The Readiness Gap

The Readiness Question

The Employee Nothing Seems to Work On

Most managers can name one. The tools they were given rarely reach that person.

Ask experienced managers who is hardest to manage, and the answer comes quickly.

It is usually not the weakest performer. It is a particular kind of person.

A familiar list

In frontline retail, the first answer is often the person who struggles to learn, or learns slowly. Many people in these roles did not come through an academic route. Most of the training bought for them was designed by people who did.

Then come the people managers describe with more feeling:

• The one who won't take input.
• The one who makes the same mistake a fourth time.
• The one who is careless in ways that keep costing something.
• The one who doesn't want to be there.
• The one who nods in the meeting and does nothing afterwards.

In offices there is one more, phrased almost the same way everywhere: that's not my job.

It isn't a shortage of tools

Most organisations have a training catalogue, a competency framework, a performance cycle and managers trained to coach.

The pattern holds anyway. Things run acceptably for months. Then something goes wrong where it matters — a client, an audit, a handover — and it is often the same person, for reasons that were visible beforehand.

Coaching is the standard answer

In management classrooms, coaching is close to the default: ask rather than tell, and let the person own the change.

For many cases that works. For simple performance gaps, the familiar situational approach — more direction for the new, more room for the capable — works well enough too.

For a smaller group, none of it seems to land. The conversation is polite. Nothing changes. A quarter later, the same conversation happens again.

Then the options narrow

Ask managers what is left once coaching has failed, and many name two things: raise your voice, or remove the person.

The options in between — reassignment, redesigned work, a lighter load, a staged plan — do exist. They are used less, because each one requires someone to first establish what is actually wrong.

What research says happens next

The drift toward harsher treatment has been studied.

Tepper, Moss and Duffy found that when supervisors see a subordinate as a poor performer, abusive supervision becomes more likely: raised voices, public criticism, withdrawn courtesy.

Later research points to a mechanism. When the cause of poor performance is unclear, supervisors tend to put it down to the person — often reading it as low conscientiousness. That reading is linked to harsher treatment.

The manager pays too. Shen and colleagues found that an employee's poor performance can raise the supervisor's own emotional exhaustion, partly through the supervisor's own harsher behaviour.

A cycle, not a character flaw

The cause is unclear. The manager needs an explanation and reaches for the one that needs no further information: this is just who they are. Patience runs out. Both people end the year worse off, and the behaviour hasn't changed.

The problem may not be the menu of responses. Most managers can use several of them well. What seems to be missing comes earlier — a way to tell, before choosing, which kind of case is in front of you.

One item on that menu has grown faster than the rest. It is also the one most often prescribed for the cases it doesn't reach.

How Coaching Became Every Manager's Job

The growth is real, and so is the case for it. Something was lost along the way.

A profession that more than doubled

The International Coaching Federation estimated 53,300 coach practitioners worldwide in 2016. Its 2025 study put the figure at 122,974.

These are survey-based estimates, weighted toward credentialled coaches. Read them as a direction, not a precise count.

From a service to a skill

More telling than the headcount is where coaching now sits.

ICF now tracks "role integrators" — managers who use coaching skills inside their day job rather than as a separate profession. They made up 11% of its 2025 respondents.

Leadership programmes followed. A manager on a general leadership course today can expect to learn a questioning model, a listening model and a feedback model.

There is a reason for the shift

It isn't only about cost. Jones, Woods and Guillaume reviewed 17 workplace coaching studies and found stronger effects when the coach was internal rather than external.

If internal coaching tends to work better, training managers to coach is a defensible choice.

What quietly disappeared

Buying a coaching engagement involves a selection step, even an informal one. Someone decides that this person, at this point, is worth the fee. A professional coach can also decline a case that won't work.

When coaching becomes a standing expectation of the line manager, that step tends to disappear. The manager coaches whoever is in front of them.

The field has scaled the intervention. It has not scaled the judgement about when to use it.

Before going further, one question needs a straight answer: does coaching actually work?

Yes, Coaching Works. Here Is the Fine Print.

