Nobody is coaching you. Here’s what to do about it.
Five things you can use this week when there’s no coach, no budget, and no time.
Coaching is the most effective development tool we have. Ask any organisation what actually changed someone’s leadership, and you’ll hear about a person, not a program. Someone who asked the right question at the right moment.
And we give it to about five per cent of people.
Executives get a coach. High potentials get a program. Everyone else gets told to figure it out — usually in the middle of the hardest week of their career, with nobody safe to ask.
I’ve spent twenty years on the coaching side of that gap. What struck me, over and over, was never the calibre of the people in the room. It was who wasn’t in it. The team leader promoted on a Friday with no handover. The manager holding six direct reports and a performance issue she’s been circling for a month. The person who’s brilliant at the work and has just been made responsible for people, which is a completely different job that nobody explained.
They needed it most. They almost never got it.
So this piece is for them. Five things that come up in coaching constantly, that you can use without a coach, a budget, or a spare hour.
1. Ask two questions, not twenty
When you’re new to leading a team — or new to a team — the instinct is to arrive with a plan. Resist it.
Sit down with each person this week and ask two things:
What’s working? What do you need from me?
Then be quiet. Properly quiet, not waiting-to-speak quiet. The silence after a real question is where the answer lives.
You don’t need to have the answers on day one. What you need is to show people you’ll ask. That’s the thing they’re actually assessing.
2. Describe what you saw, not what you decided it meant
Most feedback lands badly because we deliver a verdict when we should be opening a conversation.
“You’re being defensive in meetings” is a verdict. The other person has nowhere to go except to defend themselves, which then proves your point, which is a trap you built.
Try the sequence instead:
- Observation. What you actually saw or heard. Facts only. “In Tuesday’s meeting, you interrupted Priya twice while she was presenting.”
- Impact. What it cost. “She stopped short and didn’t come back to her recommendation.”
- Question. Hand it over. “What was going on for you?”
That last step is the one people skip, and it’s the one that does the work. You’re opening a door, not reading a charge sheet.
3. Give yourself sixty seconds before the hard conversation
When you’re about to raise something difficult, your brain treats it as a threat. Genuinely — the physiology is the same as the one that gets you out of the path of a car. Heart rate up, peripheral vision narrowing, access to nuance dropping away.
That’s why you swing between too harsh and too soft. It isn’t a character flaw. It’s a body doing its job at the wrong moment.
Sixty seconds of slow breathing before you walk in makes a measurable difference. So does writing one sentence: what am I actually trying to achieve here? Not what you’re trying to say. What you want to be true when the conversation ends.
Structure calms the system down. Go in with an opening line you’ve decided on and you’ll stay far closer to the version of yourself you’d like to be.
4. Prepare one good question instead of five good answers
We over-prepare for the wrong thing. We rehearse our position, anticipate objections, build the case.
Then the conversation goes somewhere we didn’t script and we’re stranded.
Walk in with one genuine question instead — something you don’t already know the answer to. “What would need to be different for this to work for you?” “What am I missing?” “If you were me, what would you do?”
It changes the shape of the room. You stop performing and start finding out. And the person opposite you can tell the difference immediately.
5. Write it down before you carry it home
The gap between a hard day and a lesson is almost always reflection. Not journalling in a precious sense — three lines in your phone on the train.
What happened. What I did. What I’d do differently.
Most of what we call experience is just this, done consistently. People who do it get better faster than people who don’t, and it costs nothing but the two minutes.
The reason it works: naming something takes it out of the churning, looping part of your brain and puts it somewhere you can actually look at it. That’s why saying a worry out loud shrinks it. Writing does the same job, and it keeps a record you can go back to.
Why I’m building Worksparks
Everything above is free, and I mean that — take it, use it, send it to someone who needs it.
But I’ve also spent two decades watching people try to do this alone at 9pm on a Tuesday when the thing is actually happening, and I couldn’t be in the room. Nobody can be in every room.
So I’ve built something that can.
Worksparks is an AI coach for the messy, human moments at work. The difficult conversation. The performance concern. The decision that feels heavier than it should. You talk it out or type it, sixty seconds is enough, and it helps you get clear and find the right words before you walk in.
It’s built on the same neuroscience I’ve taught for years. It’s private — what you write is never sold and never used to train AI models. And it’s priced for the ninety-five per cent, not the five.
We’re crowdfunding the build on Indiegogo now. I’m being straightforward about where we are: this is early, we have around a hundred people testing it, and the money goes directly into shipping it properly rather than fast.
If any of this resonates, backing it helps. So does sharing it with someone who’s leading without a net.
Sonia McDonald is CEO of LeadershipHQ and the founder of Worksparks. She’s spent twenty years arguing that leadership is a set of behaviours anyone can learn, not a title you’re handed.
If this was useful, subscribe — and tell me in the comments which of the five you’re going to try. I read everyone.