In 2013, Microsoft killed the stack-rank review. Lisa Brummel, then SVP of HR, sent a memo announcing the change to roughly 100,000 employees. The reaction inside the company was immediate and predictable: managers asked what would replace it.
The answer Microsoft landed on wasn't a different review system. It was a different practice. The new model — formalized as Connects — required managers to have ongoing conversations with their direct reports throughout the year, focused on impact, learning, and growth. Not quarterly. Not biannually. Continuously.
Adobe arrived at the same conclusion in 2012 with Check-In. Deloitte arrived at it in 2015 after publishing their findings in HBR. Goldman Sachs followed in 2017. Each company arrived at a slightly different operational format. They all converged on the same underlying claim: coaching has to be continuous to be useful, and continuous coaching is the operational signature of high-performing companies.
This post is about what that claim actually means in practice — what those companies built, what made it work, and why most organizations still haven't followed.
How Adobe, Microsoft, and Deloitte built their coaching cultures
Each of these companies came to coaching cultures from a different starting point and built different operational answers. The common feature was a structural decision to separate coaching from grading.
Adobe Check-In. Adobe killed annual reviews in 2012 and rolled out Check-In to roughly 11,000 employees the following year. The Check-In format was deliberately spare: ongoing conversations between managers and reports about expectations, feedback, and growth, with no standardized rating, no documentation requirement, no HR ceremony. The minimal structure was the point. Adobe wanted the conversation to be the artifact, not a form filed afterward. Voluntary turnover dropped roughly 30 percent in the years following the transition.
Microsoft Connects. Microsoft eliminated stack ranking in November 2013, replacing it with what the company called Connects — short, frequent conversations between managers and reports focused on impact, learning, and growth. The cadence Microsoft recommended was at least quarterly, with most teams running them more often. Like Adobe, Microsoft made the conversation the artifact. Like Adobe, the change came with explicit cultural support from senior leadership: Satya Nadella's broader "growth mindset" framing, after he took over as CEO in 2014, institutionalized the move at the company-culture layer rather than just the HR-process layer.
Deloitte's performance snapshots. Deloitte announced their reform in a widely-cited HBR piece in April 2015 by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall. The Deloitte system asked four questions of each team leader at the end of every project or every quarter, and built the performance picture from those snapshots. The questions were future-oriented: would the leader give this person the highest compensation? Would they always want this person on their team? Was this person at risk of low performance? Was this person ready for promotion today? Snapshots produced data; conversations produced development.
The architectures differed. The principle was the same: separate the conversation about how someone is doing from the rating that decides their compensation, run the conversation continuously, and trust the manager to do the work.
What separates a coaching culture from a feedback culture
Most companies have a feedback culture. They claim they want feedback to flow freely. They run engagement surveys. They send 360s. They have HR business partners running interventions when something escalates.
A feedback culture isn't the same thing as a coaching culture. The differences are operational, not aspirational.
Feedback flows downward; coaching flows in both directions. A feedback culture is largely about managers giving feedback to reports. A coaching culture has reports asking managers for input on their work in flow, and managers asking reports for input on their management. The two-way flow isn't about the manager being humble — it's about establishing that information moves both ways structurally.
Feedback is event-based; coaching is conversation-based. A feedback culture has discrete moments: the review, the 1:1, the retro. A coaching culture has a continuous conversation that's always running and surfaces in particular moments. The signal is in the conversation, not in the events.
Feedback is about the work; coaching is about the person doing the work. A feedback culture is calibrated to ship better outputs. A coaching culture is calibrated to develop better operators. Outputs improve as a side effect, but the orientation is on the human doing the work, not on the artifact.
Feedback is filed; coaching is integrated. A feedback culture stores notes in the HR system for later use. A coaching culture has the manager actively using what they learned about the person in the next conversation, the next assignment, the next decision about who to put on what. The information has to flow into action, not just into a document.
The companies that built coaching cultures didn't get there by sending more 360s or running more surveys. They got there by changing what managers actually do — and by giving managers the time, the structure, and the tools to do it. Coaching, as we covered in our post on the manager-training gap, is a craft that has to be practiced into existence; it doesn't arrive with the title.
The frequent communication patterns that matter
Coaching cultures look different from the inside than from the outside. The artifacts change less than the texture.
