The first meal I cooked on my own was chicken. I was young, out of a mess hall and into a kitchen the size of a wardrobe. I burned the outside black and left the middle raw. I ate it anyway, because pride is a seasoning.
Nobody sat me down afterwards and said, "Ken, you are no chef. Step away from the stove. Leave cooking to the professionals."
So I cooked again the next night. It went badly. Then less badly. Now people ask me to make dinner on purpose.
Cooking is a basic human skill. You learn it by doing it badly in front of people who love you enough to eat it.
Coaching should work the same way. Instead we rope it off like a Michelin kitchen.
Coaching got locked behind a rope
Jo Wright, who I had on the podcast, put an idea in my head and it will not leave. Every manager needs coaching skills the same way every adult needs basic cooking skills. You do not need to be a chef. You need to feed people.
Somewhere along the line we decided otherwise. Coaching became a profession with certifications, hourly rates and a specialist vocabulary. All of it useful. None of it a reason for the rest of us to stop cooking.
I have watched good managers freeze when the word comes up. "I'm not a coach." No. And you are not a chef either, and yet you managed to feed yourself last night.
Most bosses got handed a stove and no recipe
Here is the part which keeps me up at night.
The Chartered Management Institute, working with YouGov, surveyed over 4,500 UK workers and managers. Their findings landed with a thud. 82% of people stepping into management have had no formal management or leadership training at all. They call them accidental managers. Promoted for being good at the old job, popular, or standing nearby when the chair emptied.
Same research: only 27% of workers describe their manager as highly effective. Of the workers who do not rate their boss, half plan to leave within the year, and only a third feel motivated to do a good job.
My own survey work points the same direction. 99.5% of the people I asked said they have had one or more types of bad boss. Not a rounding error. A near-universal experience.
So we take someone with no training, hand them six humans and a spreadsheet, and then act surprised when they lead by reciting instructions.
They are not bad people. They were never shown how to boil water.
Telling, with a question mark on the end
Ask managers whether they coach their teams and almost all of them say yes.
Julia Milner and Trenton Milner studied this for Harvard Business Review. Their conclusion is blunt: managers tend to think they are coaching when they are telling their employees what to do.
I did this for years. I would lean back, do my thoughtful face, and say, "Have you considered approaching it the way I did in 2011?"
Reader, this is not a question. It is a recipe read aloud at volume.
Real coaching starts from a position of not knowing. Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular made the same case in The Leader as Coach: leaders are no longer expected to hold all the answers, and command-and-control has run out of road. The job shifted from dispensing to drawing out.
The hard bit is not the technique. The hard bit is admitting you have no idea, in front of someone who reports to you.
Three ingredients you already own
Basic cooking is a handful of moves. Heat, salt, timing. Basic coaching is smaller than people fear.
Ask one question before you give one answer. Not five questions. One. "What have you tried so far?" works in almost every situation, including the ones where you already know the answer. Especially those.
Then shut up for four seconds. Four seconds of silence feels like a fortnight. Most people fill it with the thing they were too nervous to say first. Everything worth hearing lives in second three.
Come back to it on Thursday. One follow-up turns a conversation into coaching. Without it, you had a chat. I set reminders, because I forget, and forgetting reads as indifference to the person waiting.
Three ingredients. No certification, no budget line, no workshop with flip charts.
The excuse I hear most
"I have no time for coaching."
I used to say it with a straight face, usually while re-explaining something for the fourth time to the same engineer.
Look at the arithmetic. Answering a question takes two minutes. Answering the same question every week for a year takes an hour and a half, plus a person who has quietly stopped thinking for themselves. Asking "what would you try first?" takes four minutes once, and then the question stops coming back.
Telling is fast food. Cheap, quick, and you eat again in an hour.
The other excuse is the fear of getting it wrong. Of asking a wooden question, or opening something you have no training to handle. Fair. I have sat in a one-to-one where an honest question landed on a subject far past my competence. Two things helped: saying "I have no idea how to help with this part" out loud, and knowing where the real support sits inside the company. Neither one required a qualification.
What burnt dinner costs
The same CMI research found 72% of workers with an effective manager felt valued and appreciated. Set it beside the third of workers who walked out of a job over a bad culture.
Nobody quits over a manager who asked good questions and listened badly. People quit over managers who never asked at all. The manager who fumbles a coaching conversation still signals something loud: I looked at you as a person with your own thinking.
Fumbling beats abstaining. Undercooked beats no dinner.
My wife Debra and I spend a lot of our working lives on this at Step It Up HR, and the pattern repeats in every room. Leaders arrive braced for a masterclass. They leave holding three questions and a promise to follow up. The small stuff is the whole meal.
Cook badly, and feed someone anyway
There is a version of you sitting in one-to-ones giving out answers nobody asked for, because the alternative feels like amateur hour.
It is amateur hour. Go anyway.
You will ask a clumsy question. Somebody will look at you sideways. You will find yourself in a silence with no idea where to put your hands. Then a person on your team will say a true thing out loud for the first time in months, and you will understand what the fuss is about.
I burned the chicken. I kept cooking.
Who on your team has been waiting for one real question from you, and what stops you asking it on Monday?