The headline numbers are real. So are the caveats.

The case for coaching

The most widely cited review, by Theeboom, Beersma and van Vianen, pooled 18 studies of coaching in organisations. Coaching improved every outcome they measured.

In psychology, these count as moderate to large effects. A separate review limited to workplace coaching also found positive effects.

Fine print 1: the study design changes the answer

In the same review, studies that compared people only with themselves, before and after, found an effect of g = 1.15. Studies that included a comparison group found g = 0.39.

That is a threefold gap driven by method, not by coaching. Before-and-after designs leave room for other explanations: time passing, the attention itself, or people drifting back toward their usual level.

Fine print 2: randomised trials report more modest effects

A 2023 review of randomised controlled trials only, by Nicolau and colleagues, found an overall effect of g = 0.43, which the authors describe as moderate. It rests on 20 studies of external coaches. The one earlier randomised-only review, by Burt and Talati, rested on 11 studies and reported notably lower effects than Theeboom's.

Why this doesn't sink the argument

Smaller effects under stricter tests are normal in applied psychology. Coaching still beats doing nothing.

What the stricter evidence changes is how confidently anyone can say how much it helps, for whom, and under what conditions.

That spread between studies — not the average across them — is where Part 4 begins.

More Coaching Isn't the Same as Better Coaching

Three major reviews found that the number of sessions made no reliable difference. One found it did. Both results point the same way.

In most interventions, more of the thing produces more of the effect, at least up to a point.

More hours of practice, more improvement. A higher dose, a stronger response. Checking for that relationship is standard practice in intervention research.

Coaching mostly fails that check

Theeboom and colleagues tested whether the number of coaching sessions changed the size of the effect. It did not.

Jones, Woods and Guillaume ran the same test on workplace coaching, and went further. They checked for a straight-line relationship and for a curve — the pattern where extra sessions help up to a point and then stop helping. Neither appeared. There was no dose effect and no plateau.

Nicolau and colleagues, using only randomised trials, found the same: the number of sessions did not moderate the result. The one exception was a modest link between longer programmes and attitude outcomes.

One review disagrees

Sonesh and colleagues, in a separate 2015 meta-analysis, did find that the number of sessions was a significant moderator.

This report does not set that finding aside. Four reviews, three reporting no reliable dose effect and one reporting a clear one, is a mixed picture, not a settled one.

Why the mixed result is the interesting part

Theeboom and colleagues offered an explanation for their own result.

People with simpler, less serious issues tend to need fewer sessions and gain more from them. People with more serious or complex issues tend to receive more sessions and gain less.

If that is right, the number of sessions and the difficulty of the case move together. The harder the case, the more sessions it gets, and the smaller the improvement. Averaged across everyone, that can hide whatever effect extra sessions have.

So the question "does more coaching help?" may not have a single answer. It may help some people a great deal and others very little.

Which turns it into a question about cost

For a manager, that matters in a practical way.

If one person needs many rounds of coaching to show a small change, the time spent on that person is not available for anyone else on the team. The useful question stops being whether more coaching works. It becomes whether it is worth it, for this person, compared with the other things that time could have been used for.

That can only be answered by knowing something about the person before the sessions start.

The Answer Researchers Keep Pointing To

The people who study coaching have been saying for years what decides the result. It sits before the first session.

The meta-analysis that asked for it directly

Jones, Woods and Guillaume ended their discussion of session numbers with a specific request. Future research, they suggested, should qualify the finding by taking account of how severe the employee's development issues are at the start of coaching.

That is a call for a measure taken before coaching begins, written by the authors of one of the field's main reviews, in the field's own journals.

The factors that have been identified

Bozer and Jones later reviewed 117 empirical studies of workplace coaching to find out what determines whether it works. Seven areas stood out. Several of them describe the person being coached: self-efficacy, motivation to be coached, and goal orientation. One describes the conditions around them: support from their supervisor.

Leadership researchers use a related idea. Hannah and Avolio call it developmental readiness — a person's motivation to develop, and their ability to develop. Part of that ability, in their account, is self-awareness.

