Leadership Coaching at Scale: How to Embed a Culture, Not Just a Skillset

Why Coaching Matters More Than Ever

 

In 2026, leaders will continue to face a more volatile world with uneven economic growth, ongoing geopolitical fragmentation and supply-chain risk, and the rapid shift to AI-enabled ways of working.  In this environment, leadership needs to go beyond managing performance to building adaptability, judgement, and ownership in others, making coaching a practical capability for developing talent and making better decisions under uncertainty. 

Coaching helps leaders move away from command-and-control behaviours and towards curiosity, collaboration, and empowerment. And the impact is measurable. According to the Human Capital Institute, companies with strong coaching cultures report 39% stronger employee engagement and 13% stronger business results compared to their peers. [1] 

These numbers demonstrate that embedding coaching behaviours isn’t just an HR initiative, it’s a business performance strategy. But here’s the challenge: how do organisations move beyond teaching individual coaching skills to truly embedding a coaching mindset across their entire leadership community? 

From One-Off Training to a Coaching Culture

 

Why Traditional Training Doesn’t Stick 

For many organisations, developing leaders often starts with a single workshop. Leaders attend a one-day or two-day training session, learn some questioning techniques, and then return to work. While these sessions build awareness, they often fail to create lasting behaviour change. 

Why? 

• Without the opportunity to practice new behaviours, these new techniques are unlikely to be used back in the workplace 

• Leaders revert to familiar, directive management styles when under pressure. 

• Coaching is treated as an additional task rather than an integral part of leadership. 

• This results in uneven adoption, where a few enthusiastic leaders may embrace coaching while the majority do not. In other words, coaching becomes an isolated skillset rather than part of the organisational DNA. 

From Skillset to Mindset: What a Coaching Culture Looks Like 

A true coaching culture reframes coaching from “something we do” to “how we lead and work together.” It is built on shared values and reinforced through systems and rituals that encourage continuous growth and learning. 

Key characteristics of a coaching culture include: 

• Curiosity as a core leadership behaviour: Leaders routinely ask powerful, open-ended questions instead of providing solutions. 

• Psychological safety: Employees feel safe to explore ideas, admit mistakes, and learn from feedback. 

• Embedded in systems: Coaching principles underpin project planning, talent and development reviews. 

• Shared language and habits: Coaching conversations happen not just in formal settings but also in everyday moments. 

 Moving to a Coaching Leadership Style: a Journey, Not a Course 

Shifting from a push leadership style (directing, solving, advising) to a pull style (curious, facilitative, coaching-led) isn’t a simple skills upgrade. It’s a change in identity: redefining how you add value when you’re no longer the person with the fastest answer in the room. 

And it comes with a very specific kind of discomfort: learning to slow down—sometimes in an instant, right at the moment your instincts tell you to jump in. 

Here’s what we’ve found works best: a stepped journey that moves leaders from theory, to lived experience, to safe practice, to real-world application—then back again to deepen the skill. 

Step 1: Build the foundation through training (the “what” and the “how”) 

Most coaching capability starts the same way: a workshop or structured training session that introduces core coaching behaviours, listening, questioning, contracting, and helping someone think rather than telling them what to do. 

This stage matters. It gives leaders: 

• a shared language (e.g., “open questions”, “reflecting”, “summarising”, “contracting”) 

• a simple structure they can rely on when under pressure 

• permission to try something different, even if it feels unnatural at first 

  
  

But training also creates a common trap: leaders can understand coaching intellectually and still struggle to do it in real time. That’s where the next step becomes essential. 

Step 2: Experience coaching yourself (the “ohhh…that’s what good feels like” moment) 

One of the fastest ways to internalise coaching is to be coached early in the journey. 

Why? Because being coached teaches what slides can’t: 

• how it feels when someone doesn’t rescue you 

• how powerful it is when someone stays curious 

• how much thinking you do when someone holds the space rather than filling it 

  
  

Leaders learn by observation and experience: what helped you think, what shut you down, what created trust, what made you defensive. That lived experience becomes a reference point they can aim for when they coach others. 

Step 3: Practise in a safe environment (role plays that leaders rarely get feedback on) 

This is often where “the penny drops”. 

Coaching role plays sound basic, but they are uniquely valuable because they create feedback on conversations leaders normally never receive feedback on. You can’t improve what you can’t see, and role plays make invisible habits visible. 

In this stage, leaders practise: 

• resisting the urge to advise 

• asking one question and then stopping 

• reflecting back what they heard (without judgement) 

• noticing the moment they slip back into “fixer mode” 

Most importantly, they get immediate feedback on impact: 

• “When you asked that, I felt rushed.” 

• “When you stayed silent, I actually thought harder.” 

• “When you offered a solution, I stopped owning it.” 

  
  

It’s awkward, perfect. That awkwardness is the learning edge. 

Step 4: Embed through peer coaching + action learning (practice with real issues, supported by a facilitator) 

Once leaders have tried coaching “in the lab”, they need repetition in a way that fits real work. 

