Coaching Culture and Advocacy

Table of Contents

The P.O.S.H. Leadership Curriculum

Learning Objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to distinguish between a leader who coaches and a coaching culture, replace the reflex to tell with the discipline to ask, advocate for someone who is not in the room, design one small structure that makes coaching the default rather than the exception, and explain why advocacy is the hidden half of leadership development that almost everyone overlooks.

The Story

Abena was a senior manager at a bank in Accra, and she had been through leadership training. She knew how to coach. She had the framework memorized. She asked open ended questions, she listened without interrupting, and she was genuinely good at it. Her direct reports felt seen and heard, and her one on one meetings were the highlight of their week.

But something bothered her, and she could not shake it.

She was the only one doing it. Her peers still told people what to do, her boss still barked orders, and the organization said it valued coaching but no one was held accountable for actually doing it. Coaching was something Abena did despite the culture, not because of it. She was an exception, and exceptions do not scale.

Then she got a new direct report, a young woman named Esi who was brilliant but quiet. Esi would not speak up in meetings, she would not advocate for herself, and she would not ask for the opportunities she clearly deserved. Abena coached her week after week, asking questions, building confidence, helping Esi see her own potential. And it worked. Esi grew. She became more confident. She started speaking up.

But coaching was not enough, because the problem was not inside Esi. The problem was the room. Esi was being overlooked by senior leaders who did not know her, did not see her, and would never sit in a coaching session with her. Her growth was invisible to the people who controlled promotions and assignments.

So Abena did something different, something that felt riskier than coaching. She started speaking for Esi when Esi was not in the room. In leadership meetings, she would say, “Esi is ready for a stretch assignment. I want her on the next big project.” When a promotion opened up, she said, “Esi is not applying because she does not see herself the way others see her, but she is the best person for this role, and I need you to consider her even if she does not put herself forward.”

Abena was not just coaching Esi anymore. She was advocating for Esi. And that made all the difference. Within a year, Esi was promoted. She became a manager herself. And the first thing she did was start coaching and advocating for the quiet young woman on her own team.

That is how a coaching culture spreads. Not through training manuals or workshop certificates, but through transmission. One person coaches and advocates, and the person they raised does the same for someone else. The structure reproduces itself.

The Soft Skill: Coaching as Structure, Not Event

Most leaders think coaching is a conversation. You sit down with someone, you ask good questions, you help them find their own answers, and then you go back to your real work. That is coaching as event, something you schedule and complete and check off your list.

But a coaching culture is different. It is coaching as structure, the default setting, the water you swim in without noticing it. In a coaching culture, the reflex to tell has been replaced by the discipline to ask, and this is not a nice to have or a soft skill that only nice managers practice. It is a structural feature of how work gets done.

Here is what a coaching culture looks like in practice. People expect to be asked, not told. The most junior person in the room can coach the most senior person, and no one finds this strange. Giving advice without being asked is seen as rude rather than helpful, a violation of norms rather than an act of generosity. And the most common phrase in any meeting is not “Here is what you should do” but “What do you think?”

This is not soft. It is structural. It changes who speaks, who listens, and who grows. It distributes the work of development across the entire organization instead of concentrating it in a few designated coaches. And it is the only way to scale leadership development beyond what one person can do alone.

The Hidden Half: Advocacy

Here is what no one tells you about coaching culture, and this is the insight that separates real leadership development from performative management. Coaching is not enough. Not even close.

Coaching happens in private, between you and one other person. That person grows, they gain confidence, they develop new skills, and that is all good. But the organization does not know. The decision makers are not in the room. The people who control promotions, assignments, and high visibility projects have no idea that your quiet direct report is ready for more. Their growth remains invisible, and invisible competence does not get rewarded.

This is where advocacy comes in. Advocacy is speaking for someone when they are not in the room. It is using your credibility, your relationships, and your political capital to open doors for someone who cannot open them themselves. It is saying their name in places they cannot reach and making sure that the people who control opportunities know who they are and what they are capable of.

Coaching without advocacy is development without mobility. You grow people, you invest in them, you watch them become more capable, and then you watch them leave because the organization never saw what you saw. They get frustrated, they feel stuck, and eventually they go somewhere else where someone will advocate for them. You have not helped them. You have trained them for their next employer.

