As part of MMA’s “Read & Grow” series, Sangeeta Shankaran Sumesh led a panel with Ganesh Balasubramanian and Shaji Antony on Sir John Whitmore’s Coaching for Performance—a powerful blueprint for unlocking leadership potential and driving transformation.
Sangeeta Shankaran Sumesh: Top-performing athletes work with coaches. Why should it be any different for professionals in the corporate world? Take the example of chess Grandmaster Gukesh. His coach, Paddy Upton, wasn’t a chess expert. Instead, he guided Gukesh in areas like mental resilience and focus, helping him reach peak performance. This demonstrates that coaching principles are universally applicable—whether in sports or business—and have a significant impact on elevating performance.
What is Coaching, Really?
Coaching is not about teaching. It’s about facilitating learning and growth. According to the International Coaching Federation (ICF), coaching is a “partnership with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential.” Unlike mentoring, coaching does not require subject matter expertise. Mentors share their knowledge; coaches ask the right questions. The goal is empowerment—not instruction.
Coaching vs. Telling: A Shift in Approach
Telling someone what to do removes their sense of ownership. It demotivates, disempowers, and limits potential. Coaching does the opposite. It fosters autonomy, partnership, self-actualisation, and high performance. A coaching culture builds trust, encourages interdependence, promotes learning, and nurtures accountability. It reduces stress and ends the blame game by fostering personal responsibility.
The Performance Culture Curve
The author identifies four types of organisational cultures: Impulsive – Reactive leadership, unclear accountability, and low performance; Dependent – Directive leadership, limited performance, and blame-shifting; Independent – Empowering leadership, growing ownership, and medium-high performance; and Interdependent – Transformational leadership, shared ownership, and high performance. High-performance leaders foster trust, adaptability, and deep team engagement, resulting in consistent overachievement.
Psychological Safety in Coaching
As a child, I was advised to learn swimming. The coach pushed me into the water and this traumatic swimming experience created a fear of water for me. Years later, I joined a class where the coach didn’t enter the pool but guided from outside. I felt safe, and that safety helped me build trust and overcome fear. This is what a coach does—creates psychological safety, builds trust, and enables growth without force or pressure.
Emotional Intelligence in Action
Coaching is emotional intelligence in practice. It is a way of leading, managing, and relating. As a finance professional, coaching helped me recognise the importance of empathy and emotional intelligence, opening new perspectives in both personal and professional domains. Emotional intelligence has four key domains: Self-awareness; Self-management; Social awareness and Relationship management
Moving Away from Command-Control Leadership
Many of us are used to being told what to do—by parents, teachers, or bosses. This leads us to adopt the same approach. Whether it’s a dictator, a persuader, or an abdicator, these leadership styles don’t foster sustainable growth. Coaching takes a different route: it’s supportive, non-threatening, and based on listening. Behaviour change happens not when the leader is present, but when the individual is empowered.
Coaching is particularly effective when time is limited; quality outcomes matter; learning and commitment are essential; and engagement and retention are priorities. Applications include goal setting, strategic planning, team motivation, problem-solving, and performance management. Internal blockers like fear, self-doubt, lack of belief hinder performance. The antidote is curiosity. Coaches are non-judgmental and create a space where learning from mistakes becomes possible. Judgment breeds defensiveness. Coaching fosters openness, collaboration, and performance through high awareness and responsibility.
What Coaches Are and Are Not
A coach is not a problem solver, teacher, or expert. A coach is a facilitator, sounding board, and awareness-raiser. Coaching prompts self-discovery. For instance, instead of saying “The bottle lid is blue,” a coach asks, “What colour do you see?” This builds observation and awareness. Consider this: A leader tells Peter to get a ladder. Peter doesn’t find one and returns empty-handed. Instead, if the leader says, “We need a ladder—who’s willing to help?”—Peter volunteers. Now he feels ownership and looks harder for a solution. Choice leads to responsibility.
The Art of Asking Powerful Questions
In ball sports, the command is “watch the ball.” But instead, asking “Which way is the ball spinning?” or “How high is it coming?” increases focus and awareness. Powerful, open-ended questions such as: What do you want to achieve? What’s stopping you? Who could help you? What else is possible? …stimulate deeper reflection and unlock solutions. A client of mine—a Managing Director—shifted his leadership approach after one key question: “What leadership legacy do you want to leave?” The result? A transformation in mindset and team engagement.
