Your Reps Don't Think the Coaching Happened

The short version: Gallup's 2024 study of 2,729 managers and 12,710 individual contributors found that 50% of managers report delivering feedback weekly while only 20% of employees report receiving it — the largest perception gap in the study. The gap is not a shortfall in effort — managers believe they are already coaching. Pipeline reviews and corrective instructions feel like coaching to the person giving them and like something else entirely to the person receiving them.

Ask a sales manager how often he coaches his team and he will tell you: weekly.

Ask his reps and roughly one in five will agree.

That is not a rounding error. That is two groups of people, in the same rooms, on the same calendar invites, walking out with entirely different accounts of what took place.

Gallup surveyed a nationally representative U.S. sample of 2,729 managers and 12,710 individual contributors, asking each group to rate the same twenty managerial behaviours — one side on how they manage, the other on how they are managed. About half the managers (50%) reported delivering feedback weekly. One in five employees (20%) reported receiving it.

That thirty-point spread was the largest perception gap in the entire study. Not on anything soft or interpretive. On frequency — the most countable thing they measured.

Somewhere between the giving and the receiving, most of it disappears.

The behaviour that matters most is the one rated worst

There is a second finding in the same study that deserves more attention than it gets.

Gallup sorted all twenty managerial behaviours into four categories: strengths rated highly by both sides, known weaknesses both sides rated low, blind spots where managers rated themselves high and employees rated them low, and unrecognised strengths where the reverse held.

The behaviour rated lowest of all twenty was "meaningful feedback in the last week."

Gallup calls this the coaching habit — quality and frequency in a single measure — and describes it as among the best predictors of employee engagement they have ever studied.

So the most powerful behaviour available to a manager is also the one he does least, and the gap between doing it and thinking he's done it is the widest in the dataset.

The known weaknesses clustered together, and the cluster has a name: meaningful feedback, motivation, removing barriers to performance, discussing strengths. Every one of them a coaching behaviour. Every one of them forward-looking. Every one of them requiring the manager to know something specific about how this person works.

Managers scored well on being responsive, approachable, and informed. Transactional things. Things you can do without knowing anything in particular about the person in front of you.

Where it goes

It goes into the pipeline review.

A manager sits down with a rep for forty minutes. They go through eleven opportunities. Close dates, next steps, what's blocking the Henderson deal, whether the Morrison thing is real. The manager asks questions the whole time. He leaves with a clear sense of the quarter and a clear sense that he has just spent forty minutes developing his rep.

The rep leaves having reported on his deals.

Nothing about how he sells was discussed. No behaviour was named. No skill was practised. The conversation was about the deals, and the rep — correctly — files it under forecasting.

Both men are telling the truth when they answer the survey.

The second place it goes

It goes into correction, which wears coaching's clothes and does none of its work.

"You need to get higher in the org."
"Don't discount until they've said yes to the value."
"You have to slow down in discovery."

These are instructions. They are often correct instructions. But an instruction transfers a conclusion, not a capability, and the rep who receives one has learned what his manager thinks — not how to think it himself next Tuesday when the same moment arrives and his manager isn't there.

Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular have written about this gap in Harvard Business Review: managers who believe they are coaching are frequently telling. And in the research they cite, roughly a quarter of executives significantly overestimated their own coaching ability when measured against how colleagues rated them.

The people who most confidently believe they are good at this are, disproportionately, the people who aren't.

Why the disagreement matters more than the shortfall

The obvious response is that managers should coach more. That is the response the entire enablement industry has been selling for twenty years and it has not worked, because it misreads the problem.

The problem is not that managers know they're not coaching and refuse to.

The problem is that they believe they already are.

You cannot fix a deficit that doesn't appear on your own books. A manager who thinks he coached four times last week has no reason to add a fifth. He has every reason to resent being told he should. From inside his own experience, he is doing the work — and the data that would tell him otherwise sits in the heads of eight people who have no safe way to say so.

That is the actual structure of the gap: it is not a shortfall in effort, it is a failure of instrumentation. Nobody is keeping score, so everybody keeps their own.

The audit

Three questions. Ask them of your reps, not yourself, and ask them in a way that permits an honest answer.

In the last thirty days, how many conversations changed something about how you sell?

Not how many meetings. Not how many one-to-ones. How many left you doing something differently on the next call. Most reps will say zero or one. This is the number that matters and almost nobody tracks it.

What is the specific behaviour you're currently working on?

If a rep cannot name it in a sentence, no coaching has landed — whatever the calendar says. A rep under genuine development always knows what he's working on. It's the thing he's slightly self-conscious about.

When was the last time someone described a specific moment in one of your calls back to you?

Not the outcome. Not the deal. A moment. Minute eleven. The thing you said. Reps remember these for years, which tells you how rarely they happen.

What the disagreement is really telling you

When two people leave the same conversation with incompatible accounts of it, the conversation had no observable output.

Nothing was written down. No behaviour was named. No standard was applied. There is no artifact, so there is nothing to disagree with — only two memories, each shaped by what each man needed the meeting to have been.

Every other function in the business solved this years ago. Marketing has attribution. Finance has the ledger. Operations has the tolerance. Nobody argues about whether the quarter closed.

Coaching is the last part of a modern revenue organisation still run entirely on recollection.

Common questions

Is a pipeline review the same as coaching?

No. A pipeline review discusses deals; coaching addresses how a rep sells. A manager can spend forty minutes asking questions about eleven opportunities and name no behaviour, practise no skill, and change nothing about the next call. Both people leave with an accurate but incompatible account of the meeting.

What is the difference between coaching and correcting?

Correcting transfers a conclusion. Coaching builds a capability. "Get higher in the org" tells a rep what his manager thinks; it does not equip him to reach the same judgement himself on Tuesday when his manager isn't there.

How do I know whether my coaching is landing?

Ask your reps three questions: how many conversations in the last thirty days changed something about how they sell, what specific behaviour they are currently working on, and when someone last described a specific moment from one of their calls back to them. Reps under genuine development can answer all three.

Why don't managers notice the gap?

Because it does not appear on their own books. A manager who believes he coached four times last week has no reason to add a fifth. In the same Gallup study, only 42% of employees said they had the opportunity to formally give their manager feedback, and fewer than one in four had ever formally rated their manager's performance. The data that would correct him does not reach him.

What is the "coaching habit" Gallup refers to?

It is weekly meaningful feedback — quality and frequency combined into one measure. Gallup rated it the lowest of twenty managerial behaviours in its 2024 blind-spots study, while also identifying it as among the strongest predictors of employee engagement the firm has measured.

Half your managers say they coached this week. One in five of your reps agrees. Somebody is keeping the wrong records — and nobody is keeping any.

Sources

• Wigert, B. (2024, May 27). The Strengths, Weaknesses and Blind Spots of Managers. Gallup Workplace. Ryan Pendell contributed. gallup.com
• Methodology: nationally representative U.S. sample of 2,729 managers and 12,710 individual contributors, drawn from the Gallup Panel. Fieldwork conducted August 9–24, 2023 (Q3 2023 workforce study), from a random sample of 18,665 U.S. adults working full or part time. Margin of sampling error ±3 percentage points for managers, ±1 percentage point for individual contributors, at the 95% confidence level.
• Ibarra, H., & Scoular, A. (2019). The Leader as Coach. Harvard Business Review, November–December 2019.