The direction is consistent. What the person brings to coaching, and what surrounds them, shapes what coaching can do.

Coaching's own definition shows why

The International Coaching Federation describes the coach's job as supporting "the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has."

That is a sound description of what coaching does well. It is also an assumption. Coaching works on the premise that the answer is already in the person, and that what is missing is the space or the questions to reach it.

Where the premise holds, and where it doesn't

The second report in this series set out five working patterns behind development that doesn't convert. They are an AERTHEIX working framework drawn from practice, not a validated classification. Read against coaching's premise, they separate quickly.

Coaching fits best where a person accepts the gap, has the basic capability, and is held back by something they have not yet seen. That is a real and common case. It is also narrower than the range of cases coaching is currently sent to.

Back to the list in Part 1

The people managers named at the start — the one who won't take input, the one who repeats the same mistake, the one who nods and does nothing — rarely sit in that narrow case.

Which raises the obvious question. If the research has pointed to readiness for years, why does so little of it happen in practice?

Why Readiness Goes Unchecked — and What Would Make It Workable

Three ordinary reasons explain most of it. None of them requires anyone to be doing their job badly.

Reason 1: the premise is taken on trust

Coaching is taught as a way of drawing out what a person already knows. In practice, that premise tends to be assumed rather than checked.

The manager is taught to ask good questions. Far less attention goes to whether this person, at this point, is someone the questions can reach. The working assumption is that the person knows the problem, knows roughly what to do, and is held back by a blind spot. For some people that is true. For the cases in Part 1, it often isn't.

Reason 2: checking takes time, and the usual check is weak

Assessing readiness is an extra task on top of the coaching itself.

When it is done, it is usually a questionnaire the person fills in about themselves. That runs into a basic problem. Readiness, as researchers describe it, includes self-awareness. Asking someone to rate their own self-awareness is circular: the people with the least of it are the people least able to report it accurately.

The people involved also have little reason to raise the question. The coach has been engaged. The manager nominated the person. The person has no reason to say they are not ready. Calling a case unsuitable costs each of them something.

Reason 3: the manager has less time than before

Gallup reports that the average US manager now has 12.1 direct reports, up from 10.9 in 2024 and 8.2 in 2013.

Two caveats. These are US figures; comparable public data for Hong Kong is not available. And Gallup also finds that large teams can perform well when they are managed effectively. Team size alone does not decide the outcome.

But every added direct report comes out of the same fixed week. A readiness check that takes an hour per person, done properly, is a day and a half of work for a team of twelve — before any coaching begins.

What would make it workable

If readiness can't be established by a separate form, and managers don't have spare hours for it, the evidence has to come from somewhere else.

The most plausible source is the work itself. Managers already see what happens after they give feedback, set a standard or change someone's conditions. The person corrects course, or doesn't. They ask for help, or they repeat the error. They accept the assessment, or they dispute it. Most of that is observed. Very little of it is written down in a form anyone can use later.

A short, consistent record of those moments, against a written standard, kept as they happen, would make readiness visible by the time a development decision has to be made. It would also show which of the five patterns is more likely in play — which is what decides whether coaching is the right next move at all.

The obvious objection

A manager short of time for a readiness questionnaire is also short of time for a new record.

That objection is fair, and it is the practical test for any approach of this kind. The record only works if it is lighter than what it replaces: a few lines at the moment something happens, not a form completed at review time. Whether that can be kept light enough for a manager with twelve direct reports is not something this report can assert. It has to be shown.

Where VITALIS fits

VITALIS is not a coaching instrument and does not predict who will respond to coaching. It creates a structured record, built from ordinary work, of how a person has responded to instruction, feedback and changed conditions — with the observed instances kept alongside the reading, and with the explanation left open where the evidence does not settle it.

That record can help a manager decide whether the next move is coaching, instruction, a change in conditions, a change in load, or more observation. Founding deployments will test whether it can make those distinctions consistently, and whether it can be kept light enough to use, without overstating what the evidence shows.