Coaching skills have long been recognized as a powerful driver of performance and a learning culture across organizations. One of the seminal texts in this space, Coaching for Performance by Sir John Whitmore, helped bring these capabilities into the mainstream of leadership development. Whitmore highlighted the importance of leaders moving beyond instruction and direction towards an approach that enables individuals to think, learn and take ownership of their work.
At the heart of coaching are a set of human skills that shape the quality of conversations taking place across the workplace every day. Skills such as curiosity, deep listening, thoughtful questioning and the ability to create a psychologically safe space for open and honest dialogue are critical to helping individuals learn, grow and lead.
When these capabilities are present, conversations shift. Instead of simply directing others or providing answers, leaders create space for reflection, insight and ownership. Individuals feel able to speak openly about challenges, explore ideas, and take responsibility for their decisions. Over time, this approach builds stronger thinking, greater confidence and a culture where learning becomes embedded in the rhythm of everyday work, and the hope is that good people stay in these organizations, retention rates improve and commitment to work increases.
The Higher Skills of Great Coaches
Many coaching programs have historically centered around structured models such as the well-known GROW™ framework – exploring goals, reality, options and the way forward. These models have played an important role in making coaching accessible to leaders and managers.
Yet in practice, the best and most experienced coaches go far beyond using a set model and asking good questions. Higher-level coaching depends just as much on presence, awareness, and the ability to tune in to what is happening in the moment.
Great coaches are not only listening to the words being spoken. They are noticing shifts in tone, energy and body language in the conversation. They are also paying attention to their own internal responses – the signals in the body that often indicate when something important is happening beneath the surface.
In this sense, coaching is not simply a cognitive exercise driven by questions from the brain. It is a whole-person capability, in which awareness of our senses and bodily responses plays an equally important role in guiding the conversation.
Linking Coaching Skills to Commercial Growth
The challenge historically, however, has been how to directly link these coaching capabilities to the top and bottom line of a business. While the benefits to leadership, engagement and development have long been acknowledged, organizations have often struggled to demonstrate the tangible commercial impact of coaching skills.
Yet when we look more closely at how businesses actually grow, the connection becomes much clearer.
Revenue growth, client retention and successful collaboration all depend on the quality of conversations taking place across an organization. The ability to build trust, understand others’ needs, ask insightful questions, and guide conversations towards meaningful outcomes is not only the foundation of effective coaching – it is also the foundation of effective commercial relationships.
This connection became very clear to me during my own career.
In my experience as a global client leader at KPMG, responsible for opening doors and converting new business opportunities, I was often asked why I seemed able to build relationships and create conversations at the most senior levels of organizations.
What was it that enabled me to have conversations at Board level and throughout an organization, to understand what was on their minds and how we as a business might be able to help?
At first glance, many people assumed the answer lay in commercial acumen or technical expertise. While those capabilities certainly matter, they were rarely the defining factor.
Ironically, the answer lay in the skills I had developed as an executive coach.
The ability to hold the room, create the right environment for meaningful conversation, and remain fully present in the dialogue were capabilities I had learned through coaching. At the same time, I never lost sight of the commercial context of those discussions. My role was ultimately to open doors and create opportunities for the firm.
What mattered was bringing these two things together: maintaining a clear focus on commercial outcomes while approaching conversations in a way that genuinely centered the customer.
Rather than pushing solutions, the emphasis was on understanding. What was really happening inside the organization? What challenges were leaders grappling with? Where might we be able to help?
For me, this was a moment of epiphany. The skill set I had been using was not simply about leadership or coaching. It was also the skill set that enables organizations to win work.
So, I took this thinking further and asked a bigger question. What if we intentionally blended commerciality with humanity? What if the same coaching capabilities that help individuals learn and grow could also sit at the heart of commercial cultures within organizations?
A Coaching Approach to Commercial Success
Rather than treating leadership development and business development as separate disciplines, what if we recognized that they are deeply interconnected?
It was from this thinking that the HUMAN™ framework for commercial growth was born.
The framework emerged from a simple observation: the capabilities that enable people to lead effectively are the same capabilities that enable organizations to build trusted relationships, create opportunity and grow.
Rather than separating leadership development from commercial capability, the HUMAN™ framework recognizes that sustainable growth depends on strengthening a set of fundamentally human skills. Skills such as how we show up in conversations, how well we understand others, the mindset we bring to challenges, our ability to act and adapt, and the clarity with which we define next steps.
When these capabilities are developed intentionally, they not only support stronger leadership and engagement inside organizations. They also strengthen the quality of external conversations with customers, partners and stakeholders.
Coaching skills become far more than a leadership technique. They become critical capabilities that underpin an organization’s commercial success and sustainable growth.
Defining the Return on Investment (ROI) of Coaching Skills
So, when asked what the return on investment is for developing ‘human’ coaching skills across an organization, we should no longer be looking only at indirect metrics or data one step removed from growth.
I argue that the business case for investing in coaching skills can be assessed by directly linking investment to top- and bottom-line performance, new relationships, new opportunities, higher win rates, and profitability. The key is to view these skills through a commercial lens and put supporting performance-measurement systems in place.
An added benefit is that if these programs are designed well, development can be blended into a single learning and coaching program rather than two separate areas of spend – creating an immediate benefit to the bottom line!
