Every day, middle managers in organizations around the world navigate the challenging space between big-picture vision and practical execution. They balance leadership expectations with the realities faced by their teams. This crucial role has the power to drive significant change, not only for the managers themselves but for the overall workplace culture.
The evidence for coaching’s transformative power continues to grow stronger. Recent research reveals that 72% of coaching clients experience improved communication skills, while organizations see an average 7x return on their coaching investment. In addition, 63% of companies report revenue growth with coaching, and a Fortune 500 study showed a 529% ROI.
Middle managers have incredible untapped potential. They shape daily work, bring strategies to life, and uplift their teams. With the right coaching skills, they can transform organizations. Coaching empowers middle managers by building self-awareness, boosting emotional intelligence, unlocking team potential, and equipping them to coach others.
Coaches Empower Managers Through Self-Understanding
First, coaches help managers be better managers by helping them understand themselves better. One of the ways coaches do this is by asking their clients deep questions. Through self-reflection, such questions help clients recognize what motivates them and what they most desire to accomplish. This clarity keeps team members more engaged. It brings their goals into focus, inspiring them to pursue their jobs with renewed energy. Coaches’ questions lift their team’s gaze above the daily rhythms of the workplace and toward a long-term perspective, helping them to see the bigger story and purpose behind what they do. This allows managers to see their everyday tasks in a new light and connect this purpose with who they are and what they uniquely bring to their role.
This increased self-understanding also equips managers to navigate seasons of upheaval and uncertainty. Because their goals and values are clear, they have fixed targets to aim for, even when norms are shaken up. Their goal is no longer simply to maintain the old routine day in and day out; it’s to keep moving toward goals of self-improvement and ways to better inspire their employees. And even when difficulties come, they have more motivation to work through them because their goals are clearly defined.
Co-Active Coaches are uniquely equipped to support managers toward this self-understanding. Co-Active Coaches apply a proven process, supported by research in neuroscience, to help clients uncover their deepest values and motivations.
Coaches Help Managers Cultivate Emotional Intelligence
Part of developing self-understanding is cultivating emotional intelligence (EI). This is the second way coaches can help managers improve as leaders. The business world is waking up to the power of EI, and though EI has not traditionally been recognized as a core skill necessary for business leadership, research shows its high value:
- TalentSmart has found that 90% of top performers have high EI. Moreover, EI by itself appears to determine 58% of a leader’s performance.
- The Harvard Business Review reported that when one Fortune 500 company used mentors and coaches to cultivate its employees’ EI, its productivity grew by 22% in a single year.
Additionally, Dr. Stephen Covey, author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” has said that
Research shows convincingly that [EI] is more important than IQ in almost every role and [is] many times more important in leadership roles. This finding is accentuated as we move from the control philosophy of the industrial age to an empowering release philosophy of the knowledge worker age.
And, according to Warren Bennis, a famous leadership researcher and author, IQ is a “threshold competence,” the baseline requirement for the job, but EI is the next-level skill that separates the best leaders from the others.
Why Is EI So Important?
One of the many reasons EI is important is that it fuels better decision-making. This was first demonstrated in studies by Antonio Damasio and Antoine Bechara et al. in the 1980s when the researchers studied people with brain damage in their ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region associated with emotional signals.
The study results found that the individuals who received fewer emotional signals from their bodies consistently made poorer decisions than other people, despite scoring normally on intelligence tests. The lack of emotional signals impaired these individuals’ judgment. This discovery led to a flurry of further research, helping people understand that emotions are an important component of healthy decision-making.
A manager’s level of EI matters not just for their own decision-making ability, however; it also affects their relationships with their team. Managers with strong EI communicate better, listen better, and develop stronger trust with their employees.
Also, when a manager is conscious of their team members’ emotions, the team feels more cared for. And when the manager is aware of how their own emotions affect others, team members end up feeling safer. This creates a better workplace environment, which helps explain the productivity increase that researchers observe.
The Special Value of Coaching in the Workplace
Coaches are in a unique position to help managers grow in EI. Because coaches aren’t members of the organization, managers can talk to them more openly about their work-related emotions and obstacles. The coach, an unbiased “outsider” to the organization, is there to help the manager understand and process their emotions; therefore, the manager doesn’t need to fear being judged or sparking offense. In this way, coaches provide a safe, healthy means of helping to cultivate a manager’s EI.
Coaches Help Managers View Their Employees in a Better Light
What if your potential could soar simply because your manager believed in you? This is the power of the Pygmalion effect, a phenomenon where a leader’s expectations directly influence employee performance.
When managers set positive, high expectations, it inspires employees to rise to the occasion, fueling confidence, creativity, and meaningful results. Conversely, low expectations can lead to diminished performance, reinforcing a harmful cycle.
This self-fulfilling prophecy is particularly impactful for younger employees and those early in their careers, as they’re still shaping their professional identities and capabilities. True leadership isn’t about fear—it’s about unlocking the greatness within every individual.
For this reason, a central tenant of Co-Active’s coaching philosophy is that all people are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. Co-Active coaches can question the assumptions that managers make about their employees, helping them take on a higher view of their team members and discover untapped potential in themselves. This mindset change helps managers optimize productivity and foster a better team atmosphere.
Outside Coaches Can Help Managers Develop Their Own Coaching Skills
Fourth, coaches can teach managers how to coach their employees. Just like EI, one’s coaching ability can be a powerful leadership skill.
Gallup, having interviewed more than 3.3 million workers from more than 100,000 teams, has compiled a list of the top workplace factors it found as necessary for employees to have job satisfaction. These factors fall into four categories: basic needs, individual contribution, teamwork, and growth. Authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman wrote a book based on Gallup’s research, and their advice to managers is this: “Do everything you can to help each person cultivate his talents. Help each person become more of who he already is.”
In other words, good managers coach their employees for success, helping them grow into better versions of themselves.
These kinds of managers help improve employee satisfaction. And this makes sense; when managers show that they care for their teams and use coaching to help them grow, employee satisfaction will grow as a result. Who doesn’t want to be supported? Who doesn’t want to become a more valuable employee? It’s no surprise that when workers have a manager like this, they stick around longer.
Co-Active coaches can help managers cultivate their own coaching ability, and the Co-Active Training Institute provides tips and advice for doing so.
The Co-Active Advantage: Transforming Managers, Teams, and Organizations Through Coaching
Because of the ways coaches can help managers self-improve, over half of Fortune 500 companies have learned and integrated Co-Active skills into the workplace.
Coaching can give managers a new perspective on their work, increasing their motivation and sense of purpose and leading to a healthier team environment. The research is clear: coaching strategies like these can radically increase productivity, organizational performance, and employee satisfaction within organizations.
Experience the same transformative coaching skills that Fortune 500 companies use—join Co-Active Foundations and start practicing proven techniques from day one.