Why change sticks through repeated leadership habits, and three to start next week
An Olympic rowing crew can review a race in under fifteen minutes. Most leadership teams never review a meeting at all.
Dame Katherine Grainger, Britain's most decorated female Olympic athlete, who went on to chair UK Sport, has described how rowers and their coach would come off the water and score their own performance, capture what went well and agree what to do differently, often within fifteen minutes. The criteria had been agreed in advance, so the review was quick. If it did not happen straight away, she observed, the key points were rarely remembered later.
That simple habit captures something important about how change actually sticks. It is rarely the big programme that makes the difference. It is the small, repeated behaviours leaders practise every week.
Leader and Coach Are Not the Same Role
The idea of the "leader-coach" has become popular, and it is worth being precise about it. A leader's role is to set direction, communicate the vision and connect each person's work to the wider goals of the organisation. An external coach's role is to raise awareness and encourage responsibility, from a position of impartiality the leader can never fully have.
A leader-coach does not stop leading. They use coaching skills, asking before telling, listening properly and helping people find their own solutions, as part of how they lead. The skills overlap. The purpose is different.
“A leader-coach still sets the direction. They simply stop being the only person in the room allowed to work out how to get there.”
What learning habits do you currently carry out with your teams? Photo Mark Ashford Unsplash
Habit One: The Fifteen-Minute Review
Grainger suggests a boardroom version of the rowing review. At the end of a meeting, ask everyone to rate it on a scale of one to ten, name one thing that worked and one thing that would make it better next time. It takes less than five minutes.
It works for two reasons. It builds a habit of reflection into the working week rather than saving it for an annual review. It also makes feedback normal and low-risk. Once people see their suggestions acted on, they offer more of them, and more honestly.
Habit Two: Attend, Shift, Then Plan
Dr Robert Gass describes a three-stage approach to coaching conversations that translates well into everyday leadership:
Attend. Before anything else, give the person your full attention. Many leaders are isolated, and being properly listened to is rarer than it should be. A surprising amount of the time, it is all someone needs to work out their own way forward.
Shift. If they are stuck, help them find their own clarity rather than handing them an answer. Ask what they have already tried, what they would do if the obstacle were removed, or what they would advise someone else.
Plan. Only then move to solutions and next steps. By this point, the plan is usually theirs, and far more likely to be followed through.
Most leaders under pressure jump straight to stage three. The plan arrives quickly and is owned by the leader, not the person who has to deliver it.
This matters for adaptability too. A 2024 meta-analysis on leadership and adaptive performance found coaching by facilitation, which encourages people to explore and work things out, was linked to greater adaptability, while coaching by guidance, essentially telling people what to do, was linked to less.
Habit Three: Show Vulnerability Without Weakness
Executive coach John Mattone draws a useful distinction. Weakness shows up when a leader is depleted and has lost control of their emotional response. Vulnerability is something else: being relatable, showing humility, and being open about challenges while describing what you are doing about them.
A leader who says "I got that wrong, here is what I have learned and what we are changing" gives everyone else permission to do the same. During change, that permission is what allows problems to surface early rather than late.
Why Habits Beat Programmes
The research on coaching effectiveness supports a focus on practice. A 2023 meta-analysis of workplace coaching found that facilitation-focused and goal-focused coaching were similarly effective, and that the amount of coaching did not predict results. The particular school of coaching matters less than whether the core behaviours are practised well and consistently.
What This Looked Like at Cooplands
On the Cooplands Bakery leadership programme, the coaching tools were the ones delegates rated most useful throughout: the GROW model, coaching questions, and learning to "hold the silence" rather than filling it. The six Directors on the parallel line manager programme moved from describing their confidence in supporting their people at 3.7 out of 5 to 4.7. By the final sessions they were running structured coaching one-to-ones with their teams as a normal part of the working month, not an occasional extra. You can read the full case study at theresiliencecoach.co.uk/case-study/cooplands.
Three Habits to Start Next Week
End your next three team meetings with the one-to-ten review and one improvement.
In your next difficult conversation, attend and ask before you plan or tell.
Name one thing you have learned from a recent mistake, out loud, to your team.
For Senior Teams: Review Success, Not Just Failure
Professor Alex Hill, whose research has examined how high-performing organisations sustain excellence over time, makes an observation that applies directly to change. Most organisations unpick their failures carefully. Very few analyse their successes. If a team does not understand why something worked, it is far harder to repeat.
Making the Habits Stick
Knowing a good habit and practising it under pressure are two very different things. A few principles from behaviour change research help:
Use if-then plans. Research on implementation intentions shows that deciding in advance "if X happens, I will do Y" makes follow-through far more likely. For example: "If a meeting overruns, I will still take two minutes for the one-to-ten review."
Attach new habits to existing routines. The end of an existing weekly meeting is a better home for a review than a new meeting created for the purpose.
Involve your line manager. Leaders whose managers ask about their new habits keep them going far longer than those practising alone.
Track for six weeks. A simple tally of how often you did each habit is enough to show whether it is becoming automatic.
In Resilience Wheel terms, these habits build Confidence through repeated small successes, strengthen the Support Network through better conversations, and shape the Attitude a team brings to the next change.
Senior teams can apply the fifteen-minute review to the change itself. At the end of each phase, ask: what went better than expected, why, and how do we make sure that happens again? Pairing that question with the usual "what went wrong" builds a far more balanced, and more useful, picture of how the organisation actually changes.
None of these require a programme, a budget or a new framework. They require a leader willing to practise them until they become the way the team works. That is usually how lasting change happens: not in one big moment, but in many small ones, repeated.
For L&D Professionals
Coaching skills transfer best when they are built into leaders' weekly routines rather than left in a development plan. Programmes that give managers two or three simple, repeatable coaching habits, and support line managers to reinforce them, are more likely to change day-to-day leadership than those that teach a full coaching model and leave application to chance.
Ready to have a conversation?
Find out how to build coaching habits into your leaders' everyday work.
Resilient Leadership Diagnostic:
theresiliencecoach.co.uk/resilient-leadership-diagnostic
Read the Cooplands case study:
theresiliencecoach.co.uk/case-study/cooplands
Book an introductory call:
zcal.co/russellharvey/intro-call
russell@theresiliencecoach.co.uk | theresiliencecoach.co.uk