A few patterns are common across the companies that operate coaching cultures effectively:
Weekly micro-conversations. A coaching culture has multiple short conversations between manager and report each week — not just the formal 1:1. A code review comment, a Slack DM about something that just happened, a quick question after a meeting. The conversational volume is high; the average length per conversation is short.
1:1 agendas owned by the report. In coaching cultures, the 1:1 isn't the manager's meeting; it's the report's. The report sets the agenda. The manager is responsible for being present, asking good questions, and following through on commitments. The asymmetry is deliberate and signals where the development work is happening.
Retrospectives at the individual level. Most agile teams do retrospectives at the team level. Coaching cultures add an individual layer: at the end of every project or sprint, the report and the manager talk about what the report learned, what they'd do differently, and what they want to work on next. The reflection is structured into the cadence of the work, not appended to a quarterly review.
Documented observations shared in real time. Managers write observations as they happen, and the observations are visible to the report. The shared visibility means the conversation about a quarterly summary isn't a conversation about new information — it's a conversation about how to interpret information both sides have already seen. This is the opposite of surprise feedback: it's structurally impossible to be surprised by a file you've been reading along.
Manager calibration cohorts. In coaching cultures, managers calibrate with each other — not just at compensation time. Monthly or quarterly, managers compare notes on what they're seeing with their respective teams, share patterns, and surface drift before it hardens. The calibration is operational, not reactive.
These aren't novel practices in any individual sense. The novelty is doing them all together, consistently, with infrastructure that supports them. Most organizations do one or two; high-performing organizations do all five and build the workflow around them.
Leadership visibility — coaching is modeled, not mandated
Coaching cultures don't get installed by HR memos. They get installed by what senior leaders do publicly and visibly.
The Microsoft transition under Satya Nadella is the cleanest case study. The replacement of stack ranking in 2013 didn't take inside the company until Nadella began modeling the framing from the CEO seat starting in 2014. The phrase "growth mindset" wasn't a corporate slogan; it was a publicly demonstrated behavior. Nadella admitted mistakes in front of the company. He talked about what he was learning in earnings calls. He treated his own development as legitimate workplace material.
The rest of the company watched this and recalibrated their working assumptions. If the CEO is willing to be in public development, you can be too. The behavior that was technically encouraged by the new HR policy became actually possible because the behavior was visibly modeled at the top.
Two specific moves matter at the leadership level:
Senior leaders ask for feedback in public. When a CHRO asks her direct reports for feedback on her leadership in a meeting other people are in, the act establishes that feedback flows upward. When a CEO names a thing he got wrong in a quarterly all-hands, the act establishes that uncertainty is allowed at the top. These aren't symbolic moves. They change what's permissible in the next layer down.
Senior leaders coach in front of others. The hardest behavior to install in a coaching culture is the willingness to deliver hard feedback well. The fastest way to install it is for senior leaders to do it publicly — not in dramatic confrontation, but in the small moments where a manager could either name something or not. When the senior leader names it gracefully, the next manager down learns the move by watching. The coaching skill propagates by demonstration, not by training programs.
A coaching culture without leadership visibility is a poster on the wall. A coaching culture with leadership visibility is the actual texture of how the company runs. The difference shows up in retention numbers within a year and in business outcomes within three.
The compounding effect of coaching cultures
The case for coaching cultures isn't a single quarter's improvement. It's the compounding curve.
A manager who gets weekly coaching from her own manager develops faster than a manager who gets a quarterly review and a workshop. After six months, the gap is noticeable. After two years, it's structural — the coached manager runs better 1:1s, sets clearer expectations, makes better hiring decisions, retains more direct reports. After five years, the difference between a coached and an uncoached manager is the difference between a senior leader and someone still figuring out how to run a team.
This compounds at the org level. A coaching culture produces managers who coach the next generation of managers. The effect doubles with every cycle of growth. Companies that operated coaching cultures for a decade have noticeably deeper leadership benches than companies that didn't — measurable in ready-now successors, internal promotion rates, and time-to-productivity for new managers.
