The concept of a coaching culture has been a serious topic for about 20 years. The first substantive volume on coaching culture, as listed by Google Scholar, is Clutterbuck and Megginson, 2005[1]. Yet after all this time, there are few, if any, examples of organisations that have achieved a sustainable coaching culture – or even a transitory one.

So, what’s the problem? Surprisingly, we have little or no research that throws light on the barriers. However, here are six key issues that emerge from conversations with coaches and HR professionals.

1)    Difficulty in defining what is meant by a coaching culture, or what it looks like.

A classic mistake is to regard coaching as something people do, rather than a way people think. Simplistic competency frameworks exacerbate the problem, as if there were one right way of coaching, rather than multiple, situational approaches. Similarly, artificial distinctions between coaching and mentoring tend to be inconsistent – and at odds with coach maturity research demonstrating that as coaches mature, they adopt more mentoring behaviours.

2)    Lack of a coherent coaching and mentoring strategy

Most companies’ approaches to coaching culture consist of multiple unconnected initiatives. Without a strategic focus, these come and go with shifts in business priorities and budgets. Under these circumstances, it’s hard to embed any changes in the corporate culture. Such strategies that exist often fail to make the link between the coaching culture and other strategic priorities for the business.

3)    Inadequate role modelling and accountability at the top

People need positive role models, if they are to make significant changes in how they think and behave. Yet senior executives tend to assume the need to coach applies to people much further down the organisation. To make matters worse, while they like to have coaching as an executive privilege, they can be highly secretive about the experience. When employees below see coaching as akin to having a personal parking space, it breeds cynicism that is hard to overcome.

4)    Focus on training line managers as coaches but not on training people to be coached

It takes two to tango. Effective coaching is a relationship of mutual trust and co-learning. To be a learning partnership, rather than an exercise in power (however well-meant), the coachee needs to understand how to make effective use of the opportunity. It also means that the emphasis of coaching has to move from remedial to developmental intervention.

Closely allied to this issue is the continuation of traditional, manager-led performance management systems. Not only is there no evidence these result in improved performance, but they undermine the quality of mutual trust essential for great teaming. Moving towards employee-led performance management is a valuable step towards positive change that can support an emerging coaching culture.

5)    Failure to develop and retain mature internal coaches

Cohorts of accredited internal coaches are increasingly common. However, one-off, sheep-dip training isn’t enough to retain them, when coaching is just a minor part of their responsibilities. They need to feel they are developing and growing. For those nearing retirement age, the potential to become a professional mentor is one retention factor.  Other innovative approaches, such as coach development centres and action learning sets, can be helpful, too.

6)    Failure to measure progress towards a coaching culture

The original coaching culture assessment tool developed in the research for the Clutterbuck and Megginson book is open access. There are many other ways to assess progress. However, it seems that few companies have any robust approaches to determine whether they are moving further towards the goal of a coaching culture – or further away from it. To mobilise the energy of everyone in the organisation around that goal, companies need to share what progress is being made and where more effort is needed.

Summary

The frequency with which these themes occur in our conversations with coaches and HR suggests that achieving a coaching culture is more rhetoric than a serious strategic objective. If companies are prepared to address the objective seriously, the knowledge now exists to create and implement strategies that can make a radical difference. But is there the will?

[1] Clutterbuck, D. and Megginson, D., 2005. Making coaching work: Creating a coaching culture. CIPD Publishing.

© David Clutterbuck 2025