Action learning groups and peer coaching are a powerful bridge because they: 

• create regular opportunities to practise coaching in real time 

• normalise the discomfort (“it’s not just me”) 

• build a culture of thinking together rather than performing competence 

With a trained facilitator in the mix, this becomes even more effective. A facilitator helps the group: 

• hold the coaching discipline (and not drift into advice-giving) 

• name patterns (e.g., “Notice how quickly we jump to solutions?”) 

• deepen the quality of questions 

• turn messy real-life attempts into learning 

This is where coaching shifts from a technique to a habit. 

Step 5: Return for advanced training (make the real-world barriers explicit) 

After leaders have tried coaching “in the wild”, they come back with the real questions—the ones that only appear once you’ve attempted it under pressure. 

An advanced session is where leaders surface what got in the way, such as: 

• awkward silences 

• the fear of not adding value 

• frustration when you don’t like the other person’s solution 

• anxiety about time (“this is taking too long”) 

• pressure to be decisive, especially in senior roles 

And then you co-create solutions—practical responses leaders can actually use in the moment. 

For example, on awkward silences: 

• Normalize it: “Take your time, I’m thinking too.” 

• Name what you notice: “I’m noticing a pause. What’s happening for you right now?” 

• Offer a gentle choice: “Would it help if I asked a different question, or do you want another minute to think?” 

• Reflect and wait: “This feels important.” (Then stop talking.) 

This stage helps leaders stop treating the discomfort as failure—and start seeing it as part of the method. 

The questions leaders wrestle with (and why they matter) 

As coaching becomes a daily leadership behaviour, these questions tend to show up repeatedly: 

• How do I move the conversation forward through meaningful questions? 

• How do I find the best question? 

• How can I switch from giving advice to slowing down and listening? 

• What do I do when I don’t like my team member’s solution? 

• How do I deal with awkward silences? 

• How do I manage the perception that I’m not adding value by only asking questions? 

  
  

Exploringand co-creating, responses to these situations accelerates the journey, because leaders don’t just learn the model. They build confidence in the messy moments that matter. 

A culture change, not a training plan 

Coaching is powerful—and often a significant departure from the prevalent leadership style in many organisations. It’s not something you “roll out”. It’s something you embed. 

That’s why the most effective leadership development programmes don’t rely on workshop after workshop. They design experiences that: 

• shift mindsets, 

• change behaviours, 

• and create structured opportunities for practice and sense-making. 

Because without those opportunities, leaders won’t develop meaningfully—they’ll simply revert to what’s fast, familiar, and rewarded. 

 The Role of Leadership Coaching and Leadership Development Programmes 

Embedding Coaching Through Leadership Development 

One of the most effective ways to embed coaching is to integrate it into a leadership development programme. This ensures leaders learn, practise, and reinforce coaching behaviours. 

Why this works: 

• Leadership development programmes typically run for months, providing multiple touchpoints for learning and reflection. 

• Programmes often involve cohort-based learning, which builds peer accountability and enables leaders to practise coaching with one another. 

• Combining coaching skill development with diagnostics and feedback mechanisms (such as 360° assessments or coaching role plays) ensures leaders understand their impact and progress. 

 Case Study: Noble Foods – Unlocking the Power of Coaching 

To illustrate what embedding coaching at scale looks like, here’s how Noble Foods, a leading food company, built coaching into its leadership approach with support from Esendia. 

The Journey 

The programme was designed to move leaders from simply learning coaching skills to adopting a coaching mindset. 

Steps included: 

1. Initial Training: Providing leaders with foundational coaching knowledge and introducing practical techniques. 

2. Role Plays with Feedback: Giving leaders the opportunity to practise coaching conversations in realistic scenarios. 

3. Personal Practice: 

4. Being Coached: Experiencing coaching from the coachee perspective to understand its impact. 

5. Coaching Others in Action Learning Groups: Applying coaching in real-world situations, guided by facilitators. 

6. Group Discussions: Leaders shared successes and identified common barriers. 

7. Barrier-Breaking Workshop: Addressing key challenges such as dealing with silence, asking powerful questions, resisting the urge to give advice, and managing non-responsive coachees. 

The Outcome 

By creating multiple opportunities for leaders to practise, reflect, and receive feedback, Noble Foods moved coaching from theory to habit. Leaders reported greater confidence in coaching conversations, stronger team engagement, and improved collaboration. Coaching became part of their daily leadership, not just a skill but a mindset. 

Conclusion: A Coaching Culture Is a Leadership Imperative 

Embedding coaching at scale is no longer optional—it’s a leadership imperative. Organisations that succeed in building a coaching culture achieve: 

• Higher employee engagement. 

• Stronger business results. 

• Better succession pipelines and leadership readiness. 

It requires more than a checklist or a single workshop. Instead, it requires a system-level approach that integrates coaching into leadership development programmes, reinforces habits through cultural artefacts, and builds communities of practice. 

If you want to explore how leadership coaching and leadership development programmes can help your organisation embed a coaching culture at scale, get in touch with Esendia. 

References 

[1] Human Capital Institute (HCI) and International Coach Federation (ICF) (2015) Building a Coaching Culture: A Global Study of Successful Practices. Washington, DC: Human Capital Institute.