Every conversation with your team is an opportunity. An opportunity to reinforce clarity, encourage ownership, and develop leadership at every level. And yet, too often, well-meaning coaching efforts fall short—not for lack of effort, but for lack of staying power.
At Achilles Group, we believe coaching should be more than an occasional performance conversation or an end-of-quarter review. When done with intention and guided by how people actually learn, coaching becomes one of the most strategic tools you have to drive business results.
The secret? It’s not about giving more advice. It’s about making the coaching stick.
Turn coaching conversations into a catalyst for change—using proven strategies from learning science that deepen retention, drive follow-through, and build leaders from the inside out.
Why Coaching Often Doesn’t Stick
Let’s start with a common scenario: You have a meaningful one-on-one with a team member. You discuss challenges, offer thoughtful input, maybe share a resource or suggestion. The meeting ends on a positive note.
But two weeks later… nothing’s changed. The issue persists. The energy fades. The follow-through never happened.
This isn’t a people problem. It’s a process problem.
Traditional coaching—talking, advising, suggesting—often feels productive, but it doesn’t necessarily trigger the kind of reflection and action that leads to growth. According to research in Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown and his colleagues, people learn best not when information is passively delivered, but when it is retrieved, applied, reflected on, and shared.
That’s where the real work of coaching begins. And that’s where business leaders can elevate their impact—not by saying more, but by creating the conditions where learning and growth take root.
Four Evidence-Based Strategies for Coaching That Sticks
1. Put the Learning into Immediate Action
The first and most critical step is helping your team do something with what they’ve just learned.
It’s not enough to talk about solutions or insight. The brain begins to truly internalize a concept when we act on it—especially if that action is taken shortly after the learning experience.
After any coaching conversation, ask a version of this:
“What’s one small thing you can do today to apply this?”
By focusing on an immediate, bite-sized action, you lower the barrier to execution. It’s not about massive change—it’s about building momentum.
You might follow up a day or two later with:
“How did that step go? What did you learn from trying it?”
This kind of active recall reinforces memory, sparks reflection, and keeps the coaching conversation alive well beyond the meeting.
2. Ask: “What Was Most Useful or Valuable for You?”
This deceptively simple question, coined by coaching expert Michael Bungay Stanier in The Coaching Habit, has a powerful impact. It does three key things:
- Encourages reflection, which deepens learning.
- Helps the individual name what resonated most, increasing ownership.
- Signals that the coaching conversation is about their growth, not just your input.
In cognitive psychology, this is known as metacognition—thinking about your thinking. When someone reflects on what they learned and articulates it, they are far more likely to remember it and act on it.
By ending every coaching moment with this question, you shift the focus from you as the leader to them as the learner—and that shift is what drives self-led development.
3. Write It Down to Make It Real
There’s a reason high-performing teams use checklists, notes, whiteboards, and shared dashboards: writing things down creates clarity and commitment.
When it comes to coaching, capturing takeaways in writing helps cement ideas into long-term memory. It also serves as a reference point for future follow-up.
Encourage your team members to:
- Write down their key takeaway or insight.
- Log one specific action step they will take.
- Note what support or resources they may need.
This doesn’t need to be formal. It could be a note in their phone, a shared comment in your performance management tool, or a quick Slack message. The act of capturing the learning turns a fleeting thought into a concrete commitment.
You might even say:
“Go ahead and write that down—we’ll revisit it next time we connect.”
This builds accountability without adding pressure. It also positions you as a leader who is not just present in the moment, but invested in their long-term development.
4. Share with a Partner, Then Debrief as a Team
If you really want to solidify learning, create space for your team to talk through their insights with others.
Peer-to-peer learning is one of the most powerful tools in leadership development. When someone explains what they’ve learned to a colleague, they’re reinforcing it in their own brain—and giving others a chance to reflect too.
In practical terms:
- Pair up team members after a coaching session or workshop and ask them to share their top takeaway with each other.
- Follow up in your next team meeting by asking:
“What did you find most useful from last week’s development conversation?”
“What’s one insight you’ve applied or experimented with since?”
These group debriefs don’t have to be long. Five to ten minutes is often enough. The goal is to create a culture of reflection and reinforcement.
When team members know they’ll be asked to share what they’ve learned and what they’ve done with it, they begin to prepare differently, listen differently, and act differently.
The Business Case for Coaching That Sticks
Let’s be clear: This isn’t just about better learning. This is about better business.
When coaching becomes a habit—and when that coaching is designed to stick—you unlock measurable benefits:
- Stronger performance: Employees become more proactive, focused, and resilient.
- Higher retention: People stay longer when they feel supported and developed.
- Better leadership pipelines: You prepare emerging leaders from within your own team.
- Smarter decision-making: Teams that reflect together, grow together.
In Houston’s competitive market—whether in construction, energy, manufacturing, or business services—the organizations that rise above are the ones that know how to scale not just operations, but people. That’s where strategic coaching comes in.
Achilles Group: Your Partner in Building a Coaching Culture
At Achilles Group, we don’t just coach leaders—we equip your leaders to coach effectively. We blend the science of learning with the art of leadership development to help businesses strengthen their internal bench, reduce dependency on outside hires, and drive sustainable growth.
From frontline managers to executive teams, we work alongside you to create conversations that are clear, actionable, and deeply impactful. Because when learning sticks, performance accelerates.
If you’re ready to shift from one-time advice to transformational development, we’re here to help you build the coaching muscle that drives results.
Let’s connect.
Schedule a conversation at AchillesGroup.com or reach out directly.
Together, we’ll build a leadership culture where coaching isn’t a checkbox—it’s a catalyst.
