How we developed coaching behaviours in 900 leaders
Global Accountancy
The challenge:
How do you get busy, technical leaders to coach?
Audit is a tightly regulated profession, and an independent review pointed to a single lever for lifting audit quality: coaching.
But under pressure, audit leaders defaulted to telling people what to do, or taking over and fixing the work themselves.
Junior people stopped thinking for themselves, leaders drowned in reviewing and rewriting, and quality suffered. They came to us with three challenges:
Shift leaders from telling and fixing to coaching and developing.
Move ownership down to their teams while protecting audit quality.
Make it land with a busy, highly technical, deeply sceptical audience.
The approach:
Shift three key behaviours in the most senior leaders.
We started with the hardest: the Partners and Directors who personally sign off the firm’s audits — senior, technical, time-poor, and sceptical of anything that smells like ‘soft’ learning. Across ten sessions, we ran 178 of them through a fast-paced, experiential 2.5-hour session, built around three shifts:
Break the bottleneck. Naming what really stops busy leaders from coaching, and why taking over feels easier in the moment.
Brief for clearer thinking. Briefing work so people take genuine ownership, without putting quality at risk.
Turn errors into judgement. Responding to mistakes so they build judgement, instead of training people to wait for the answer.
We made the behavioural science stick with charismatic, memorable tools, from the marshmallow test to ‘tappers versus listeners’.
01
Break the bottleneck.
Naming what really stops busy leaders from coaching, and why taking over feels easier in the moment.
02
Brief for clearer thinking.
Briefing work so people take genuine ownership, without putting quality at risk.
“Honestly one of the best sessions we’ve done in my time.”
Partner
The results:
The toughest audience asked for more.
98% found the facilitator clear and engaging.
95% felt more of the firm needed sessions like this.
95% would recommend it to a peer.
The loudest message wasn’t in the scores, it was a request: roll this out to our managers.
The programme is now in delivery across 900+ leaders: Partners, Directors, the audit quality team, and managers.
