Manager development coaching for organizations
Before you commission manager development coaching, run a five-minute test.
Ask five of your managers the same four questions, separately:
- What proportion of your week should be spent managing rather than doing?
- What decisions are yours to make without asking?
- What will you be judged on at the end of this year?
- What is the one thing your manager most wants from you?
If the five answers differ materially, you do not have a capability gap. You have a definition gap — and training managers who have not been told what their job is teaches skills for a role nobody has described.
This is the most common finding in this area, it is cheaper to fix than a program, and it is usually fixed by the layer above the managers rather than by the managers themselves.
This page is for the organizational buyer. Individual, self-funded work for a new manager is first-time manager coaching; the wider organizational picture is leadership development for organizations.
ICF ACC · MBA · Riyadh · Arabic and English
What a manager cohort actually needs
Four things, in this order. Most programs start at three.
1 — A defined remit. See above. Until a manager knows what proportion of their time should be spent managing, what they may decide, and what they will be measured on, everything else is decoration.
2 — Permission to manage. Time protected in the diary and authority that matches the accountability. A manager judged on their own output and their team's, with the same workload as before promotion, will choose their own output every time — and they are right to, because that is what is measured.
3 — A small number of skills that carry most of the weight. Delegating and not taking it back. Having the difficult conversation within a week. Prioritizing upward — saying "yes, and here is what will not get done". Developing one person deliberately. Four things, not a curriculum.
4 — A peer group. Managers at the same level, meeting regularly, with real problems. This is frequently the highest-value component and the one most often cut, because it looks like it costs time and produces nothing measurable.
Skipping one and two is why programs on three do not transfer. A manager taught to delegate, in an organization that has not given them the time or the authority to delegate, has been taught to notice a constraint.
Cohort diagnostic
Score your manager population, not one manager. 2 = mostly true across the group, 1 = mixed, 0 = mostly not.
| Score | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Our managers could answer the four questions above consistently | |
| 2 | Managers have time protected for management work | |
| 3 | Their authority matches what they are held accountable for | |
| 4 | They are measured on their team's output, not only their own | |
| 5 | Their managers have a conversation with them about how they are managing | |
| 6 | A manager here can have a difficult conversation without escalating it | |
| 7 | We promote people who manage well, not only people who deliver well | |
| 8 | New managers get something structured in their first ninety days |
13–16: a cohort program will transfer. Buy one.
8–12: fix rows 2, 3 and 7 alongside the program, or it will half-work. These are organizational decisions rather than development ones.
Below 8: a program now will produce a well-liked event and no change. Rows 1 and 7 come first.
Row 7 is the one that decides the culture. If the people who get promoted are the strongest individual performers rather than the best managers, the organization has already told everyone what to optimize for, and no program outvotes that.
What good looks like
A cohort, not a classroom. Eight to twelve managers at a similar level, who continue to know each other afterwards.
Spread over months, not compressed into days. The gap between sessions is where the work happens; the session is where it is examined.
Built on live problems. Every participant brings a current situation — a person, a deadline, a conflict — and works it. Content is introduced because a problem needs it, not because it is week three.
Their managers involved, minimally but specifically. One conversation before, one after. Not an open channel: difficult conversations at work sets out why a manager who uses a coach as a message channel damages the engagement.
Something expected between sessions, and someone looks. Diagnostic row 4 of the pillar's transfer test, applied.
A free resource for participants to run alongside it: first 90 days as a new manager is written for the participant rather than the sponsor and can be used as pre-work at no cost.
Design worksheet for the sponsor
1 THE REMIT GAP Did the four questions produce consistent answers? Y / N If no, who is fixing that, and by when? ____________________________________________________ 2 THE COHORT How many, at what level, selected by whom: ____________________________________________________ What they will be told about why they were chosen: ____________________________________________________ 3 THE FOUR SKILLS Which two matter most for this group, and why: ____________________________________________________ 4 THE MANAGERS ABOVE What each participant's manager will do, specifically: ____________________________________________________ 5 TIME Who protects it, and what gets dropped to make room: ____________________________________________________ 6 WHAT WE WILL LOOK AT, AND WHEN ____________________________________________________ 7 WHAT IN OUR SYSTEM CONTRADICTS THIS (start with promotion criteria) ____________________________________________________
Copy the block — nothing to download and no email required.
