Why Training Managers to Be Career Coaches Isn’t Working.
Companies keep trying to solve disengagement, churn, and employee stagnation by “teaching managers to coach.” Guess what, it's the wrong solution to the right problem.
It sounds logical. It feels humanistic. It seems like the right thing to do.
It’s also failing - for reasons deeper than I first realised.
Here’s why.
Most People Aren’t Coaches - and rarely ever, career coaches.
Managers don’t become managers because they’re skilled at developing people. Sometimes they are. But generally - they are promoted because they’re technically exceptional SME’s.
Gallup’s 2025 global research shows:
Only 20–30% of managers are skilled at coaching (in the most general sense)
74% say they lack the time, capability, or confidence to have meaningful career conversations
And when managers don’t support development, employee engagement drops sharply - one of the strongest predictors of churn
So yes, most managers can’t coach, nor do they want to.
But the deeper truth is this:
Coaching is the wrong tool for the job.
Let’s unpack why.
Why Career Coaching Is Hard for Managers (and always will be).
Even when managers want to help their people grow, the dynamic is fundamentally compromised.
Employees feel conflicted being coached by the person who:
they joined the company for and trust
decides their performance rating
controls their opportunities
influences their pay
may not want them to leave the team
Meanwhile, employees often want:
a different role
a different team
a different direction
or sometimes… a different company
Exploring that future with your manager can feel like a CLM — a career-limiting move.
So what do employees do?
They stay quiet.
And that silence gets misinterpreted as “no ambition, not proactive enough or coasting.”
So managers (who are expected to get more productivity from each of the humans in their team) create linear development plans based on assumptions - often involving generic courses or LMS modules that are an easy answer.
But the plan rarely matches how the employee learns or worse - is even what they want to learn.
This mismatch is how engagement erodes:
Wrong development direction
Wrong learning style
Wrong assumptions about ambition
Wrong conversations at the wrong time
And eventually… they leave.
But even if the trust issue didn’t exist, the next challenge would still break the model.
And critically - why Career Coaching Fails (the coachee doesn’t know the answers).
Traditional coaching assumes the coachee already has the answers within them.
A coach:
asks open-ended questions
helps the person uncover their insights
guides them toward a destination they have already identified
But inside organisations, most employees have not yet identified that destination.
They don’t know:
what they want next
what they’re capable of
how their strengths translate
their learning preferences
the options available
or how to evaluate those options
So when a manager asks:
“Where do you want to be in three years?”
“What skills do you want to build?”
“What direction excites you?”
They get… blank stares.
Not because the manager is a bad coach.
Because the employee doesn’t have the raw material to work with.
You can’t coach someone toward a destination, they can’t yet see.
This is why development conversations become circular, vague, and frustrating - for both sides.
And it’s why “just train managers to coach” has failed for more than a decade.
What People Need Instead: A Designed Career Process
Career growth is not a Q&A exercise.
It’s a design exercise.
Before employees can answer big career questions, they need a structured method that helps them understand themself better FIRST:
who they are
what they value
what motivates them
where their strengths lie
how they learn best
what constraints matter to them
what options exist in the organisation
And guess - what - that’s hard. You might think you know it, but it’s challenging to get right without a process.
Only after this foundation is built can coaching - or any conversation - become meaningful.
That has been the basis for my practice for over 8 years and it still astounds me how rarely employees - or people in general - practice this much needed form of ‘empathy’ - knowing themself, before starting out on change.
And this - more than anything else - is why employees often leave development conversations feeling unsure, and managers leave feeling unsuccessful.
It’s a tricky business that we have over-estimated for over a decade, and not taken a close enough look at.
Until now.
The problem isn’t intention.
The problem is the missing method.
What’s needed is a guided, repeatable framework that:
Helps employees clarify identity and strengths
Maps to multiple possible pathways
Evaluates options based on personal and commercial realities
Supports experimentation
Gives managers a shared logical structure and language to evaluate and approve
Removes the conflict and guesswork - for both sides.
This isn’t coaching.
This is Career Design.
Career design doesn’t assume employees have the answers.
It helps them create the answers.
Where Actvo Fits In
This is exactly why we built Actvo.
Actvo gives employees this process - at scale. A safe, AI-guided space to explore who they are, what they want, and where they could go - before they ever sit down with a manager.
It helps them:
unpack their story
discover strengths and motivations
explore multiple pathways
evaluate what’s realistic
design small, safe next steps
For managers, Actvo removes the pressure to “be a coach.”
They finally get:
a structured process
shared language
clarity
data
insight
and conversations grounded in truth, not guesswork
Managers don’t need to coach their way into the unknown.
They need a framework that makes the unknown navigable.
The Bottom Line
Companies don’t have a coaching problem.
They have a process problem.
Training managers to coach won’t fix disengagement, churn, or growth.
Because growth doesn’t start with coaching.
Growth starts with clarity.
Clarity comes from insight.
Insight comes from process.
And process unlocks possibilities that coaching alone can’t reach.
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I’m Melisa Jenner - Founder & CEO of Actvo® and Author of Emotional Leadership. We provide AI-assisted ‘on-the-job’ skills & career planning, for teams. Making it easier for managers to activate growth.
If you’d like to talk more about this topic, contact me at melissa@actvo.ai 🐝