The People Who Need Coaching Most Aren’t Getting It
Most founders and executives I talk to genuinely care about their managers. They want them to succeed, can usually name the ones who are struggling, have a mental list of the conversations they've been meaning to have, and carry an intention to figure out how to do more developmental work with their leadership team when things slow down a little. Maybe they’ve even looked into a workshop they could bring in.
But things don't slow down. So, the conversations stay on the list, and the managers, many of whom are talented people (usually the previous top individual contributors) who stepped into leadership without much preparation for what it actually requires, keep doing the best they can with what they have, which is often more instinct than infrastructure and very little guidance.
This is the gap I see most consistently in scaling organizations: not a lack of care for managers, but a lack of any sustained, structured mechanism for developing them, especially when they first step into the role. Leadership training helps, up to a point, but too often training is just a one-time event. What changes behavior, over time, in the actual conditions of the role, is coaching. And for most managers at most companies, especially the ones growing quickly, they aren’t getting that.
The Executive Bandwidth Problem
Let’s call a spade a spade, as they say. The people best positioned to coach a manager are usually their direct supervisors, and those supervisors are, in most scaling organizations, completely underwater.
A founder or executive who is managing a growing leadership team, navigating a funding round, rebuilding a product, or simply keeping a fast-moving company from coming apart at the seams does not have two hours a week to do genuine developmental coaching with each of their managers. They have fifteen minutes, maybe, in a standing meeting that is also covering operational updates, decisions that need to be made, and whatever is on fire that day.
In most cases, that’s not necessarily a failure of leadership, but rather a completely accurate description of the job at a certain stage of growth. The problem is that when we acknowledge this and then do nothing about it, the managers underneath those executives are left to develop themselves, which some of them do admirably and some of them don't, largely based on factors that have nothing to do with how much potential they have. (And sometimes this means they turn to other people in the organization for that guidance, whether it’s part of their job description or bandwidth or not, which can be good or bad, depending!)
The logical response, when the people responsible for developing managers don't have the capacity to do it, is to create a dedicated structure for that development. That structure, for a lot of organizations, is 1:1 coaching with someone whose entire job is to focus on the manager's growth. An external coach brings the time, the objectivity, and the specific skill set for that work that even the most well-intentioned executive simply cannot offer from inside the org.
What the Research Actually Says, and Why It Matters Here
The case for 1:1 coaching over group training alone is not especially controversial in the research, even if it hasn't fully made its way into how most companies budget for development. The Association for Talent Development has found that pairing coaching with training can increase leadership effectiveness by as much as 88% compared to training alone. That number reflects something most talent development professionals already know intuitively: information without application doesn't change behavior, and application without feedback doesn't change it reliably.
What tends to get less attention is where the ROI actually shows up. And the answer, somewhat counterintuitively, is not primarily in the manager being coached. The return shows up in their team.
Gallup's research on this is consistent across industries and company sizes: managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores. (Did you think I’d make it through a blog without talking about employee engagement?) When a manager improves how they communicate, how they recognize their team's contributions, how they handle conflict, and how present and available they actually are, the people on that team feel it. And so, you guessed it, engagement goes up, voluntary turnover goes down, and productivity increases.
So when an organization invests in coaching one manager, it’s really investing in the experience of every person on that manager's team, and depending on team size, that can mean ten or fifteen people whose day-to-day working lives shift in meaningful ways. The math on that tends to look very different once you factor in what replacing a disengaged or departed employee actually costs, which most estimates put somewhere between half and 2.5 times that employee's annual salary.
Why Generic Training Keeps Missing the Mark
Don’t get me wrong! None of this is an argument against leadership training. I used to design just that. Good training does real things: it builds shared language, surfaces frameworks managers haven't encountered, and creates moments of genuine reflection that can open doors. The problem is what happens after the door opens and no one is there to walk through it with you. If the training being offered is also individual and asynchronous, the problem is also whether people will actually make the time to complete it. That’s different from live group training.
Group training has to design for a hypothetical manager, some reasonable composite of the challenges and contexts represented in the room. Which means for any given participant, some of it is directly applicable and some of it is interesting but not quite relevant to what they're actually dealing with. A manager navigating a specific team dynamic, a particular pattern of conflict, a gap in their own self-awareness that keeps recreating the same problem (that one’s a doozy), leaves that training with tools that may or may not fit the situation waiting for them on Monday.
1:1 coaching starts with the actual situation. The real team, the real challenges, the real history. A coach can help a manager examine a conversation that went sideways last week, prepare for a difficult one coming up next week, and start to notice the patterns in their own behavior that connect the two. It’s more personal. That kind of specificity and continuity is simply not available in a group setting (or an online course), no matter how good the facilitator is.
It’s also worth acknowledging the conditions most managers are operating in. They’re often the people in the organization least likely to admit they don't know what they're doing, because they’re supposed to be the ones who do. They sit between executive leadership and their teams, fielding pressure from both directions, rarely with enough support from either side. A coaching relationship offers something most of them genuinely don't have anywhere else: a confidential, dedicated space to think out loud, make sense of hard situations, and develop without performing competence they haven't built yet. A productive break from the exhaustion of that performance that actually helps them move forward so they can continue to breathe and break through that exhaustion little by little, as that competency AND confidence genuinely build.
That is the environment where real growth happens. And for managers at scaling companies, who are being asked to lead through change, uncertainty, and complexity at a pace that leaves little room for reflection, building that environment deliberately is one of the most useful things an organization can do.
Curious about what 1:1 leadership coaching might look like for your managers?
Kidera Culture Consulting's 1:1 Manager & Leadership Coaching package is built for people leaders at scaling companies who are ready to move beyond training and into real, sustained development.