UpLevel Productions
Building coaching cultures that outlast the workshop
Most leadership investment evaporates within a quarter. The organizations where it does not have usually done one specific thing differently.
There is a predictable arc to leadership investment. A programme is commissioned. It is well received. People use the new language for a few weeks. Then quarter-end arrives, the old reflexes return, and within two quarters the only evidence the programme happened is a line in the training budget.
This is not a failure of the facilitators, and it is rarely a failure of the participants. It is a structural problem: the capability left the building when the consultants did. UpLevel Productions, the leadership transformation practice of Dunbar Group & Associates, is built around solving precisely that.
What is a coaching culture, actually?
A coaching culture is an organization in which taking a coach-approach to leadership is the default rather than the exception. Leaders ask before they tell. Feedback is a normal transaction rather than an event. People at every level have somewhere to think out loud without it becoming a performance-management signal.
The distinction that matters: a coaching culture is a set of behaviours distributed across hundreds of ordinary interactions, not a service delivered by a small number of accredited people. If coaching in your organization means ‘the eight executives who have an external coach’, you have a coaching benefit, not a coaching culture.
Why do most leadership programmes fail to stick?
Three reasons, in roughly this order of importance.
They transfer information rather than build capacity. Most senior people already know what good leadership looks like. What they lack is the ability to access it when the pressure is on, the information is incomplete, and somebody in the room is unhappy. Knowing is not the bottleneck; capacity under load is.
They are external by design. An outside facilitator can create a powerful room. They cannot be present for the difficult conversation on a Tuesday in March. If nothing internal was built, nothing internal persists.
They measure sentiment rather than behaviour. Post-programme satisfaction scores measure whether the experience was good. They do not measure whether anyone does anything differently. The two correlate far more weakly than anyone wants to admit.
What is an internal coaching cadre, and why does it change the outcome?
An internal coaching cadre is a group of people already inside your organization, trained to a professional coaching standard, supported by supervision and a community of practice, who coach across the business as part of their role.
The advantages compound. They understand your context without a briefing. They are present for the ordinary moments where culture is actually set. They cost a fraction of equivalent external coverage. And crucially, training someone to coach changes how they lead — so the cadre improves the organization twice, once through the coaching they deliver and once through their own practice.
UpLevel specialises in exactly this: training cadres of internal coaches and building the supervision structures that keep them sharp. It is the difference between renting a capability and owning one.
What does a serious build actually involve?
Three movements, whether the engagement runs six weeks or three years.
Discovery. Interviews, observation and honest diagnosis of what is happening — including what has not been said out loud. The most useful finding in a discovery phase is usually the thing everybody knows and nobody has written down.
Design. The programme, the facilitation, the coaching structures and the measures, designed with the organization rather than for it. Measures should be behavioural: what will be observably different, by when, and who will notice?
Embed. Trained internal coaches, equipped leaders, shared language, and a deliberate handover. The test of the engagement is what still functions twelve months after it closes.
You can read more about how we structure each of these on our practices page.
Why does emotional range keep coming up in leadership work?
Because it is the limiting factor more often than skill is.
Cognitive and emotional load accumulates in ways that degrade precisely the capacities leaders depend on most. Empathy narrows. Decision quality drops. Relational attunement fades. And the leader is usually the last person in the room to notice, because the same load that causes the degradation also impairs the self-monitoring that would catch it.
A leader who cannot sit with uncertainty, conflict or grief will manage around them — and the organization pays for that in decisions deferred, conversations avoided and people who quietly disengage. This is why UpLevel runs specialist practices in emotional leadership and resiliency, and in navigating end-of-life and grief at work. These are not adjacent wellbeing topics. They are load-bearing.
What track record sits behind this approach?
UpLevel Productions describes itself as “the coaches’ coach”. It has served more than 300 organizations, including Google, Disney and Lululemon, and trained over 10,000 leaders across 100 countries.
Its principal, Christie Mann, MA, CPCC, PCC, has been faculty, associate partner and executive coach with the Co-Active Training Institute since 2013 — the oldest and largest coach training school in the world — and previously led its Corporate Client Solutions function. Her full background is here.
The public version of this thinking runs through The UpLevel Podcast, ranked by Feedspot as the #4 Best Workplace Mental Health Podcast and one of the Top 10 Best Coaching Culture Podcasts.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to build a coaching culture?
Meaningful change in leadership behaviour is usually visible within two to three quarters; a self-sustaining internal cadre is typically a multi-quarter to multi-year build. Anyone promising a culture in a two-day offsite is selling you the offsite.
Do we need external coaches if we build an internal cadre?
Usually a mix. Internal coaches handle breadth and everyday capability; external coaches remain valuable for the most senior roles and for situations where organizational distance is the point.
How do you measure whether it is working?
Behaviourally. What is observably different in how decisions get made, how feedback moves, and how conflict is handled — agreed in the design phase before the work starts, not retrofitted afterwards.
Can this work alongside our existing L&D function?
That is the strongest version of it. The aim is to leave capability behind, which means building with your internal team rather than around them.
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Next step
Want to talk about applying this in your organization?
Start with a 30-minute conversation. We will listen first and tell you plainly what we think.