem and deciding to solve it.
Not everything is coachable
This distinction matters.
There is a tendency in some conversations about “coaching cultures” to treat coaching as inherently superior to directing, advising, teaching or managing. I don’t think it is.
They’re different responses to different situations.
If someone is new to a role and genuinely doesn’t know how a process works, teach them. If there’s an emergency, be clear. If you possess information they need, share it. If a decision is yours to make, make it. Asking someone seventeen beautifully open questions when what they actually need is an answer isn’t coaching; it’s an excellent way to make them avoid you in the kitchen.
The difficulty — and perhaps the interesting part of leadership — is that people don’t always arrive with labels explaining which response they need.
A question that sounds like a request for advice might actually be a request for reassurance. A performance problem might contain a confidence problem, a relationship problem, a clarity problem or no problem at all once somebody has had the opportunity to think aloud.
You discover that by staying curious for slightly longer.
Not indefinitely.
Just longer than the reflex to fix.
Coaching without becoming the coach
I think this is where coaching skills become particularly useful for leaders.
You don’t need to transform every one-to-one into a coaching session, and your team shouldn’t have to wonder whether asking you where the printer paper is going to result in a forty-minute exploration of their relationship with stationery.
But there is something powerful about working with a leader who doesn’t always need to be the person with the answer.
Someone who can say, “What do you think?” and actually want to know.
Someone who can listen to an idea without immediately improving it.
Someone who notices when another person is thinking and doesn’t rush in to finish the thought for them.
Someone who can distinguish between the moments when leadership requires direction and those when it requires space.
None of this looks particularly dramatic. There may be no model, no formal coaching conversation and certainly no need to announce that a coachable moment has occurred.
The other person may not even notice.
They may simply leave the conversation thinking a little more clearly than when they entered it.
And perhaps that’s enough.
The moments are already there
I don’t think coachable moments need to be created nearly as often as they need to be noticed.
They’re already happening in corridors, meetings, one-to-ones, video calls and the few minutes after everyone else has left the room. They appear when somebody hesitates, wonders aloud, asks for help, gets stuck or begins thinking differently in front of you.
The question isn’t whether every one of those moments should become coaching.
Most shouldn’t.
The more interesting question is whether we notice that, occasionally, we have a choice about what happens next.
We can answer.
We can advise.
We can fix.
Or, every now and then, we can stay with the question for a little longer and see what the other person does with it.
That’s often where the coachable moment begins.