Active Listening and the GROW Model
Effective coaches listen not just to words, but to emotions, energy, and body language. Intuition plays a key role. The GROW Model helps structure coaching conversations. GROW is an acronym for Goals; Reality; Options and Will or Way forward. Instead of saying, “You are useless,” or “This report is terrible,” a coach asks: What are you most pleased about in this report? Or What could you do differently? The feedback should include questions like: What happened? What did you learn? How will you apply it?
Coaching High-Performance Teams
In today’s global, dynamic, and virtual work environments, coaching brings people together to collaborate, innovate, and excel. Leaders have two key responsibilities: Deliver results and Develop people. To foster a coaching culture: Set ground rules; Build communication skills; Define common goals; Hold regular discussions; Create support systems; and Encourage social interaction and shared learning.
The ROI of Coaching
Coaching delivers tangible returns like higher performance and productivity; improved career growth and relationships; better engagement and retention; increased motivation and collaboration; and greater adaptability and job satisfaction. It also helps manage conflicts, ego, and stakeholder complexities.
Great leaders display values, vision, authenticity, agility and alignment. Performance, learning, and enjoyment must coexist. If you neglect one, the others will falter. A CFO I coached transformed from a finance-only mindset to becoming a strategic business leader. Similarly, team coaching with the RPG Group led to best practices, tech adoption, and enhanced collaboration. The author also emphasises the importance of working with trained, credentialed coaches which is a crucial step toward building a sustainable, high-performance culture.
Companies: Beyond Profit
Shaji Antony: We often think of companies as purely profit-making machines. But the book challenges this notion. It positions a company as part of a larger ecosystem where individuals, organisations, and society are interconnected. Principles give life to culture. Without them, organisational values and vision statements may exist, but they won’t translate into real behavior. Principles create a framework, not rigid boundaries, but a freedom tree that enables responsible action.
A key concept in the book is the Inner Game equation, derived from sports psychology. It states that
Performance = Potential – Interference.
I’ve been a football player since childhood, primarily a right-footed defender. I rarely used my left foot out of fear that I’d miss the ball and allow a goal. It was a classic case of interference. However, during my college years, I had a coach who insisted I practice using my left foot. With consistent effort, that interference slowly disappeared. That’s the power of coaching. It helps reduce my interference and enhance my performance.
The author shows how coaching supports individuals through each level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: from basic needs to self-actualisation. A company should look into the Triple Bottom Line: People, Planet, Profit. A company that embraces coaching not only enhances individual and team performance but also contributes to a more ethical, engaged, and sustainable ecosystem.
The Rear View Mirror
Ganesh Balasubramanian: Unfortunately, most people believe that once you have a coach, 90% of your problem is solved. This mindset is similar to how people approach a psychologist or medication as a quick fix. That philosophy needs to change. Coaching is about enhancing an employee’s potential by focusing on their performance and providing the right platform to utilise that potential.
Take PT Usha, for example. She is quite famous. But how many of us remember Coach Nambiar, the man who played a crucial role in her success? What I’ve come to understand is that coaching helps an individual or employee to help themselves. The individual remains the driver. The coach is like a rear-view mirror or a headlight—offering clarity and direction. But the steering wheel is still in the hands of the individual.
Coaching is Domain Agnostic
Sangeeta Shankaran Sumesh: Many times, when people want to lose weight, they think that simply signing up for a gym or hiring a trainer will solve the problem. But then they end up eating more, and later complain, “Oh, my weight hasn’t reduced.” The truth is, you have to take the necessary actions yourself. The onus is on you. Coaching is domain-agnostic. Ganesh, what are your thoughts on that?
Shaji Antony: Coaching doesn’t necessarily have to come from domain experts. A domain expert is more like a mentor. For instance, if I want to become a CHRO, a mentor with vast HR experience can guide me specifically in developing HR-related skills. Coaching, however, is something different. Having said that, I personally prefer having a coach from a similar background, as it helps in building a better connection.