Advocacy without coaching is equally empty, just in a different way. You open doors for people who are not ready, you use your influence to push them forward before they have the skills or confidence to succeed, and then they fail. Everyone blames them, their reputation suffers, and you have not helped them either. You have set them up to fall.

Coaching and advocacy together, that is the structural foundation of leadership development. You grow people in private, and you advance them in public. You do both, or you have done neither.

Insights from Psychology

The psychological research explains why coaching cultures are rare, why most leaders default to telling instead of asking, and why advocacy feels riskier than coaching even though it is just as necessary.

Let us start with the telling reflex. When someone asks for help, your brain wants to give advice. This feels efficient, it feels generous, and it satisfies your need to be useful. But research on advice giving shows that telling people what to do has three problems that most leaders never consider. First, your advice is based on your context, your constraints, and your way of thinking, not theirs. Second, giving advice robs the other person of the chance to think for themselves, to struggle with the problem, and to develop their own judgment. Third, and most damaging, creating dependency means that the person you told will come back to you next time instead of figuring it out on their own. The leader who always tells creates followers who cannot think without them. The leader who always asks creates thinkers who can lead without them.

Now consider the confidence gap, which has been documented in dozens of studies across multiple countries and industries. Women and underrepresented groups consistently underestimate their own abilities. They apply for promotions only when they meet one hundred percent of the criteria, while men apply when they meet sixty percent. This is not a skill gap. It is a confidence gap. And coaching alone does not fix it, because the gap is not about their internal state. It is about the external standards they perceive. They look at the job requirements, they see that they do not meet every single one, and they conclude that they are not ready. Advocacy bridges that gap. Someone else, someone with credibility, says, “You are ready.” And that external validation changes everything. It does not matter that the validation came from outside. It works anyway.

The Matthew Effect, named after the biblical verse about the rich getting richer, is sociologist Robert Merton’s observation that advantage accumulates. Those who have more get more, and those who have less get less. In organizations, the Matthew Effect means that visible people get more opportunities. The people who speak up in meetings, who sit near the decision makers, who have powerful advocates, they get the stretch assignments, the promotions, the visibility. Quiet people get overlooked, not because they are less capable but because no one sees them. Coaching happens in private, so it does not change visibility at all. Advocacy happens in public, so it changes visibility directly. Without advocacy, the quiet stay quiet, no matter how much coaching they receive. The Matthew Effect continues unchecked.

Finally, consider the research on social proof and legitimacy. People look to others to determine what is real, what is valuable, and who is credible. If a respected leader advocates for someone, that person becomes legitimate in the eyes of others. Doors open, opportunities appear, and the person who was invisible suddenly becomes visible. Advocacy is not just nice to have. It is necessary. It provides the social proof that quiet competence cannot generate on its own.

Insights from Business

The business case for coaching culture and advocacy is measurable, and the costs of ignoring it are staggering. Let me walk you through the numbers and the logic.

Start with the cost of command and control. Organizations that rely on telling create bottlenecks, and bottlenecks are expensive. Decisions wait for the leader, so everything slows down. Innovation dies because no one feels safe to suggest anything, so the organization falls behind competitors. Turnover rises because talented people will not stay where they are not heard, so recruitment and training costs spiral upward. Research on organizational agility shows that command and control structures are simply too slow for modern markets. By the time a decision works its way up the chain and back down, the opportunity is gone. Coaching cultures make decisions faster because people at every level are empowered to think, to act, and to learn from the results.

Now consider the advocacy gap in succession planning. Studies of succession pipelines consistently find that women and underrepresented groups are overlooked not because of performance but because of visibility. They have the skills, they have the results, they have everything except someone to speak for them. And the cost of this gap is not just a diversity problem. It is a talent problem. Organizations that fail to advocate for their quiet high potentials are leaving value on the table. They are letting their competitors hire the people they should have promoted.

The retention multiplier is even more direct. Research on employee retention shows that the single strongest predictor of whether someone stays with an organization is whether they have a leader who invests in their development. Not a leader who manages their work, assigns their tasks, or evaluates their performance. A leader who develops their career. Coaching and advocacy are the two levers of development. Coaching builds skill and confidence. Advocacy builds visibility and opportunity. Together, they build loyalty. Separately, they build frustration.

