When Coaching Isn’t Enough: The Gaps Facing Today’s Overloaded Managers

Professional coaching has helped countless leaders overcome challenges, gain self-awareness, and accelerate their professional growth. Its market size of $14.2 billion in 2023 alone speaks to its popularity and perceived value. However, in today’s high-pressure business environment, many managers (and HR buyers) are discovering that coaching often isn’t the one-size-fits-all solution they need – especially at scale. Coaching, despite its benefits, often falls short on the five essential dimensions of modern leadership development.

The Problem with "Guidance Over Solutions" 

When it comes to synchronized problem-solving, professional coaching's philosophical foundation becomes its biggest limitation. The International Coaching Federation explicitly discourages coaches from providing direct advice, instead defining coaching as a process whereby coaches should focus on "creating space for the client's wisdom to emerge." 

While reflective questioning can spark meaningful insights for some leaders, managers under pressure often need quick, specific advice that coaching’s non-directive approach can’t provide in the moment. 

Even beyond this philosophical mismatch, coaches face another challenge: they have to rely solely on secondhand accounts of team issues.

Secondhand Understanding May Limit Personal Impact

One of the major benefits of professional coaching over traditional learning & development approaches is the coach’s ability to get to know the coachee over time. This allows the coach to provide more meaningful guidance through lines of questioning, parsing underlying assumptions, and building trust with the individual.

While coaching can foster meaningful one-on-one relationships and deepen self-awareness, its effectiveness is inherently limited by the coach's secondhand understanding of the manager's situation. This includes an objective, well-rounded understanding of the abilities, preferences, and ambitions of the coachee’s employees and stakeholders. Instead, coaches must rely solely on their clients' personal reflections about team dynamics, business goals, and organizational processes, potentially missing crucial, unbiased context that could inform more targeted guidance. 

This gap in day-to-day insights becomes even more problematic when coaches have limited familiarity with the company environment.

External Coaches Can't Match Company-Specific Needs

Professional coaches can bring diverse experiences and insights gathered from multiple industries to their work with clients. Yet, they rarely possess a deep understanding of an organization's specific policies, procedures, and cultural nuances. As a result, even well-intentioned guidance can lack the precision managers need for their unique challenges. According to Gartner, incorporating corporate context into development opportunities can boost performance by 35% – a benefit often missing from traditional coaching relationships. 

Even if these coaches wanted to update their methods, there’s another catch: many are not consistently exposed to the most up-to-date research.

Managers Need Guidance That Includes The Latest Research

While many coaches bring valuable experience to their practice, their expertise is a byproduct of their personal background and training. Even the best coaches – especially those balancing numerous clients – may find it challenging to stay current on every new study or best practice in organizational psychology. Consequently, their guidance, while well-intended, may not always align with the latest research or real-time, evidence-based insights. In an era during which managers face increasingly complex challenges, from supporting employee mental health to implementing return-to-office mandates, this limitation becomes particularly acute.

Fixed Scheduling Creates Inherent – and Crucial – Time Gaps

Despite technological advances enabling virtual coaching platforms, the fixed-schedule nature of coaching sessions creates a fundamental disconnect between when problems arise and when managers can access support. This scheduling constraint means managers must often navigate critical situations without immediate guidance, then retrospectively discuss these challenges during their next scheduled session. Again, this reflective learning is very valuable, but it does not address the potential underperformance in-the-moment as managers proceed with a course of action they develop in absence of sound guidance.

High Costs Limit Manager Access to Coaching

These shortcomings become even more pronounced in today's business environment, where Gartner reports that 75% of HR leaders believe managers are overwhelmed. The premium costs, time requirements, and scheduling constraints of professional coaching also create scalability challenges, often making it impossible to provide coaching to every manager who could benefit from support. In most circumstances, precious few managers either receive access to coaching or make the time and effort to fully engage with a coach, reducing its potential impact.

In an attempt to fill this gap, some organizations have turned to AI-facilitated “coaching” solutions, which mimic the guidance- and reflection-based approach of a human coach. But these tools often miss the mark. Simply automating the coaching methodology through a chatbot – programming it to ask a series of questions – can create an even more frustrating experience for managers. These interactions feel mechanical and impersonal, lacking the nuanced understanding and adaptive response that makes human coaching valuable in the first place.

Ultimately, human-powered professional coaching remains a powerful tool for leaders, who are fortunate to have access to it. It can help those leaders seek deeper self-awareness and personal growth. However, today’s managers also need development solutions that deliver personalized, timely, and practical support at scale. As organizations continue to evolve and face new challenges, it's becoming clear that, even with the support of traditional learning and development programs, professional coaching cannot provide the comprehensive support that modern managers require to drive team performance and business outcomes.

To learn more about the five essential criteria for modern manager development solutions, read our companion piece: "The Performance Catalyst: 5 Steps to Developing High-Performing Managers."

Ready to transform how your managers perform and grow? Humancore has created the first AI-powered advisor for managers. To learn more about how an AI-powered advisor can transform your organization's approach to manager development, contact us at [email protected].