Coaching plays an important role in our lives. I remember when I was in 12th grade, I missed a valuable opportunity. I had been selected for a month-long football camp. The coach, Mr. Sukumaran from Chennai, who also coached the Tamil Nadu football team, conducted the camp in Tirunelveli. Unfortunately, some of us couldn’t wake up on time and were late to the ground. As punishment, the coach disciplined us, and a few of us, including myself, left the camp. There were two or three juniors who weren’t as skilled as we were, but they stayed for the entire camp. Eventually, they became excellent players and secured good employment. Later, during my post-graduation, I met another coach who helped transform my lifestyle.
Coaching R&D Team
Sangeeta Shankaran Sumesh: Can you share your experience with coaching?
Ganesh Balasubramanian: In 2019, I had an experience working at a global R&D center in Asia where we assigned a coach to a group of 15 individuals. Post-COVID, this became especially relevant. As many of you know, R&D professionals tend to be more ego-centric than eco-centric. They are highly intelligent and often believe they know everything, making it difficult to change their mindset.
We brought in a coach with a management background. Initially, the team was sceptical. But what followed became a compelling case study. Each coaching session was one-on-one, lasting an hour, with only four individuals met per day. The coach stayed for a week each month. By the third or fourth visit, we saw noticeable change. Out of 15 people, we retained 89%. One person resigned—but interestingly, he informed the coach before his own reporting manager. It was a personal, family-driven decision that no one else knew about. The trust and openness he developed with the coach were remarkable.
Coaching began with a professional focus, but eventually, employees shared personal challenges too. What was once a roadblock became a pathway. The coaching created a safe space for reflection and growth. Even more impressively, 13 of the 15 people identified 32 improvement and innovation projects for the organisation. Most of them received promotions during the exercise. We identified their potential early and nurtured it.
On a structural level, coaching helped break departmental silos. Earlier, cross-functional teams (CFTs) were formed, but in practice, they were “confusion-building teams.” Members didn’t know their roles, and decision-making still rested with department heads. Empowerment existed only in theory. People would hesitate to make decisions without first aligning with their manager, even if they were nominated to the CFT.
The coach helped uncover and address this dysfunction. Within two to three months, we noticed significant synergy in the teams. While not everyone changed, communication improved, and ego clashes diminished. In most cases, conflicts were simply due to poor communication.
I was once invited to speak at a premier management institute. After my talk, the Dean asked to meet me. During our conversation, he asked something unexpected: “None of my department heads speak to each other. How do you handle this in a corporate context?”
This struck a chord. Whether in academia or industry, the underlying problems are similar. Today, we are not just bound by carbon dioxide but by jargon dioxide. Everyone wants to sound intellectual using complex models, but coaching doesn’t rely on jargon. It’s about simplicity—connecting real-life experiences to professional goals.
Think of NASA scientists. They might be working on projects that’ll launch in 2050, long after they retire. Yet they stay committed because they believe in the purpose. That’s the essence of coaching. It builds a connection to purpose. When people understand the larger goal, they give their best.
That said, coaching doesn’t always work. In one instance, we assigned a coach to a difficult employee. Ironically, the coach began adapting to the coachee’s behavior instead of the other way around. It turned into reverse mentoring, and eventually, the coach had to be replaced.
The key takeaway? Coaching only works when the coachee feels the need. Never implement it as a checkbox HR activity. It’s not about ticking off a mandate. It’s about igniting transformation. Purpose makes all the difference.
Feedback & GROW Model
Sangeeta Shankaran Sumesh: What are your thoughts on feedback?
Shaji Antony: Leaders and functional managers should have a clear mandate to develop their people. Today, most focus only on personal achievements. If ‘developing people’ is included as a key performance indicator (KPI), managers will feel responsible for their team’s growth—and naturally, they’ll offer open and transparent feedback.
Sangeeta Shankaran Sumesh: Your experience with the GROW model?
Ganesh Balasubramanian: The GROW model stands for Goal, Reality, Options, and Way Forward. Goals should be simple, clear, and attainable—make them interesting. Understanding reality is crucial. For instance, rather than sending everyone to a generic communication program, identify the specific communication gap and tailor the training. We need hyper-personalisation today. Don’t jump straight to options. Remember, in a typical classroom setting, retention is only around 10%. People often ask, “What’s the way forward?” The author emphasises will. With strong will, impossible becomes I’m possible.
