Leadership Academy — Gap Week: Planning a Difficult Conversation with COIN and GROW

Part of the Leadership Academy series — notes from Exaze’s Leadership Academy, Batch 1. There’s a planned gap of a couple of weeks in the live sessions (mentioned at the end of Session 4), and this is the assignment issued to cover it — not a live session, but worth its own entry since it introduces a framework the sessions haven’t covered yet.

The assignment

A Difficult Conversation Planning Template landed this week — a worksheet, not a lecture, and it’s a useful test of whether COIN from session four actually sticks when applied to a real, specific conversation rather than a hypothetical one. It asks for:

• Who the conversation is with (role, not name)
• What type it is — performance, disagreement, or expectation mismatch (the same three-way split from session four)
• Context — how you’ll open it, in one sentence
• Observation — what specifically they did or didn’t do, observable, not interpretive
• Impact — the effect on the team, customer, or project, not just on you
• Next step — what specifically should change, and by when
• Anticipated pushback — what they’ll probably say back
• How you’ll handle that pushback, in one sentence
• When the conversation will actually happen — a specific date and time, not “soon”
• What would help you feel prepared

The last four fields are what make this more than a repeat of session four. COIN gives you the structure for the conversation itself; the worksheet forces you to also plan for what happens after you say your piece — the pushback — and to commit to an actual date rather than letting “I’ll do it soon” quietly become “I never did it,” which session four already flagged as its own failure mode.

The framework: GROW

The worksheet also names a framework not covered in any session yet: GROW — Goal, Reality, Options, Will (sometimes “Will/Way Forward”). It’s not a Leadership Academy invention — it’s one of the most widely used coaching models in the world, created in the late 1980s by Sir John Whitmore and colleagues, and popularised through his book Coaching for Performance, which has sold over a million copies. (Performance Consultants — The GROW Model)

Stage	What it does	Example question
G — Goal	Get clear on what the person actually wants to achieve — a target, a behaviour change, a decision.	“What would you like to achieve? What does success look like?”
R — Reality	Understand the current situation honestly — what’s working, what isn’t, what’s actually true right now.	“What’s happening right now? What have you already tried?”
O — Options	Explore possible paths forward without judging them yet — the point is breadth, not the right answer.	“What options could you consider? What would you try if nothing were in the way?”
W — Will (Way Forward)	Turn the discussion into an actual commitment — what, by when, and how they’ll know they did it.	“What will you do first? How committed are you, on a scale of 1–10?”

Whitmore himself was blunt about the model’s limits: he said “any dictator can use GROW,” meaning the four letters are just a shape — they only work in the hands of someone actually asking and listening, not someone using the sequence to steer a person toward a predetermined answer. That warning matters here, because it’s the same failure mode COIN warns against with its “Next step” — don’t offload the decision with a vague “what do you think should happen now,” but don’t script the answer for them either.

Where GROW meets COIN: COIN structures how you open a hard conversation and name what happened. GROW is what the conversation can turn into once the hard part is said out loud — moving from “here’s what I observed” toward “here’s what you want instead, and here’s the path there,” with the other person doing the thinking rather than being told the plan.

In the real world: Performance Consultants — Whitmore’s own firm — ran a public fireside chat in July 2026 specifically on this pairing, with a live, unscripted coaching demonstration. CEO Tiffany Gaskell played a manager checking in with “Harper,” a team member whose pushback in a meeting had left them feeling sidelined. Rather than opening with a verdict, Gaskell asked what Harper had noticed, stayed with her defensiveness instead of smoothing it over, and — notably — skipped straight from Reality to Way Forward once trust was established, rather than mechanically running the full G-R-O-W sequence. One observer’s takeaway was that a framework can support that kind of judgement call, but it can’t fully script it. The session also produced a plain checklist worth holding next to the worksheet’s “anticipated pushback” field: name the fear you’re avoiding, ask before you tell, stay with the discomfort instead of smoothing it over, don’t force every step of a framework, and judge success by clarity rather than agreement. (Performance Consultants — How to Have Difficult Conversations at Work)

Filling out the template, worked example

(Illustrative — combining the worksheet’s fields with GROW’s Options/Will thinking)

Who: A team member who’s missed two internal deadlines this month, both times without flagging the risk in advance. Type: Performance. Context: “I want to talk about the last two deliverables — I don’t think this is a motivation problem, so I want to understand what’s actually going on.” Observation: “Both times, I found out about the delay only when I chased you, not before.” Impact: “It meant I had no time to reset expectations with the client, so I absorbed both delays without warning them.” Next step: “From the next deliverable onward, I want a flag the moment you think a date’s at risk — even if you’re not sure yet.” Anticipated pushback: “They’ll probably say they didn’t want to raise a false alarm.” Handling it: Acknowledge that instinct is reasonable, then reframe: a flag that turns out to be a false alarm costs nothing; a surprise costs trust (this is the same principle from session three’s SCOPE framework — escalate on threshold, not certainty). When: Thursday, 2pm, before the next sprint planning. What would help me feel prepared: Re-reading the actual Slack messages from both incidents so the Observation stays specific, not remembered-and-softened.

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Previous: Session 4 — Communication Modes and Difficult Conversations · Back to the series index

Sources:

• Performance Consultants — The GROW™ Model: A Complete Guide
• Performance Consultants — How to Have Difficult Conversations at Work