(Part 1 of a 3-part series on coaching precision and impact.)
Picture this. You’re a field sales manager who just delivered a terrific day of coaching. You and your rep worked through real calls, you saw what landed (and what didn’t), you pinpointed a skill that will move performance, and you had a crisp, motivating dialogue about what “better” looks like next time. You both leave the visit energized. That’s coaching at its best.
Then you sit down to write the field coaching report.
And somehow all that clarity collapses into a few safe lines: “Great attitude. Strong day. Keep it up.”
If that feels familiar, you’re not alone. And it isn’t a character flaw or a lack of commitment. It’s a translation problem. The verbal conversation is specific, alive, and anchored in real behavior. The written documentation often becomes generic, cautious, and thin. The gap between the two creates a costly disconnect in how coaching is experienced, measured, and improved.
Field coaching reports were never meant to be paperwork. At their best, they do three jobs at once: they reinforce the coaching conversation, they create a usable record of development, and they provide leaders with a reliable way to see coaching quality and impact across teams.
But in many organizations, the report has drifted into something else. It’s a compliance artifact. A box to tick. A task to complete before the next field ride.
That drift shows up in the language managers use when they write. Instead of capturing behavior and building a path forward, the report leans on praise that’s hard to argue with and impossible to act on. “Solid performance.” “Good energy.” “Nice presence.”
Positive? Sure. Developmental? Not even close.
When a rep reads that kind of report, they can’t see where to focus. They can’t track progress over time. And they don’t feel coached. They feel observed. In some teams, reps stop opening coaching reports altogether, not because they don’t want development, but because the reports offer nothing new to work with.
That is a quiet failure of a system that should be accelerating growth.
There are a few reasons this gap shows up even in strong coaching cultures.
First, writing takes discipline that conversation doesn’t. In the moment, managers can tailor coaching to the rep, adjust based on what they see, and say the hard thing with the right tone. That’s a dynamic skill. The report asks them to freeze that conversation into a clean, clear, defensible record, often late at night after a full day in the field. The easiest path is vague language that feels safe.
Second, many managers carry a real concern about legal or compliance implications. They’ve been trained, explicitly or implicitly, to avoid wording that could be interpreted as judgmental or risky. So they retreat into generalities. The intent is protection. The unintended consequence is that development disappears.
Third, most managers have never been taught how to translate verbal coaching into written coaching. They’ve been trained to coach in the field. They’ve been given templates to fill out afterward. But no one has shown them what strong, specific, compliant documentation actually looks like, or given them a way to practice it.
So the report becomes the afterthought to the real work. And yet it’s the report many organizations rely on to judge whether coaching is happening and whether it’s working.
That’s the alignment gap.
On the surface, weak documentation looks like a nuisance. In reality, it has ripple effects.
For reps, it blurs the development plan. When written coaching doesn’t mirror verbal coaching, the path to improvement feels inconsistent. Reps may remember the conversation, but they don’t have a concrete record they can use to prepare, reflect, or track progress. Coaching becomes episodic instead of cumulative.
For managers, the gap slows growth. If the report doesn’t capture what mattered, it’s harder to build continuity from one session to the next. It’s also harder to sharpen coaching skill over time, because the manager never sees their own work reflected back with precision.
For leaders, the gap obscures reality. Field coaching reports are one of the richest data sources a commercial organization has. When the content is generic, leaders can’t accurately gauge coaching quality, identify skill patterns, or link coaching to performance outcomes. You end up measuring activity instead of impact.
The irony is that many of these managers are doing the right things verbally. The organization just can’t see it, and the rep can’t use it because the written record doesn’t match the coaching that actually happened.
The alignment gap isn’t inevitable. It’s a skill gap, and skill gaps can be closed.
When managers learn to document the same way they coach, with clear observations, the impact of those behaviors, and specific next steps, the report becomes a true extension of the conversation. It reinforces the development goal, makes progress visible, and keeps coaching anchored to what matters most.
And when organizations can see alignment between verbal coaching and written coaching, they finally get a credible view of coaching effectiveness at scale. Not a guess. Not a compliance metric. A measurable development engine.
In the next post, we’ll get practical about what elite coaches do differently, not in theory, but in observable, repeatable behaviors. We’ll break down the four evidence-based coaching practices that consistently separate high-performing managers from the rest, and why they matter for performance, retention, and growth.
Because once the alignment gap is closed, coaching stops being a moment. It becomes a system.