If you want project-ready capability, then coaching must be part of your SME growth strategy.
You’ve built a solid business. You’re winning new work, turning heads, maybe surprising yourself with how far the business has come in the past two to three years. Clients trust you and your company to deliver. You’ve carved a reputation in your sector, often through the sheer force of experience, resilience, and being better than the rest at getting things done.
But now the growth you’ve worked so hard for is starting to stretch things.
Project work is piling up. Stakeholder expectations are increasing. And the people who’ve grown with the business may be moving into new roles, leading, coordinating, and making commercial decisions they were never formally trained for. Your more recent hires need support to settle in.
So, what next? How do you embed the growth and ensure everyone is project-ready?
For many SME leaders in engineering and construction, the instinct is to hire. Bring in someone with experience. Someone with the right qualifications. Someone who’s “been there and done it”.That may be the right move. But it may also be riskier than you think.
Good people are hard to find and even harder to integrate
Hiring an experienced project professional can work brilliantly if they fit your culture, adapt quickly, and bring energy rather than ego. But that’s a big “if”.
We’ve seen time and time again that hiring from the outside doesn’t always solve the delivery pressure you’re under. Sometimes, it slows things down. Sometimes, it creates tension. Sometimes, it simply fails. See our blog: Bodies on the Ground
The alternative is often right under your nose: investing in the people you already have.
Time-served team members who’ve grown with the business. People who understand your clients, your contracts, your quirks. People with the potential to lead others if they’re given the structure and support to do it well.
The problem isn’t capability. It’s confidence, clarity, and consistency.
That’s not a recruitment issue. It’s a development opportunity.
What’s missing isn’t knowledge, it’s support
In many growing project environments, delivery is still being held together by a handful of senior individuals who are stretched thin. Their limited capacity often becomes reactive, driven by how quickly they hear about issues to solve problems. Yet they’re most effective when they can proactively steer everyone onto the right path. Meanwhile, junior and mid-level managers are stepping into more responsibility, often without the guidance or tools they need. This gap shows up in subtle but serious ways:
- Delays in decision-making
- Poor communication across functions
- Confusion over scope, responsibilities, or commercial impact
- Rising friction with clients or suppliers
These aren’t technical problems. They’re human ones. When we face uncertainty, it’s natural for our brain to overthink or paralyse us with somewhat unconscious emotional fears. To overcome this, we need the self-awareness to recognise what’s happening, regulate our nervous system and gather the missing facts and information needed for our confident logic to kick in.
As the Association for Project Management (APM) puts it:
“Coaching enables professionals to develop self-awareness, confidence, and emotional intelligence, skills that are often overlooked but essential in high-pressure project environments.”
— APM, The Benefits of Coaching for Project Delivery Professionals
According to the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) Pulse of the Profession 2023 report, organisations that invest in “power skills” like collaborative leadership, communication and strategic thinking are significantly more successful. They hit project targets more often, retain better margins, and build trust with stakeholders faster.
You don’t need to turn your delivery team into consultants or corporate managers. But you do need to help them grow as leaders and cope with daily pressures, in their own environment, in their own voice, with support that fits the way your business works. See our blog: Engineering Project Management Coaching for Emotional Intelligence
Training helps. Coaching makes it stick.
Most SMEs understand the value of training. It’s logical, budgetable, and it shows you’re taking development seriously.But there’s a problem: training alone often doesn’t land.
The Strength Report 2025, published by Be Business Fit, found that while 58% of professionals had attended leadership training in the last five years, only 45% received any coaching afterwards.
More than half said that coaching would have helped the learning stick.
“Training was great, but without follow-up I slipped back into old habits.”
— Professional, The Strength Report 2025
PMI studies back this up. Training can improve performance metrics by up to 26%, but only when it’s reinforced through real-world application, accountability, and support. Coaching provides that. It bridges the gap between theory and action.
As APM highlights:
“Too often, professionals receive training but are then left to make the changes on their own. Coaching offers the sustained support that allows learning to become embedded.”
— APM, Coaching in the Project Environment
Think of it like this: training gives your team the map. Coaching helps them read it while navigating the terrain.
The Strength Report 2025 confirms what we’ve seen for years
Thanks to Be Business Fit, we now have hard data to back up what many in engineering and construction have felt for years.
