A project manager escalates the same delivery problem to the PMO for the second month running. The PMO manager solves it again, quickly and well, and feels useful doing it. Next month a close cousin of the same problem lands on the same desk, because escalating has become the fastest route to an answer. That is a coaching conversation that never happened.
GROW is a four-stage structure for having that conversation instead. It is a plain, repeatable shape for a discussion, built for use inside a working week rather than a scheduled coaching session. The value for a PMO is direct: solve someone’s problem for them and you have built their dependency on you. Coach them through it and you have built their capability, and capability is what scales when the portfolio grows and you cannot.
Where GROW comes from
GROW does not have a single inventor. It grew out of the UK executive-coaching community of the 1980s, among practitioners who took Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game method out of tennis coaching and into business. Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis (Random House, 1974) argued that a player’s own attention and self-observation beat a coach’s technical correction, and that idea is the root of GROW’s question-led approach.
Sir John Whitmore was the first to publish the model, in Coaching for Performance (Nicholas Brealey, 1992), and the book remains the model’s central reference. It is now in its sixth edition (Whitmore and Tiffany Gaskell, Nicholas Brealey, 2024, ISBN 9781399814904). Graham Alexander, who worked alongside Whitmore bringing the Inner Game to the UK, claims co-development. So does Alan Fine of InsideOut Development, whose account names three co-developers: Fine, Whitmore and Alexander. Whitmore himself later credited Max Landsberg with coining the acronym, in a conversation with Alexander, though that rests on Whitmore’s own 2009 telling rather than independent record.
Two firms with roots in this story, InsideOut Development and Whitmore’s own Performance Consultants, now assert intellectual property over parts of the GROW material.
“Not copyrighted, definitive, obligatory, exclusive.”
Whitmore’s own recorded description of the model, in 2009.
We treat GROW here as a shared, describable idea. Nothing in this article, or in the template that goes with it, reproduces anyone’s branded question set.
The model explained
GROW breaks a coaching conversation into four stages, each with a distinct job to do.
Goal
What does the person want, from this conversation and from the wider situation? A goal the PMO hands down is instruction. A goal the person names for themselves is coaching. Keep it specific enough to check progress against later.
Reality
What is actually happening now? Facts rather than impressions: what has been tried, what the data says, what has already been ruled out. This is usually where the real insight turns up, often because describing the situation accurately out loud is the first time anyone has done it.
Options
What could be done, before deciding what should be done? The coach’s main tool here is a plain “what else?”, asked enough times that the first three answers stop being treated as the only three.
Will (Way Forward)
What will the person actually do, by when, and how committed are they to it? Many coaches ask for a confidence score out of ten and probe anything below eight: a six dressed up as a plan is not a plan. Variants render the W as Way Forward, Wrap-up, or Obstacles. This article uses Will (Way Forward), matching both Whitmore’s and Fine’s usage.
Two ideas hold the structure together. Whitmore called the first awareness and responsibility: people act on what they see for themselves, and own what they decide for themselves. The second is non-directiveness. The moment a coach supplies the answer, GROW has collapsed into instruction with extra steps in between. Used well, GROW is a map for the conversation, not a script to march through. Skilled users loop back from Options to Reality, or revisit the Goal once Reality proves more complicated than first stated.
How a PMO uses GROW
Turning escalations into coaching
The clearest use is the escalation described at the start of this article. Instead of taking the problem, a PMO manager runs Reality and Options on it: what has actually been tried, what the PM thinks the options are, what they would do next without the PMO manager. The first conversation takes longer. Every one after it takes less time, because the PM stops treating the PMO as the answer machine.
One-to-ones and the five-minute conversation
PMO managers already run one-to-ones, delivery reviews and the “have you got five minutes” conversations that fill most working days. GROW gives those conversations a shape without requiring a coaching qualification: a goal for the conversation, an honest look at the current reality, a short list of options, and a commitment before the person leaves the room.
Stage-gate post-mortems
Reality and Options also work on a completed stage or a failed gate review. What does the evidence actually say happened, separate from the story that has already formed about it? What could the team do differently at the next gate? Run this way, a lessons-learned session produces a decision someone owns instead of a document nobody reads again.
When not to coach
GROW has a limit, and stating it plainly builds credibility rather than undermining it. A live incident, a hard regulatory deadline, a genuine crisis: these need direction, not a question. Asking “what options do you see?” while a programme is actively failing reads as abandonment dressed up as trust.
The distinction already has a name on this site. Cynefin separates complicated and complex problems, where exploring pays off, from chaotic ones, where the only sound move is to act first and make sense of it afterwards. Coach in the complicated and the complex. Direct in the chaotic, then coach on what happened once things are stable.
The coaching trio
GROW is the everyday structure: quick, memorable, usable in a corridor or a one-to-one without preparation. CLEAR, from Peter Hawkins, goes deeper on contracting and review, useful where the relationship itself needs attention before the content does. STEPPA brings emotion into the structure explicitly, useful where a PM’s stuck feeling is the real subject and the practical problem is secondary to it. Reach for GROW first. Reach for CLEAR or STEPPA when GROW’s four stages are not quite enough.
Try it before your next one-to-one
We have built a one-page GROW question card: five or six HotPMO-written questions for each stage, aimed at the PMO scenarios above (escalations, one-to-ones, gate reviews), with a short reminder of when not to coach at the foot of the page.
Further reading
- Sir John Whitmore, Coaching for Performance, 1st edition (Nicholas Brealey, 1992).
- Sir John Whitmore and Tiffany Gaskell, Coaching for Performance, 6th edition (Nicholas Brealey, 2024), ISBN 9781399814904.
- W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis (Random House, 1974), ISBN 9780394491547.
- Max Landsberg, The Tao of Coaching (Profile Books reissue), ISBN 9781781253328.
- Alan Fine with Rebecca R. Merrill, You Already Know How to Be Great (Portfolio, 2010), ISBN 9781591843559.
- InsideOut Development, “How the IP GROW Model From InsideOut Development Is Unique” (insideoutdev.com).
- Performance Consultants, “A Complete Guide to the GROW Model” (performanceconsultants.com).
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How HotPMO can help
Reading a model description does not make a manager a better coach. Real practice does. We run structured coaching-skills training for PMO managers through the PMO SuccessHub, working through real scenarios rather than handing out a laminated card and good intentions. That training sits inside the same ISO 9001 quality system we run across HotPMO, so it stays structured rather than ad hoc. If you want a PMO that coaches rather than just answers, that is where to start.