Is Everyone Coachable?

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It has become fashionable in leadership circles to declare that “everyone is coachable.” A neat, inclusive sentiment. But like many modern truisms, its politeness conceals complexity. The question isn’t whether people can change. It’s whether they will — and under what conditions. In practice, coachability isn’t a universal trait. It’s a sliding scale of readiness, mindset, and psychological safety.

The appeal of coachability as a concept lies in its optimism. It’s a promise of human potential, that with the right touch, everyone can flourish. But this promise is often misunderstood. Organisations assume coachability is something people either have or lack, like punctuality or charisma. They frame it as a personal quality, when in truth, it is profoundly relational. A person’s openness to being coached doesn’t live in a vacuum — it reflects their trust in the system, their experience with authority, their belief that feedback leads to growth rather than punishment.

What Is Coaching?

Before we interrogate coachability, we must first ask a more basic — and often neglected — question: what is coaching? Not theoretically, but in practice.

Coaching, at its core, is a structured conversation aimed at unlocking a person’s potential. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines it as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential.” It sounds grand, and sometimes is, but coaching is also deeply ordinary: a moment of stillness in a busy week, a prompt that lands at the right time, a challenge that shifts a mindset.

What distinguishes coaching from therapy, mentoring, or training is its stance. Coaches do not advise, diagnose, or direct. They inquire, reflect, and provoke. This non-directive stance is grounded in the belief that people are the experts in their own lives — but that their expertise is sometimes buried beneath habit, assumption, or fear.

In organisational settings, coaching can be formal (executive coaching, leadership development) or informal (manager-as-coach conversations, peer support, retrospectives). It can focus on behaviour, mindset, strategy, or relationships. It may draw on models like GROW (Goal, Reality, Options, Will/Wrap Up), Clean Language, or Acceptance and Commitment Coaching.

The coaching profession itself has grown rapidly. According to the ICF’s 2023 Global Coaching Study, there are now over 100,000 certified coaches worldwide, with the industry valued at over $20 billion. But this growth has come with confusion. Many people use the term “coaching” to describe everything from micromanagement to motivational speaking. As Professor Tatiana Bachkirova has argued, “the risk is not that coaching means too little — but that it means everything.”

This ambiguity matters. Because if coaching is misunderstood, then so is coachability. We cannot expect people to be open to a process they don’t recognise, haven’t experienced, or — worse — associate with criticism.

The Myth of Universal Coachability

Much of the belief in universal coachability stems from the humanistic roots of modern coaching. Carl Rogers, one of the key influences on coaching theory, championed the idea that people are naturally self-actualising — given the right conditions, they grow. But conditions are everything.

A 2020 meta-analysis in The International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching & Mentoring found that coaching outcomes are significantly moderated by the coachee’s readiness for change, openness to feedback, and internal motivation. In other words, coachability isn’t innate — it’s circumstantial.

Psychologist David Clutterbuck, a pioneer in developmental coaching, suggests that around a third of people are highly coachable, a third are conditionally coachable, and a third are resistant or disengaged. These proportions are not immutable, but they do challenge the idea that good coaching alone can overcome resistance. It’s not just about method. It’s about timing, context, and fit.

Consider the phenomenon of ‘defensive uncoachability’ — individuals who intellectually understand the value of coaching but emotionally resist it. Often this resistance stems from prior experiences where vulnerability led to exposure, rather than support. The late professor Chris Argyris termed this “single-loop learning” — when individuals learn to avoid errors rather than interrogate the assumptions behind them. Coachability demands double-loop learning, and double-loop learning demands safety.

The false assumption that everyone is always coachable creates practical risks. For one, it puts inappropriate pressure on managers or coaches to deliver transformational outcomes regardless of the individual’s readiness. This leads to frustration and disillusionment on both sides. It also encourages organisations to view coaching as a universal cure-all — a one-size-fits-all intervention — rather than a relational and responsive process. In such environments, coaching is less a gift and more a mandate, with coachability used as a proxy for compliance.

There’s also a social dynamic to consider. Labeling someone as ‘uncoachable’ can become a stigma — a shorthand that excuses leaders from deeper reflection. But that label often says more about the quality of the relationship than the individual. As Sir John Whitmore observed, “the coach’s responsibility is not to teach, but to create an environment in which learning can occur.”

What Makes Someone Coachable?

Harvard Business Review’s 2015 article “What Makes a Coachable Employee” identifies several markers: self-awareness, willingness to learn, receptiveness to feedback, and persistence. These sound obvious — but they’re rare. According to a 2021 Gallup survey, only 26% of employees strongly agree that the feedback they receive helps them do better work. In most organisations, feedback is filtered, defensive, or avoided altogether.

And when feedback is delivered, it is often generic. A study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior (2022) found that nearly 40% of feedback given in workplace settings was so vague that recipients could not describe a concrete behaviour to change. Coachability thrives on clarity. It withers in the fog of platitudes.