Let me bring this back to the Ghanaian context, because my master’s thesis at HSE University was not abstract. The Ghana Statistical Service found that 92.3 percent of Ghanaian businesses are micro‑sized and informal. Most have no formal training budget, most have no HR department, and most are run by managers who have never received any formal leadership training at all. For these businesses, a coaching culture is not a luxury. It is survival. The leader cannot be the only decision maker because there is no time and no capacity. The only way to scale is to build a culture where everyone coaches everyone, where asking is the default and telling is the exception.

And advocacy? In an informal economy where opportunities come through relationships rather than formal job postings, advocacy is the engine of mobility. Someone must speak for you, someone must introduce you, someone must vouch for you. That is not corruption. That is how networks work in every economy, formal or informal. The question is whether leaders use their networks intentionally to lift others or unconsciously to protect their own position.

Insights from Philosophy

The philosophers have long understood that power is not just about what you do. It is about who you include and who you speak for.

Consider Plato’s cave. The prisoners see only shadows on the wall, and they believe the shadows are reality. One prisoner escapes, sees the sun, and returns to tell the others. Plato’s allegory is about education, about the painful process of coming to see the truth. But it is also about advocacy. The escaped prisoner advocates for those still in the dark. He speaks for them, he tries to open their eyes, and he uses his experience to help them see what they cannot see on their own. The leader who coaches but does not advocate is like a prisoner who escapes and stays outside. They have grown, they have seen the sun, but they leave everyone else in the dark.

Socrates, of course, is the original coach. He did not lecture. He asked questions. He believed that wisdom could not be transferred from one person to another like water from a jug. It had to be discovered, and the only way to discover it was through dialogue. The leader who coaches is practicing Socratic method, trusting that the answers are already inside the other person and that the coach’s job is simply to draw them out. But Socrates also had students, and he advocated for them. He introduced them to influential Athenians, he vouched for their character, and he used his credibility to open doors. Coaching without advocacy is Socrates without students. It is incomplete.

The ethics of care, developed by Nel Noddings, offers another lens. Noddings argued that ethical action emerges from relationships, not from abstract rules or principles. The caring leader does not apply a formula. They respond to the specific needs of the specific person in front of them. For some people, the need is coaching. They need someone to ask them questions, to help them think, to draw out their own wisdom. For others, the need is advocacy. They need someone to speak for them, to open doors, to use their credibility on their behalf. The leader who only coaches is applying a formula instead of responding to the person. The leader who coaches and advocates is responding to the whole person.

Insights from African Wisdom

The African philosophical tradition has never separated coaching from advocacy, because it has never separated individual development from communal responsibility.

The proverb says it takes a village to raise a child, but the proverb is not just about children. It is about everyone. No one succeeds alone, and no one develops alone. The village does not just coach. The village advocates. The elders speak for the young, the community opens doors, and the network carries people forward. A coaching culture without advocacy is a village that watches its children struggle but does nothing to help. It is not a village at all. It is just a collection of individuals.

In traditional Ghanaian governance, the chief does not rule alone. The council of elders advises, but the council also advocates. They speak for the community, they bring concerns to the chief, and they open channels of communication between the formal hierarchy and the informal networks where most of the real work happens. The leader who builds a coaching culture is creating a council of elders, a structure where every person is empowered to advise, to question, and to coach. And every leader is expected to advocate, to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves, and to use their position to lift others.

Sankofa teaches us to look backward to move forward, but Sankofa is usually applied to ourselves. We look at our own past, we learn from our own mistakes, and we carry our own history into the future. What if Sankofa is also for others? What if a leader looks backward at the people coming behind them and says, “I will carry their stories forward, I will speak their names, and I will open the doors that were opened for me”? That is advocacy as Sankofa, looking back to lift others as you move forward. It is the same principle applied to community instead of self.

Insights from Sacred Tradition

The sacred texts are filled with advocacy, with people speaking for people who cannot speak for themselves, and with leaders using their relationship with power to protect and promote the vulnerable.

After the golden calf, in Exodus 32, God was ready to destroy the people of Israel. Moses did not stay silent. He did not say, “Well, they brought this on themselves.” He advocated. He argued. He reminded God of the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He spoke for people who had no standing to speak for themselves. That is advocacy, using your relationship, your credibility, and your voice to protect and promote someone who cannot protect or promote themselves.