It also compounds in the reverse direction. A company that doesn't coach managers loses them; the cost of replacing a senior manager runs into multiples of their annual salary by most published estimates. A company that doesn't coach engineers watches them stagnate, and the cost of stagnation is silent — slower innovation, longer cycle times, quieter teams that nobody notices because nobody can see what they could have been.
The companies whose names appear at the top of every "best places to work" list — the ones with documented retention rates and visible growth pipelines — are disproportionately the companies that built coaching cultures a decade ago. The compounding curve doesn't reverse.
Frequently asked questions
What is a coaching culture?
A coaching culture is one where development conversations happen continuously between managers and reports, where feedback flows in both directions, and where senior leaders model the behavior publicly. The architecture differs by company but the operational features are consistent: weekly micro-conversations, 1:1 agendas owned by reports, individual-level retrospectives, real-time observation sharing, and manager calibration cohorts. Coaching is a craft, and a coaching culture is the operational setup that lets the craft compound.
What did Adobe do to replace annual reviews?
Adobe killed annual reviews in 2012 and rolled out Check-In to roughly 11,000 employees the following year. Check-In was deliberately minimal — ongoing manager-report conversations about expectations, feedback, and growth, with no standardized rating, no documentation requirement, and no HR ceremony. The minimal structure was the point: Adobe wanted the conversation to be the artifact, not a form filed afterward. Voluntary turnover dropped roughly 30 percent in the years following the transition.
How did Microsoft change its performance management?
Microsoft eliminated stack ranking in November 2013, replacing it with Connects — short, frequent conversations between managers and reports focused on impact, learning, and growth. The change took meaningful effect when Satya Nadella began modeling the underlying behavior from the CEO seat starting in 2014, framing it as a "growth mindset" company-wide. The HR mechanic and the cultural framing were both required for the change to land.
What's the difference between feedback and coaching at work?
Feedback is about the work; coaching is about the person doing the work. Feedback is event-based (the review, the 1:1, the retro); coaching is a continuous conversation that surfaces in particular moments. Feedback flows downward (manager to report); coaching flows in both directions. Feedback gets filed in HR; coaching gets integrated into the next assignment, the next conversation, the next decision. The same observation can be feedback or coaching depending on what the manager does with it.
How do you build a coaching culture in your company?
Start with practice changes, not policy. Move 1:1 ownership to the report. Add individual-level retrospectives at the end of every project or sprint. Make observations shared in real time rather than filed quarterly. Have senior leaders ask for feedback publicly and coach visibly in front of others. The infrastructure (tools, cadence, calibration cohorts) follows from the practices, not the other way around. The change starts with what you do; the system catches up.
What we know — and what we're refining
If you lead a team and you've felt the difference between teams that coach constantly and teams that don't — but haven't been sure how to install the coaching version on your own team — the move this week is small: at your next 1:1, hand the agenda to the report and ask them what they want to talk about. Don't add a "manager wants to discuss…" section. Just take the meeting they bring. Do this for four weeks and watch what happens to the texture of the conversation.
Coaching cultures aren't built by HR systems. They're built by managers and senior leaders changing what they do, repeatedly, until the new behavior becomes the new default. We've built Performance Blocks around making this kind of change tractable for organizations that don't have Adobe's HR engineering capacity. Henry helps managers run the structured tasks that coaching cultures require — observations captured in flow, summaries grounded in real data, 1:1 agendas the report can shape, real-time visibility into what the manager is seeing. The point isn't to replace the human work of coaching. The point is to remove the operational reasons coaching cultures usually fail to install at smaller scales.
The detail we're still refining is which practice changes have the highest leverage at small scale. Adobe and Microsoft installed coaching cultures with the resources of giant companies; the question we're still working through is which two or three practice changes do the most work for a 50-person company that can't afford a full HR program. We have a working hypothesis (1:1 ownership shifted to the report, plus shared observation visibility), but the data is suggestive rather than conclusive. If you've installed a coaching culture from scratch on a small team and have a sense of the order of operations, we'd genuinely like to compare notes.
Adobe figured this out in 2012. Microsoft figured it out in 2013. Deloitte figured it out in 2015. The companies that figured it out a decade ago have been compounding the effect ever since. The companies that haven't are still running the same review system that was already obsolete in 2014 — and competing for talent with the companies that figured it out. The compounding curve doesn't reverse.