Ask a manager whether they coach their team, and almost all will say yes. Watch the same manager run a project review meeting, and you will usually see this pattern: a question, a two-second pause, then the manager’s own answer. At a mid-sized construction firm in Ankara — about 284 employees, handling both residential and commercial projects — I encountered exactly this last year. A site foreman had brought an invoicing dispute to his manager. The manager asked, ‘What do you think we should do?’ The foreman began to think. The manager waited perhaps fifteen seconds, then solved the problem himself and closed the meeting. He had wanted to coach. He had not managed it. The gap between these two things looks small. Its consequences for organisational capability are not.The most common misreading of coaching in business goes like this: managers see coaching as a more refined form of guidance — giving the right answer in a gentler, more Socratic way. The actual principle is precisely the opposite. Coaching means deliberately withholding the answer, activating the other person’s own thinking capacity, and leaving ownership of the solution with them. This is not a semantic distinction. When a manager gives the answer, the immediate problem is resolved; but the same employee returns next time with the same class of problem. When the manager coaches, resolution takes a little longer; but the employee starts attempting the next comparable problem on their own first. In Turkish business culture, this gap matters especially. The manager is expected to know. Quick decisions are rewarded. Saying ‘I don’t know — what do you think?’ can read as weakness. Coaching under this cultural pressure is genuinely difficult. Coaching programmes that ignore this difficulty do not match the reality their participants face.Three components make coaching functional in a real work setting; remove any one of them and the process breaks down. The first is deliberate silence: the manager asks the question and actually waits. This waiting period is sometimes called ‘golden silence’ in management writing — in Turkish business meetings it is typically broken within the first ten seconds. The second is the quality of the question itself. ‘What will you do?’ and ‘What options do you see here — shall we map them out?’ are different instruments. The first demands an account; the second opens thinking. The third is the timing of feedback: the coach shares an evaluation after the employee has reached a solution, not while the employee is still working toward one. At the Ankara construction firm, when these three components began functioning together — after a six-week group coaching process with site managers — we observed a clear reduction in decision bottlenecks in subcontractor coordination. The measurement was rough but meaningful: the number of ‘on-the-spot decisions’ the manager made in weekly coordination meetings fell by roughly a third; foremen began working through problems among themselves longer before escalating.The conditions under which coaching does not work also need to be stated plainly, because ignoring these limits harms both the coach and the employee. Coaching cannot function without an established trust relationship. If an employee reads their manager’s questions as a trap rather than genuine curiosity, they will either go silent or produce safe, non-committal answers. Coaching is also the wrong tool when there is a genuine technical knowledge gap. Asking an accountant who does not know the regulation, ‘What do you think we should do about this VAT refund?’ is not coaching — it is an abdication of responsibility. In such cases, direct instruction or mentoring is the appropriate approach. Coaching belongs to developmental time, not to crisis moments. On a construction site during an active safety incident, insisting on coaching mode is choosing the wrong instrument. Address the situation first; have the learning conversation afterward.The most real obstacle to coaching in Turkey is cultural impatience — and this impatience has legitimate roots. KOBIs struggling with the cost pressures and currency volatility that accelerated through 2018 find ‘wait, think, ask a question’ difficult to justify. A production manager at a garment manufacturer in Izmir put it directly to me last summer: ‘Coaching is a fine idea, but if my employee does not know the answer, I tell them and we move forward — time is money.’ This objection deserves a genuine response, not dismissal. Coaching requires investment: time, and a willingness to accept short-term performance pressure in exchange for longer-term capability. The return on that investment typically becomes visible over three to four months — a horizon that feels opaque to many KOBIs. Presenting coaching purely as a communication technique therefore falls short. The manager needs to understand it as a capacity investment, and needs to be able to discuss concretely when and how that investment pays back. When the volume of recurring decisions an employee escalates decreases, the manager’s operational energy shifts toward strategic questions. This shift is measurable, but only if someone is patient enough to track it over time.Starting to coach does not require launching a formal programme. Three steps can be applied from next Monday. First: in your next one-to-one, before solving the problem an employee brings you, ask a single question and wait at least thirty seconds. Just that. You will feel a strong impulse to speak — notice it, but stay still. Second: reframe your standard question. Replace ‘what will you do?’ with ‘how would you want to move forward here?’ The difference in how the employee responds will be visible within a few meetings. Third: when the employee reaches a solution, before saying ‘yes, correct’ or ‘no, do it this way,’ ask ‘as you thought this through, what did you notice you had not considered at first?’ These three steps do not build a coaching system. They do start building a coaching reflex. Having watched site foremen, store managers, and sales representatives reach their own solutions for the first time in a coaching conversation, I can say this: the moment is both small and significant. Watch how the same person handles the next comparable problem — and measure the difference yourself.
This article was originally published in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on January 26, 2019. The English edition has been reviewed and edited by the author.