What 200 Leaders Taught Us About Peer Coaching

I was approached by a technology leader from a medium-sized organization. They started doing AI before people were even talking about it, and they grew fast.

"You see," they told me, "we are growing fast and promoting leaders to the next level, but they don't have time to mentor the new leaders reporting to them and build the skills needed to become first-time leaders or move from managing people to managing managers."

"It is all happening too fast. We have brought in another provider to lead a leadership development seminar, but we haven't seen any behavioral change.

We need help, and we want to measure:

• Results in delegation

• Results in giving feedback

• Leaders who stop being the answer and start empowering their people to become problem solvers

Can you do that?"

My answer is always the same:

"If you partner with me, YES! But I need your people's input."

We were able to gather data, review engagement surveys, and have conversations across all leadership levels. The responses were remarkably consistent, from Team Lead to SVP.

The challenge was feedback. Feedback to their people. Feedback to peers. Feedback across functuiona/matrix teams.

Our suggestion was:

• Micro-learning: We don't spend a lot of time teaching or training, only short micro-learning moments.

• Peer-to-Peer Coaching and Learning

• Measuring before and after each event.

They said yes. They liked that this approach didn't require as much time, and we were even able to run the first event remotely.

Mostly, when we run events where leaders at all levels learn together, the top leaders leave early. In this event, no one left.

We started exploring feedback. We, as the facilitation team, were the ones bringing the design, knowledge, and expertise to create the conditions for leaders to learn from one another, but we didn't get too attached to the material itself. The conversation touched leaders at all levels. It was open enough that whether you led people, managed managers, or oversaw a large organization, everyone could connect it to their own reality, current challenges, and wins.

The chat was overflowing with sharing. Leaders were teaching each other throughout the event.

Then we paired them to peer coach each other.

When we say peer coaching, the idea is that two peers partner to solve a real challenge with a very specific structure.

One peer, the Explorer, explores a real, current challenge. The second peer is the Peer Coach. The Peer Coach's role is to partner through questions rather than solve the problem or share an opinion - that’s it!
Then they switch roles. Each person gets to coach and to explore.

The outcome was unbelievable.

• All participants said the same thing: peer coaching was the most impactful experience they had. Not only that, many shared that they are ready and feel comfortable doing the same with their people.

As I listened to people talk about their experiences, I realized that both were learning at the same time. The Explorer was working through a real challenge, and the Coach was practicing something too: asking questions instead of jumping in with answers. And for many leaders, that is exactly the behavior they need from their own teams and across functions.

The skill of guiding someone through questions without jumping in, rescuing, or taking over is exactly what a leader needs when their team brings them a problem.

You see, the magic happens when people work on Real Play, not Role-Play. Real challenges require in-the-moment exploration and questioning that you simply cannot recreate through role-play. It builds skills that are difficult to develop through theory alone. What often happens is that people go back to their work environment and play it safe, doing what they have always done.

We were beyond surprised to see how 10 minutes, multiplied by two rounds, shifted so many leaders' behaviors.

We are not saying it was all perfect, but the progress was real. The reason it works is not complicated. We learn faster from peers than from experts. We do this all the time with on-the-job learning, but rarely in leadership.

This is why more and more of the work we do with teams and cohorts is connected directly to real work and real challenges. The expert should never be the focus; it's the peer with a good question.

What is the problem your team keeps bringing to you that they should be solving themselves?