For Coron, The Strength Report 2025 is a validation of everything we’ve experienced on the ground: that structured support, delivered at the right level and in the right way, changes everything.
Some highlights:
- Coaching is widely experienced and widely valued. 75% of those surveyed had experienced 1:1 coaching. Those who had, overwhelmingly found it valuable, especially when it came to thinking clearly, communicating effectively, and managing pressure.
- Middle managers are underserved. Coaching tends to be reserved for senior leaders. Yet it’s the mid-tier professionals – site managers, PMs, engineers, quantity surveyors – who are holding delivery together day to day.
“It’s seen as a reward, not a tool, that needs to change.”
— Middle Manager, The Strength Report 2025
- Training without coaching is a missed opportunity. The lack of follow-up means most training never truly embeds. And without reflection, behaviour change rarely happens.
- The cost of inaction is high.
- £22,000: the average cost of a grievance case
- £6,000–£12,000: the estimated cost of a resignation due to poor leadership
- Morale, motivation and team cohesion: harder to price, but just as critical
This isn’t just anecdotal. It’s evidence. And it’s incredibly good news for SMEs who want to develop their people without having to engineer a corporate solution.
Coaching is no longer a “perk”. It’s a practical strategy
We’re starting to see a shift.
The APM has openly stated that coaching is suitable at all stages of a project delivery career. Not just for directors and execs. Not just for those at risk of burnout. But for anyone stepping into bigger responsibility.
It helps with:
- Difficult conversations
- Cross-functional leadership
- Commercial awareness and decision-making
- Confidence to act, not just escalate
And the best part?
It works best inside live delivery environments. Coaching doesn’t need to be off-site, theoretical or abstract. In fact, it’s more effective when it happens alongside project work at the point of need, while the pressure’s real.
I was reminded of this recently, working with someone in a growing SME who found himself under pressure from a colleague – someone senior to him – who was quietly undermining his performance to the directors.
On paper, the facts told a clear story: when he was leading, things ran smoothly. When he wasn’t, things dipped. But facts weren’t enough to change the narrative. Worse still, the person backing up the criticism was the director who should’ve known better from the data.
He was frustrated, hurt, and ready to fight fire with fire, but I didn’t tell him what to do. I gave him space. and a chance to speak honestly, process what was happening, and reconnect with what he knew to be true.
He decided to stop trying to prove his worth to the wrong people and started showing up even more consistently for the team that trusted him. Quietly. Calmly. Clearly.
The biggest impact of coaching is helping people find their footing again, not giving them the answers.
The Project Management Institute (PMI) backs this up the impact of coaching at the point of need with hard numbers:
“Organisations that prioritised power skills reported just 8.8% average budget loss, compared to over 16% for those that didn’t.”
— PMI, Pulse of the Profession 2023
What we’ve seen work
The SMEs we work with are often at a tipping point:
- Longstanding team members are stepping up
- The work is becoming more complex
- Clients are expecting more
- Leadership wants to grow sustainably
When those businesses invest in internal capability, something powerful happens:
- Decisions are made earlier, with more clarity
- Accountability spreads throughout the team
- Communication becomes proactive, not reactive
- Commercial risks are surfaced and managed, not ignored
And crucially: project delivery becomes more consistent. Read our blog: How to reduce commercial risk in projects.
So, where do you start?
You don’t need to build a corporate academy. You can embed training and coaching into your existing project office and delivery teams.
You don’t need to recruit someone else’s “finished article.” Yet there are options to benefit from external experience.
And you don’t need to send your best people on a course they’ll forget in two weeks.
What you can do is take one simple step: ask where your team is now and where they could be or where they’d like to be.
At Coron, we call this our Compass Check, a short, structured video call with you to explore your team’s capability, leadership rhythm and delivery challenges.
If it’s the right fit, we’ll move on to our Trail Insight. This is where we meet with you where you are, map out what your team needs and how to get there.
And if you’re ready, we’ll introduce you to our Base Camp Programme, our structured project management training and coaching programme for SME teams. Built from real project life. Delivered by people who’ve lived it.
Explore our programme: Base Camp.
Final thoughts
Your business is growing. The work is there. The opportunity is real.
You don’t need more heroics. You need more confidence in your team.
And that starts not with a hire, but with a conversation.
Building your project capability is easier than you think. But it won’t develop by chance.