MTInstitute for Alignment
All Resources

Coaching Models · 5 min read

GROW: the world's most adopted coaching framework

Sir John Whitmore's GROW model — Goal, Reality, Options, Will — has powered executive coaching conversations for forty years. Its strength is its discipline.

What it is

  • 01Goal — what outcome does the coachee actually want, by when, and how will they know they have it?
  • 02Reality — what is actually happening right now, with what evidence, and what assumptions are baked in?
  • 03Options — what are all the possible ways forward, including the ones the coachee is currently dismissing?
  • 04Will — what will the coachee actually do, by when, and what might stop them?

Three takeaways

  1. 01

    GROW works because it moves people from rumination (stuck in Reality) to commitment (Will) with structure, not pressure.

  2. 02

    Most leaders skip Reality. The discipline of staying in 'what is' for longer than feels comfortable is where the breakthrough lives.

  3. 03

    GROW is portable — it is the same conversation whether you have 15 minutes in a corridor or 90 minutes in a coaching session.

Three things to implement this week

  • In your next 1:1, ask only GROW questions for 20 minutes and resist the urge to give advice.
  • When the Options stage feels thin, ask: 'What would you do if resources were unlimited? What if they were zero? What would [name a leader you admire] do?'
  • End every GROW conversation with a specific Will commitment — 'by Friday, I will…' — and follow up at exactly that moment.