Org, people & execution
GROW Model
A four-stage structure for a coaching conversation: agree the Goal, examine current Reality, generate Options, then secure the Will to act. It turns a manager's instinct to hand out answers into disciplined questions that leave ownership with the person being coached.
Also known as GROW coaching model, Goal, Reality, Options, Will. First set out by John Whitmore, Graham Alexander and Alan Fine in 1992; the primary source is cited in full below.
Where this is contested
Provenance is shared and the acronym unstable: Whitmore, Alexander and Fine each developed the model in 1980s UK performance-coaching practice and each has been credited as principal author, Max Landsberg is credited with coining the name, and the W is variously expanded as Will, Way forward or Wrap-up.
- Format
- Process / loop
- Level
- Team
- Best for
- Plan execution · Evaluate options
- Decision stage
- Explore options · Decide · Plan
- Difficulty
- Introductory
- Time to apply
- One conversation of 30 to 60 minutes. Using the structure takes an hour to learn; using it well, with real restraint in the questioning, takes months of practice.
Plate · The model
The components
Goal
What the coachee wants to achieve, longer term and from this session, framed in their own words and within their own control. Vague aspiration is sharpened into something whose achievement would be observable.
Signals of strength
The goal is the coachee's, stated in their words · The session goal is distinguished from the longer-term goal · Achievement would be unambiguous to an observer · The goal sits within the coachee's control or influence
Reality
A specific, descriptive and non-judgemental examination of what is actually happening now: facts, patterns, previous attempts and their results. Self-assessment here does most of the model's work.
Signals of strength
Specific recent examples rather than generalities · The coachee says something they had not previously realised · Assumptions are surfaced and tested against events · The coach is talking far less than the coachee
Options
The widest practical list of ways forward, generated before any evaluation. The coach's suggestions, if offered at all, come last and carry no more weight than the coachee's own.
Signals of strength
More options on the table than the obvious two · Ideas the coach had not thought of · No evaluation until the list has run dry · The coach's contributions are framed as options, not advice
Will
The conversion of options into committed action: specific steps, dates, anticipated obstacles and an honest measure of commitment. The expansion of the W varies by author, Will for Whitmore, Way Forward for Fine, Wrap-up for Alexander, but the function is the same: the conversation must end in owned action.
Signals of strength
A specific first action with a date · Obstacles named, each with a counter · Commitment scored eight or more out of ten, or the plan reworked · A follow-up point agreed before the session ends
When it earns its keep
- You are structuring one-to-one development or performance conversations where the other person owns both the problem and its solution.
- A capable person is stuck, your instinct is to give them the answer, and you know from experience that handed-down answers do not stick.
- A manager is moving from directing work to developing people and needs a scaffold that keeps questions open and conversations purposeful.
- The conversation must end in committed action with dates attached, rather than in sympathy or vague resolve.
And when it doesn't
- The person genuinely lacks the knowledge or skill involved. Questioning cannot conjure absent expertise; a skill gap needs instruction or training first, then coaching.
- The situation is urgent or safety-critical. When the building is on fire, direct; coach afterwards.
- The issue is personal distress or a clinical matter. A conversational structure for performance is no substitute for professional support, and pressing on can do harm.
- The real problem sits in the system rather than the person. Coaching an individual around a broken rota, process or incentive structure fixes nothing and quietly blames them for it.
How to run it
Before starting, gather the inputs the analysis depends on:
- Uninterrupted time and privacy, typically 30 to 60 minutes, treated as a working session rather than a corridor chat.
- A topic the coachee owns and wants to move on, since the model runs on their motivation, not the coach's.
- The coach's discipline to ask rather than tell, with open questions ready for each stage.
- An agreed follow-up point, because commitments made in the room decay fast without review.
- 1
Contract the conversation
Agree the topic and what a good outcome from this session would look like. Two minutes of contracting prevents the commonest failure, a conversation that wanders pleasantly and lands nowhere.
- 2
Agree the Goal
Establish both the longer-term goal and what the coachee wants from this session, in their words. Whitmore distinguishes end goals from performance goals; the useful session goal is one the coachee controls. A goal owned by someone else in the building is a complaint, and needs reframing before anything else happens.
- 3
Explore Reality
Get specific and descriptive: what is actually happening, when, with whom, and what has already been tried. The coach's job is questions and silence, and the stage is done when the coachee has said something they had not realised they knew. This is the stage most managers rush, and rushing it is why their sessions produce shallow options.
- 4
Generate Options
Go for quantity before judgement, and keep asking 'what else?' past the first comfortable answer. The coach may add suggestions, but only after the coachee's list is exhausted, and offered as options to weigh rather than instructions to follow.
- 5
Establish Will
Convert chosen options into commitments: what exactly will you do, by when, what might stop you, and how committed are you on a scale of one to ten. Whitmore's practice was to treat anything below about eight as a signal to rework the action rather than to accept it politely.