Esther was the queen, and she had access to the king. Her people were about to be destroyed, and she could have stayed silent. She could have protected herself. Instead, she said, “If I perish, I perish.” She spoke, she advocated, and she saved her people. The leader who advocates takes a risk. They use their political capital for someone else, and it might cost them. Esther was willing to pay that cost.

When the religious leaders brought the woman caught in adultery, they wanted to stone her. Jesus did not condemn her, but he also did not ignore her. He stood between her and her accusers. He spoke, and he changed the outcome. That is advocacy, standing in the gap and using your voice to change the trajectory of someone else’s life.

Paul sent Onesimus, a runaway slave, back to his master Philemon. But Paul did not just send him. He wrote a letter, and he advocated. He said, “Welcome him as you would welcome me.” Paul used his relationship with Philemon to advocate for someone who had no relationship at all. That is what advocacy looks like in practice, not a grand gesture but a specific intervention on behalf of a specific person.

Practical Exercise

This exercise will take about thirty minutes. Do it alone first, and then do it with your team.

Start by identifying someone who is overlooked. Think of one person on your team or in your organization who is quiet, capable, and invisible. They do good work, they show up every day, but no one talks about them and no one advocates for them. Write down their name.

Now name what they need. Do they need coaching? Do they need to build skill or confidence? Or do they need advocacy? Do they need visibility, opportunities, someone to speak for them? Be honest with yourself. Coaching feels good to give, and it feels safe. Advocacy feels risky, and most of us default to coaching because it does not require us to use our political capital. If this person needs advocacy, say so. Write it down.

If they need coaching, write down three open ended questions you will ask them in your next conversation. “What is something you want to learn but have not had the chance to try?” “What is holding you back from asking for more responsibility?” “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” Schedule the conversation, keep it private, ask the questions, and listen. Do not give advice.

If they need advocacy, write down one room you are in where they are not present. A leadership meeting, a planning session, a conversation with a decision maker. Then write down one thing you will say about them in that room. “I want to recommend someone for that project.” “There is someone on my team who is ready for more.” “I want to make sure we are not overlooking quiet people.” Say their name, use your credibility, and open the door.

Finally, build the structure. Coaching culture does not happen by accident, and neither does advocacy. Design one small structure that makes coaching the default. Add “What do you think?” to the end of every instruction you give for one week. Start every team meeting with a round of questions instead of updates. Create a shared document where anyone can ask for coaching on any topic. Choose one and implement it this week.

Then build the advocacy structure. In every leadership meeting, add an agenda item: “Who are we overlooking?” Before every promotion decision, ask: “Who has been advocated for and who has not?” Create a practice where each leader must advocate for at least one person per quarter. Choose one and implement it this quarter.

Application

This week, do two things.

First, have a coaching conversation with someone who reports to you. Ask only questions, give zero advice, and notice how uncomfortable it feels. Do it anyway.

Second, advocate for someone who is not in the room. Say their name, open a door, and use your credibility for someone else.

Then notice something. The person you advocated for will never forget it, and they will do the same for someone else. That is how a culture spreads, not through training but through transmission. One person coaches and advocates, and the person they raised does the same for someone else. The structure reproduces itself, and you have started something that will outlast you.

References

Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Wiley.
Grant, A. M. (2013). Give and take: A revolutionary approach to success. Viking.
Ibarra, H. (2019). Act like a leader, think like a leader. Harvard Business Review Press.
Kpodo, P. E. (2026). Managerial soft skills in the structure of effective leadership: Posh Life Plan, a project‑based business plan for a leadership development platform serving the Ghanaian market. Master’s thesis, HSE University.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. University of California Press.
Tannen, D. (1990). You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation. William Morrow.

A Final Word

Module 22 is not about being a coach. It is about building a coaching culture, and building a coaching culture requires the thing that almost no one talks about. Advocacy.

Coaching develops people, and advocacy advances them. You need both. Most leaders do only the first because it feels good and it is safe. They check the box, they feel good about themselves, and the people they coach stay stuck. They grow in private, and they are overlooked in public.

Do not be that leader. Coach in private, advocate in public, and build the culture where everyone does both. That is how you turn managerial soft skills into the structure of effective leadership.