By: Bernardo Ferdman
What People Get Wrong About Coaching Cultures
Most organizations that want a coaching culture start in the same place: training.
Leaders are trained to ask better questions. Listening skills are emphasized. Coaching models are introduced. And yet, months later, many organizations notice something hasn’t shifted in the way they hoped.
The issue usually isn’t effort or intent. It’s that coaching has been treated as an individual skill, when in reality, a coaching culture is a relational system.
Coaching Is Multi-Level—Whether We Design It That Way or Not
Coaching cultures operate simultaneously at three levels:
- Individual: self-awareness, reflection, emotional regulation
- Interpersonal: how people respond to uncertainty, mistakes, and disagreement
- Systemic: goals, incentives, evaluation practices, time pressure, and norms
Most organizations overinvest in the first level and hope it will somehow fix the others. It doesn’t.
You can train people to be more reflective, but if the system punishes reflection, they’ll stop using it. You can teach curiosity, but if questions are interpreted as weakness or incompetence, people will default to answers.
A coaching culture isn’t created by what people know. It’s created by what the environment rewards and tolerates.
Self-Awareness Is the Entry Point—Not the Destination
Self-awareness matters. Deeply. Leaders who can notice their assumptions, emotional reactions, and habitual responses are better able to pause before acting. They’re less likely to jump to conclusions or treat their first interpretation as fact.
But self-awareness alone doesn’t change culture. What matters is what happens after awareness:
- Do leaders stay curious when they feel threatened?
- Do they test assumptions—or defend them?
- Do they slow down inquiry, or rush to closure?
Many leaders are familiar with ideas like the ladder of inference: how quickly we move from data to judgment. Far fewer create conditions where it’s safe for others to question those judgments. That gap is where coaching cultures either form or fail.
Learning Requires “Trust That Won’t Get Dinged”
Most people don’t resist learning because they lack motivation. They resist because learning feels risky. Before people experiment, ask questions, or admit uncertainty, they’re scanning for one thing:
Will this be used against me later?
When learning and evaluation are blurred, curiosity shuts down. People may comply. They may perform competently. But they won’t explore what they don’t yet understand.
A coaching culture depends on trust that won’t get dinged: the belief that reflecting out loud, naming a mistake, or asking for help won’t quietly count against you when it matters most. That trust isn’t built through reassurance. It’s built through consistent behavior over time.
Coaching Is About Discovery, Not Pre-Packaged Answers
One of the most common misunderstandings about coaching is that it’s a technique, a set of questions leaders pull out when they’re trying to be “less directive.” But coaching isn’t the absence of answers. It’s a commitment to discovery before certainty.
In a coaching culture:
- Questions surface assumptions rather than lead people to predetermined conclusions
- Dialogue is used to make sense of complexity, not just to align around decisions
- Leaders resist the urge to fix too quickly, especially when the challenge is adaptive rather than technical
This doesn’t mean leaders never give direction. It means they’re thoughtful about when answers help and when they shut learning down.
Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds
Coaching cultures ask leaders to do something counterintuitive:
- Create space without losing standards
- Encourage openness without removing accountability
- Invite questions without undermining clarity
That tension is real—and unavoidable.
Many leaders worry that too much safety will lead to softness, or that too much inquiry will slow execution. Those concerns aren’t wrong. They’re incomplete.
The real challenge isn’t choosing between safety and performance. It’s learning how to hold both at the same time. That’s where coaching cultures either become powerful, or get dismissed as impractical.
A Question Worth Sitting With
If you want to understand whether a coaching culture is truly possible in your organization, consider this:
What happens when someone raises a question that doesn’t have an immediate answer?
Not what’s said in principle, but what actually happens in the room.
Do people get curious? Does the conversation narrow? Does the moment quietly pass?
Those responses, both verbal and nonverbal, shape culture far more than any formal initiative.
In the next post, I’ll explore one of the most common tensions leaders face when trying to build a coaching culture: how to create psychological safety without lowering expectations, and why separating learning from evaluation may be one of the most consequential—and difficult—leadership moves we can make.