- 6
Loop back where the conversation demands it
GROW describes a logical order, not a one-way street. Reality frequently rewrites the goal, and weak will usually points to an earlier stage done too quickly. Revisit rather than push through; a goal revised mid-session is evidence the model is working.
Reading the result
A short, coachee-owned action plan with dates and a commitment level attached, plus, when the Reality stage has done its work, a changed understanding of the problem that outlasts the plan itself.
- Judge the session by the Will stage. Vague commitments at the end almost always trace back to a rushed Reality stage in the middle.
- Check whose content fills the plan. If the actions are really the coach's, delivered through leading questions, ownership will evaporate within the week.
- Expect the goal to move. A goal that survives contact with Reality unchanged is either very well chosen or a sign the examination stayed shallow.
A worked example
A veterinary group regional manager coaches a practice manager on chronic clinic overruns
A UK veterinary group operates 14 small-animal practices. At one, morning clinics run 40 minutes late by mid-morning, complaints are rising and one vet is threatening to leave. The regional manager's instinct is to impose the appointment template used at other sites. Instead she runs a one-hour GROW session with the practice manager, using the model as a management tool rather than bringing in an external coach.
- Goal
- The practice manager's opening goal is 'get the vets to run to time', which she cannot control. Reframed to what she can: 'within six weeks, morning clinics finishing within ten minutes of schedule on four days out of five, without cutting consultation quality'. The session goal becomes leaving with a plan she believes in at eight out of ten or better.
- Reality
- Questioning reveals the overruns cluster around two vets with complex caseloads and around emergency slots double-booked into routine lists. The ten-minute consultation standard was inherited years ago and never reviewed, and the booking system routes post-operative checks to vets even though nurses could run them. Saying it aloud, the practice manager hears the shift herself: she has been treating a booking-design problem as a personality problem.
- Options
- She generates seven options, including fifteen-minute slots for the two complex-caseload vets, nurse-led post-op and suture clinics, a protected daily triage slot for emergencies, and moving new-client registrations off the morning peak. Only when her list is exhausted does the regional manager add phone triage, borrowed from another practice, and offers it explicitly as one more option rather than the answer.
- Will
- Three actions are chosen and dated: rebuild the booking templates by Friday, brief the team on Tuesday, pilot nurse-led clinics within a fortnight. Commitment scores nine, nine and six. The six is interrogated rather than accepted; it reflects a nurse-training gap, so the action is reworked to 'scope the training need with the head nurse this week', and moves to eight. A review call is booked for three weeks out.
The read. Overruns fell inside the six weeks, and the honest reading is about what the regional manager did not do. The group's standard template was tidier on paper than the practice manager's plan, and would have failed, because the template could not have known about the two complex caseloads or the nurse capacity, and because a plan she built survived the first bad Monday in a way an imposed one would not. The review call mattered as much as the session: one action had stalled and was restarted there, which is what stops GROW decaying into good intentions.
Pitfalls
- Using questions as camouflage for instructions, of the 'have you considered doing it my way?' variety. The coachee always notices, and ownership dies quietly.
- Racing to Options. Most weak GROW sessions spend two minutes on Reality and twenty on solutions, then wonder why the solutions miss the real problem.
- Treating the sequence as a script to be completed in one pass. Reality routinely rewrites the goal, and a coach who refuses to loop back is serving the model rather than the person.
- Accepting a goal the coachee does not control. 'Make my boss listen' is a complaint; coaching it as a goal sets the session up to fail.
- Skipping the follow-up. Commitments made in a good session decay within weeks unless a review point was fixed before anyone left the room.
What the critics say
Coaching psychologists have argued that teaching GROW as a fixed session structure encourages mechanical, linear application, and that the model lacks an explicit review stage across sessions. Grant proposed extending it (RE-GROW) precisely because real coaching runs over a series of conversations in which prior commitments must be revisited and evaluated.
Grant, A. M. (2011) 'Is it time to REGROW the GROW model?', The Coaching Psychologist, 7(2), pp. 118-126.
The goal-first architecture is contested. Clutterbuck and colleagues marshal evidence that goals in effective coaching frequently emerge, shift or dissolve during the work, and that anchoring a conversation to an upfront goal can stop the coach following the more important thread when it appears.
David, S., Clutterbuck, D. and Megginson, D. (eds) (2013) Beyond Goals: Effective Strategies for Coaching and Mentoring. Farnham: Gower.
GROW structures a conversation and nothing more. It is silent on the relationship, psychological safety and the coach's underlying skill, which the evidence suggests carry most of coaching's effect. In unskilled hands the model produces a tidy interrogation that follows every stage and helps nobody.
Sources and further reading
- Whitmore, J. (1992) Coaching for Performance. London: Nicholas Brealey. 5th edition 2017.
- Alexander, G. (2006) 'Behavioural coaching: the GROW model', in Passmore, J. (ed.) Excellence in Coaching: The Industry Guide. London: Kogan Page.
- Fine, A. (2010) You Already Know How to Be Great. New York: Portfolio.
- Performance Consultants International: The GROW Model. ↗