Why Coaching? Why the Coaching Approach in Knowledge Management? My takeways …, March 2025
Why Coaching?
Why the Coaching Approach in Knowledge Management?
My Takeaways
March 2025
In this reflection, I look back on why coaching became important to me, how it shaped me as a colleague, leader, knowledge manager, and parent, and why I now see coaching as deeply relevant to knowledge management, workplace learning, and human growth.
A few days ago, I was asked by a client the question, “What made me decide to be a coach?” Strangely, it took me a long time to answer that question as it has almost been 10 years ago since my coaching journey began. And it wasn’t really clear to me the exact reason why coaching became a direction for me.
But as I had unpacked this question with my own peer coach, I realized that “coaching” had no longer just become a skill I had or a certification I carried. Rather, it has quietly reshaped how I saw Leadership as well as Personal Leadership, Knowledge Management, and even Motherhood. I felt a need to pause and ask myself: Why did I really get into coaching? What has it changed in me? And why am I so convinced that it matters to managers, leaders and for Knowledge Managers?
Where my Coaching Journey began
I didn’t set out saying to myself, “I want to be a coach.” early in my career. What I was really curious about in the beginning was to become a more effective leader, even though, at the time, I was only a mid-manager in my former organization. My first real encounter with coaches was during a High-Performance Leadership course by my former teacher, George Kohlrieser. There I saw how the coaches sat in small groups, listening, observing, asking questions that hoped to unlock insights in participants. Their job, I later realized, was to create safe spaces for participants to share lived experiences and insights, especially if they could be very personal. I remember thinking very clearly how I wanted to be like one of them when I retired. At the time, I didn’t even know that this role was called being a “coach.” I just knew that I wanted to learn how to create that kind of space for others and, in my own small way, help people grow into the leaders they could become.
During that period, I was already informally and voluntarily leading an Employee Network in my former organization. I, along with a very small group of fellow volunteers, helped organize events that brought people together, hoping to foster connection not just as employees but also as human beings. It wasn’t an official leadership role. But over about 11 years, it gave me many chances to support staff engagement, trust-building, and informal community-building.
I was later grateful for the opportunity to participate in an internal coaching program launched by HR, which provided a foundational step in my journey toward becoming a certified coach. This felt like a gift I wouldn’t have dared ask for myself. I felt so blessed to have been chosen to be part of this first and experimental cohort. So I gratefully took the course and earned my coaching certification. Following my retirement, I continued my studies to deepen my coaching practice and align my skills with international professional standards.
The real impact of being a coach, however, came when I started learning about the International Coaching Federation (ICF) Coaching Competencies and principles. These asked me to unlearn my first notion of leadership and replace it with a much “quieter” and “softer” one. Let me explain.
I grew up in an Asian country where I was/is number 6 out of 7 children. My father was often away for work. So my mother carried much of the day-to-day responsibility of raising us. Understandably, managing a household with 7 children required structure, discipline, and resilience. Her message to us was clear, “Study hard, work hard, keep going, make the most of every opportunity that comes your way and make something of yourself”. And from my parents’ generation, where large families were common, I also learned early on that one had to speak up if you wanted to be seen or heard.
From my mother, I learned grit, drive, and courage. Those lessons helped me survive and assert myself. But over time, I also saw how easily that same style could make me take over a conversation or miss when someone was hurting or feeling discounted. And as I got older and learned more about impactful leadership, I started to realize that this style of leadership could only take me so far.
What Coaching asked me to unlearn, then relearn
Coaching entered my life at the right time. It brought with it a different set of core competencies and principles: among them, curiosity, no judgment, dropping assumptions, silence, and powerful questions. At first, they sounded simple and almost obvious. But practicing them was another matter.
Curiosity, for example, isn’t just “being interested.” In coaching, it also means “I can’t be so sure of myself all the time. I can’t assume I know why someone behaves or thinks a certain way. When I am genuinely curious, I have to stop talking long enough to listen. And really listen - not just to the other’s words, pauses, and body language. It means also acknowledging that my view is not the only valid one. Therefore, give your coachee space and let them discover their own thoughts, feelings and eventually solutions.”
No Judgment was another big shift. I had grown up with a strong internal critic, formed by both my culture and family expectations. Judging others came just as quickly. Coaching asked me to notice that, and to pause. “What if I don’t label this person? What if I don’t rush to blame, categorize or just stay neutral? What if I hold them with kindness first, just be present, and try very hard to just listen without judging? This is a muscle I am still strengthening.
Dropping assumptions might be the hardest of all. In many organizations, leaders are expected to “know”, to speak with certainty, to project confidence. I internalized that very early when I was growing up. My young adult version of myself believed that one leads and supposedly shows strength, by showing you know what you’re doing and you instruct others how to do it. But my further training on Leadership and Coaching, gently but firmly, unraveled that. A good coach and a good leader don’t pretend to know everything. It can be a challenging but rewarding shift for a leader to say, 'I don't know,' and instead focus on helping others discover their own insights.
