21 October 2026
The best-performing organisations aren't just training their managers. They're developing them as coaches. It's a shift that's already under way and it's accelerating, driven by what organisations have learned about what impacts performance. Coaching and mentoring are now a mainstream management expectation and the organisations getting it right are treating it as a core capability rather than a nice-to-have.
What coaching means in a management context
So, what is coaching in the workplace, really? It's a day-to-day management behaviour: asking the right questions to develop a team member's own thinking, rather than simply providing the answer.
Coaching and mentoring often get used interchangeably and in practice they work well together, but they aren't quite the same thing. Mentoring shares experience and guidance, coaching builds a person's own thinking.
Many managers are excellent mentors, who always have an answer ready. What they might not have learnt yet are coaching skills for managers: how to hold back the answer long enough for your direct report to find their own.
Learning how to coach your team doesn't require an entirely new toolkit. It can start with one different question, asked consistently, instead of the same solution offered on autopilot.
Why it matters
A joint study by the International Coaching Federation and the Human Capital Institute found that 72% of organisations identify a direct correlation between coaching and increased employee engagement, yet only 15% currently have what the same research classifies as a strong coaching culture. The pattern is clear; most organisations just haven't structured for it yet.
What a coaching culture looks like in practice
An embedded coaching culture looks different day to day. Performance conversations become two-way and teams get visibly more comfortable solving problems before they escalate.
For Toyota, an engagement survey in 2012 pointed to a misalignment between employees and their managers. Toyota asked managers what they needed and found a cycle: they wanted to feel empowered and trusted, which depended on better decisions, which depended on being coached themselves.
Toyota built a leadership programme with coaching at its core, underpinned by ILM's coaching and mentoring qualifications. The programme gives managers a recognised qualification and gives the business a consistent standard of management.
According to Rachel Shepherd, Toyota's General Manager for People and Workplace Experience, the impact showed up directly in engagement, decision-making and retention. What's consistent across examples like these is that a coaching culture isn't built in a single session. It's a manager habit, practised and reinforced, one conversation at a time.
How to build it: structure and qualification
None of this happens by accident. Building a coaching culture at work is a structured process, developed throughout every level of management, not something bolted onto a single course. That's why coaching and mentoring is such an integral part of ILM's portfolio.
ILM's coaching and mentoring qualification suite gives managers a genuine, progressive route with rigour – real coaching with real people, in a structured and reflective manner.
The ILM Level 3 Award and Certificate in Coaching and Mentoring build the foundational skill of coaching real conversations, while the ILM Level 5 Certificate and Diploma in Professional Coaching and Mentoring develop that into consistent, outcome-driven practice across more complex situations. Both are grounded in real workplace application rather than theory.
Take the next step
Coaching gives you a competitive advantage. Organisations that build it into the way managers operate keep their best people and grow their next leaders. That's the power of coaching in the workplace.
Explore our coaching and mentoring qualifications
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