Scale Your Impact: A Simple Coaching Model To Develop Your Team

Randy, a Vice President at a Fortune 200 company, has been a superstar performer since his early career days. However, as his responsibilities have grown, he is overwhelmed by how much his team depends on him. His days are packed with back-to-back meetings with clients and stakeholders, as well as answering emails and Slack messages in between, where he constantly answers questions and provides direction for his team. He works late into the night and even on weekends to keep up. While his leadership recognizes his contribution, they also see that his approach becomes a bottleneck. Yet, Randy struggles with how to change without compromising critical client needs.

Solution: Scaling Through Coaching

Randy needed a way to scale his impact. The traditional delegation wasn’t the answer—his team wasn’t yet ready to handle high-stakes issues independently. Instead, he embraced the coaching approach, identifying and developing key team members to become his next-level leaders. Rather than simply directing them, he provided structured coaching before and after crucial client meetings, equipping them with the confidence and skills to take ownership.

Over five months, Randy saw a significant transformation. His leadership bench strengthened, with team members independently managing bigger responsibilities. Randy was less consumed by day-to-day firefighting as they grew and focused on higher-level strategic initiatives. Not only did his team thrive, but he also achieved a better work-life balance, proving that effective coaching can be a game-changer for leadership scalability.

What Coaching Is and Is Not

Despite its popularity as a concept, coaching is often misinterpreted as advice-giving. Offering direct or indirect advice—such as, “Have you thought of XYZ?”—can be helpful, but coaching goes beyond providing solutions. Effective coaching helps individuals think for themselves, uncovering their strengths, habits, limiting beliefs, and blind spots. Coaching doesn’t replace essential management duties like mentoring, giving direct feedback, or making executive decisions.

The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as a process for “maximizing potential”. At its core, coaching operates on the belief that individuals are whole, capable, creative, and resourceful. A coach’s role is not to provide answers but to help people process their thoughts, which leads to designing actions and experiments to help them progress toward meaningful outcomes.

In coaching, there are two foundational elements leaders need to learn. They are:

A. Asking Powerful Questions
B. Adopting a Coach Mindset

A. Asking Powerful Questions

A powerful question helps people think for themselves to create solutions for their challenges. They are open-ended and not-leading.

Coaching questions typically fall under these four categories, which I have shown as different parts of a vase in the figure below.

1. Agreement – Establishing the topic, desired outcome, and time frame.
   • Examples: What is the focus of this conversation? What do you hope to achieve by the end of this conversation? How much time do we have for this conversation?
2. Exploration – Diving deeper into the topic.
   • Examples: What is the real challenge for you? Where do you stand now? What obstacles are in your way? What are your options? How do you want to see this a year (or any other timeframe) from now?
3. Integration – Extracting key takeaways.
   • Examples: What have you learned so far? What insights stand out? How might this apply elsewhere?
4. Accountability – Committing to a course of action.
   • Examples: What will you do next? By when? How will you measure success?

B. Adopting a Coach Mindset

If you’ve ever experienced a great coaching session, you might have noticed how natural the conversation feels—almost as if the coach follows your thought process. This ability comes from the coach’s mindset. The key qualities are:

1. Presence – Clear your mind, close your email, messaging, and other distractions, and focus entirely on the person before you.
2. Listening – Listen to understand, resisting the urge to formulate a response too soon.
3. Curiosity – Set aside judgment and ask open-ended questions that encourage reflection.
4. Empathy – Emotionally connect with the other person’s experience by recalling a time when you faced similar challenges (But do not say it out loud).

Final Words

As highlighted in the Harvard Business Review article How to Lead Like a Coach, coaching skills deepen trust and continuously improve peoples’ critical thinking and decision-making capabilities, which are crucial to thriving today. However, coaching is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It demands continuous experimentation and adaptation to align with individual’s and organization’s unique culture and priorities.“Everyday coaching is not an off-the-shelf answer. It’s a model of behavior change that you can adapt to your culture and needs.”

Giving someone judgment-free, undivided attention, genuine curiosity, and unbiased listening is a gift. It requires practice, reflection, and sometimes feedback from a mentor coach. But in the end, the rewards are priceless—for both the leader and the team.