In psychological terms, coachability correlates with three major dispositions: openness to experience, emotional intelligence, and learning orientation. People high in these traits are more likely to interpret feedback constructively, experiment with new behaviours, and recover from failure. But these traits are not fixed. They can be fostered — or flattened — by culture.

For instance, a team culture that normalises blame will erode openness. An environment that prizes hierarchy will undermine curiosity. A business obsessed with speed will deprioritise reflection. These cultural forces don’t just shape behaviour — they shape identity. And identity governs coachability.

There’s also the question of ego. People whose self-concept depends on being right — on being the smartest person in the room — will resist coaching even if they claim to embrace it. In many cases, the issue is not pride, but fear. Fear of being exposed. Fear of failure. Fear of being seen as less than competent.

In coaching terms, the work is not to fight ego but to reframe it. As executive coach Jennifer Garvey Berger puts it, “We need to help people build bigger selves — selves that can hold complexity without collapsing into certainty.” This takes time, patience, and a deep relational container. It also takes mutual consent. Coaching is not something you do to someone. It’s something you do with them.

When Not to Coach

There is a time to step back. Not everyone needs coaching at every moment. And some people need something else entirely. Recognising when not to coach is not an act of failure — it’s an act of discernment.

In cases of burnout, acute stress, or psychological distress, coaching can backfire. A coach is not a therapist, and must never play one. The boundaries here are ethical and essential. When someone’s nervous system is in survival mode, they are neurologically unable to access the reflective mindset that coaching requires. What they need is containment, not challenge.

Similarly, coaching someone who fundamentally lacks autonomy — whose goals are not self-determined but externally imposed — is likely to breed resentment, not reflection. This is common in performance-related coaching, where the implicit message is: “Change, or else.” The coaching may be well-intended, but it’s often experienced as coercive.

Sometimes, what’s called coaching is actually performance management in disguise. A struggling employee is ‘sent to coaching’ in hopes that they’ll shape up. This is unethical, and often damaging. As Dr. Julia Milner’s work on ethical boundaries in coaching shows, coerced coaching corrodes trust. It creates a performative dynamic, where the coachee feigns engagement to satisfy an agenda they didn’t agree to.

It’s also important to acknowledge the situational context. New starters may be too overwhelmed to engage in reflective practice. Individuals facing redundancy or profound uncertainty may require clarity and closure more than personal development. And teams in crisis often need stabilisation — not transformation.

There is also the matter of coaching fatigue. In some fast-growth companies or high-performing teams, coaching is so ubiquitous that it becomes background noise. People begin to feel they are endlessly being ‘worked on’ — their identity a perpetual project. Here, the most respectful thing a coach can do is offer stillness, not stimulus.

Ultimately, knowing when not to coach is as important as knowing how. It’s a mark of professional maturity — and of ethical clarity. Coaching is powerful. But like all powerful things, it must be used with precision, consent, and care.

Coachability in Sales Organisations

Nowhere is the question of coachability more urgent than in sales. The sales profession, often plagued by bravado and burnout, simultaneously demands constant growth and punishes vulnerability. Reps are expected to hit targets, adopt new tools, master changing scripts — and do so with unwavering positivity.

Yet studies consistently show that most sales coaching is ineffective. A 2022 Salesforce report found that 62% of reps felt their coaching was sporadic, overly tactical, or irrelevant. And managers, often promoted for their selling skills rather than their coaching ability, are ill-equipped to create developmental dialogue.

The best sales leaders build a culture of feedback by going first. They coach in public. They share mistakes. They treat coaching not as a cure for underperformance, but as a catalyst for excellence.

Organisations like HubSpot, Gong, and Outreach have redefined sales coaching as an always-on, peer-supported, data-informed practice. Reps review calls together. Managers coach the coachable and support the resistant. And performance is viewed not just in numbers, but in mindset.

Beyond Coachability: What Comes Next?

Perhaps the more pressing question is not whether someone is coachable — but what coaching is meant to unlock. Is the goal skill acquisition? Self-awareness? Organisational fit? Clarity here changes how we assess coachability.

We might also ask: coachable to what end? A sales leader may want someone coachable to hit quota. But that may differ from the individual’s goal, which could be meaningful work, autonomy, or mastery. When coaching lacks aligned purpose, it risks becoming performative.

Great coaching helps people re-author their stories. It doesn’t just tweak behaviour — it rewrites belief. But this only happens when the coachee is safe, willing, and clear on the why.

So, is everyone coachable? No — not always. But most people can become coachable under the right conditions. The role of a leader, and of a coach, is to create those conditions — not to assume they exist.

Coachability is not a static quality. It’s dynamic, contextual, and earned. The best coaching relationships begin with curiosity, not certainty. And the most powerful change doesn’t come from believing everyone is coachable — it comes from helping them believe they are.

Flow State Sales has become known globally for its practical, psychology-led coaching programmes — helping sales teams, managers, and leaders embed sustainable high performance. From one-to-one coaching to full-scale enablement strategies, our work turns insight into impact.

If you’re looking to build a more coachable culture in your team or organisation, we’d love to help.
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