Coaching helped me change how I saw my colleagues
As these principles settled into my way of being, they changed how I showed up as a colleague and a leader. I became more aware of how much I talked in meetings or how I tended to take the floor or influenced the overall dynamic in the room. From that same first High-Performance Leadership course, I remember something what my teacher, George Kohlrieser would say, along the lines of “For real dialogue, try not to speak more than four sentences at a time. After speaking, give the other person a chance to do the same”. That simple idea, combined with coaching skills, forced me to be more intentional, especially when I had a difficult conversation to navigate.
Moreover, the known acronym, “THINK” widely popularized by British pastor and evangelist, Alan Redpath, increasingly guided me when I managed to catch myself in a tricky conversation. In particular, this acronym meant to ask these questions: “Is this really True? Is it Helpful? Is it Kind? Is it Inspiring? And finally, “Is it Necessary?
I also learned to appreciate Silence, the pause in a coaching session where the client is thinking, feeling, and processing. As someone who likes to talk, that silence used to feel really awkward. Now, I see it as an opportunity to be present for my coachee and to be compassionately neutral. I try very hard to not rush to fill the space with my own ideas. I make an effort to just zip it and allow my coachees to find theirs.
The Coaching Mindset in Knowledge Management
These shifts also deeply influenced how I practice knowledge management. I eventually realized that KM is fundamentally a different way of working. It’s not just “doing things more efficiently.” It’s about enabling better, smarter decisions so that organizations can reach their mandates and goals more effectively. But any change in “how we work” is essentially a change process. And as most of us know, people often resist change.
In my earlier KM work, my impulse was frequently to recommend solutions. And even if my suggestions were well-founded, they were still mine. The more I told people what to do, the more it became “extra work imposed from thye outside” rather than something they owned. People are far less likely to embrace an idea they had no hand in shaping.
Coaching helped me realize that, as a knowledge manager, I would have been most useful if hadn’t been telling people how to change their practices but helping them discover what will work for them.
Instead of prescribing, I now strive to ask questions like:
What about this situation is truly difficult for you or your team?
What would make this easier or more meaningful
What are you already doing that’s close to what you want?
What’s getting in the way, and what would need to shift?
What knowledge would you get exactly if you did this step?
What was the reason why you did this step? Is that reason still relevant or existing?
What would happen if you did nothing? For a year, 5 years, etc?
The Power of Evoking Awareness
These questions above draw on ICF coaching competencies, especially one we coaches call, “Evoking awareness”. In our training, we learned that when people hear themselves articulate their own barriers, needs and possible solutions, they begin to own the path forward. It becomes their idea, their design. And as I’ve noticed and learned in KM the hard way, if it’s their idea, they are much more likely to implement it.
And this is directly linked to how I think about knowledge. After what I’ve been learning from my peers in the KM community, having knowledge is not about having information. It’s about knowing, caring, and then acting. You first become aware of something. Then, if it matters to you, you care. Once you care enough, you act. You don’t let it sit on a shelf. Coaching supports that movement from awareness, to care, to action by making the learning deeply personal. The principle of evoking awareness has become one of the most meaningful for me.
In coaching, there is this beautiful idea that our coachees already hold many of the answers they’re searching for. They’ve just lost sight of them under layers of fear, staying in their comfort zone, and the negative stories they tell themselves in their head. A coach’s role is not to give them advice, but to help them remember what they already know, to help them see how they’re approaching a challenge. I love the way my former classmate and mentor coach mentioned in one of her courses, “when a coach rushes to tell the client what to do, they are robbing them of a learning opportunity.” They’re taking away the chance for that precious “aha” moment when they suddenly realize, “What was I thinking? I actually knew this all along!”
As a coachee myself, I have felt the power of that A-HA moment. I’ve had sessions where, through someone else’s presence and questions, I suddenly reconnect with something I had long forgotten I believed or knew. It’s very humbling and empowering at the same time. You realize that you’re not that clueless and waiting to be filled with other people’s wisdom. You are actually a person with your own treasures that sometimes need help being uncovered.
Coaching also made me a better Parent
Coaching has also shifted how I show up as a parent. When I am stressed or feel cornered, I sometimes notice old patterns in myself, i.e. that instinct to push harder, to worry about timelines, and to equate security with achievement. I have, many times, projected those expectations onto my daughter: “By this age, you should know how to do this. By that age, you should know better” and so on. Because of coaching, I’ve learned that this instinct isn't really about my daughter. But it's about my own need for things to feel secure and on-track. Coaching has helped me catch it before it becomes pressure, and to offer curiosity instead. With coaching skills now added in my toolkit, I started to PAUSE, LISTEN more, or ASK for clarification. And I can see now how our relationship is better for it.
So what?
If there's one thing I'd want a fellow KM practitioner or leader to take from this, it's that shift from Telling to ASKING, ie. to be able to surface or extract the client’s own good ideas. It’s about being a voice not as the expert in the room, but to hear from the person closest to the problem. They already know what to do. They just don’t know it yet and need a nudge to help them remember what they had forgotten they already know.
References:
IMD High Performance Leadership, Advanced High Performance Leadership
“Hostage at the Table”, George Kohlrieiser
”Care to Dare”, George Kohlrieser
”From Knowing comes Caring, from Caring comes Change.”, A Plastic Ocean, 2016 movie