Item 5 is the item sponsors leave blank. A development program added to a full workload is a tax on the participants, and they experience it as one.
What not to do
A one-off workshop for everyone. Information transfer, priced as development.
Manager training as a reward. It signals that the cohort has been recognized rather than that something must change, and participation follows the signal.
A program aimed at managers when the problem is the layer above them. Common, and expensive, and it produces a cohort that can see the contradiction clearly.
Individual coaching for six managers with the same gap. More expensive and less effective than a cohort, because it removes the peer group — which was the part that worked.
Anything that cannot say the finding is structural. If the audit shows the remit is undefined, the honest first deliverable is that sentence.
How engagements are structured here
Manager development is one of the six stated organizational service areas, alongside executive and senior leadership coaching, career development for employees, internal mobility and promotion readiness, professional positioning, and career transition support. Audience levels run from emerging talent to executives, and new managers and experienced managers are distinct levels — they are not the same cohort.
The process is Understand → Design → Deliver → Apply → Review, and entry configurations range from a single senior leader to coaching attached to an existing program — relevant here where an organization already has manager training and the gap is application.
Confidentiality follows the stated position: "The organization pays. The session still belongs to the participant." Session content is not reported to the sponsor; review happens against the engagement objectives.
Delivery is in Arabic or English, and participants choose.
Book a discovery call · Message Saad on WhatsApp · See the organizational page
In the Saudi context
Most managers here were promoted internally, which means nearly every cohort contains people managing former peers. That is a specific, teachable situation and it deserves explicit time rather than a passing mention.
Let the cohort choose the language. A manager working in their second language is developing and translating at once, and the sponsor usually assumes English because the materials are.
Mixed teams are the norm for the participants, so "check what they heard" is a practical skill for this cohort rather than a cultural aside.
Approval structures shape what a manager can act on, particularly in public-sector and government-linked organizations. A program that teaches decision-making without accounting for the approval architecture teaches something participants cannot use.
Growth has produced managers earlier than experience would suggest, which is a real gap and one that responds well to a peer cohort — because the peers are all discovering the same things at the same time.
Common questions
How many managers should be in a cohort?
Small enough that everyone speaks in every session. Beyond that it is a scheduling question.
Should new and experienced managers be in the same cohort?
Usually not. The problems are different and the mixed group tends to teach the new managers to be quiet.
Can we combine this with our existing training?
Yes — coaching attached to an existing program is a stated entry configuration, and it is often the right answer when the content is sound and the transfer is not.
What if the finding is that the remit is undefined?
Then that is the first deliverable, and it is a better use of the budget than a program. The four questions are free; run them this week.
Do you report on individual managers?
Against the agreed engagement objectives, not on what was said in a session.
Our managers say they have no time.
They are almost certainly right. That is diagnostic row 2, and it is the sponsor's problem rather than the cohort's.
Can one manager join instead of a cohort?
Yes, and it is a different product: first-time manager coaching for an individual, where the peer group is replaced by a rhythm.
Start with the four questions
Ask five managers, separately, this week. It costs nothing, it takes an afternoon, and the answers will tell you whether you are buying development or a definition.
A useful next step, matched to this topic
If you want support applying what you just read, start with the option closest to the problem in front of you.
Working on this for a team or organization?
Use the corporate route for leadership, manager development, succession, transition and organization-wide coaching needs.
Saad Al-Wuqayan
Career & Executive Coach — ICF ACC, MBA
Saad Al-Wuqayan coaches professionals and executives in Riyadh. Nearly two decades across engineering, business development, financial leadership as a CFO and government transformation sit behind every session.
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Work on this with a coach
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