The Coach Who Changes Everything
By Nadir Ahmad, CEO at Dowling Street
In a village in Rajasthan, India, a 14-year-old girl named Nisha Vaishnav was at football practice when a family arrived to evaluate her as a potential bride. She refused the proposal. When her father later questioned why she kept going to practice, she told him: "There is no lover. I am going to play football. That is my love."
By 2024, Nisha was playing for the Rajasthan state team at the National Football Championship. Her sister Munna, who introduced her to the sport through a nonprofit called Football for Freedom, now trains younger girls and counsels them against child marriage. "Whether I am able to stop their marriage or not," Munna has said, "I want to help them become something in life, realise their dreams."
What made the difference for both of them was not just access to a field. It was a coaching environment that believed in their potential and gave them reasons to keep showing up.
That environment doesn't create itself. And the question of how to build it, whether for a teenage girl in rural India or a team inside a large organization, turns out to have a surprisingly specific answer.
Danny Aronson is Training the Next Generation of Leadership
Danny Aronson is the founder of Sport4Growth, a Park City-based organization that advises youth sports organizations on strategic planning and coaches the coaches on how to engage with players and parents to deliver upon the organization’s goals. He has spent years developing frameworks and approaches to help young athlete grow through sport rather than simply passing through it, or worse being negatively impacted by it. His answer centers on a coaching philosophy he calls promotive coaching: a framework for reinforcing the specific behaviors that lead to growth, rather than primarily correcting mistakes.
The foundational premise is simple and largely ignored in practice: what gets rewarded gets repeated.
Effective promotive feedback has three characteristics. It is positive, reinforcing behaviors worth repeating. It is specific, identifying the exact action that created progress rather than offering vague praise. And it is meaningful, connecting the behavior to a larger goal so the learner understands why it matters.
Aronson illustrates it with a basketball example. A coach who tells a player "great shot" after scoring has offered positive feedback, but not promotive feedback. The outcome has been celebrated, not the behavior that produced it. Compare that to: "Way to use your legs to power that ball up there. That will keep you scoring more." Same moment, different effect. The player now knows what they did, why it worked, and how to repeat it.
When the shot misses, the principle holds. The coach can still say: "Way to use your legs to power that ball. I know it didn't go in; we'll work on the aim. The mechanics are right." Process success is real even when the outcome fails. That distinction, between a failed outcome and a failed effort, is one the best coaches build into every interaction.
Danny goes on to explain the insights came out his coaching of youth baseball coaches. He said to them, “Think about the kids just starting out in baseball. They are going to fail at the basics of throwing, catching the ball and hitting the ball 90% of the time initially. We know that 70% failure at hitting puts you in the Hall of Fame but that means nothing to young kids. Instead, you have to fill them with success to offset the failure early on in their development, or else they will not want to keep going long enough to develop. Later in life, with the proper experiences in sports, they will have the resilience to intrinsically overcome this challenge. Our job is keep them playing long enough to develop resilience. This is where promotive coaching comes into play. Use it to offset the feeling of failure early on, so that they want to stay long enough to see that they can overcome hard things.”
The Organizational Parallel
Most workplaces are structured around results. Quarterly numbers. Project delivery. Revenue targets. There is nothing wrong with caring about outcomes, but outcome-focus has a shadow side that is easy to miss until you start looking for it.
When a team member gets something right, we tend to acknowledge the result. "Good work on that proposal." "Nice job landing the client." These comments feel like positive leadership. But they leave the underlying process invisible. The person who delivered doesn't know which part of their approach actually worked. Over time, success becomes something that happens to people rather than something they can reliably produce.
The feedback asymmetry runs in one direction: when something goes wrong, critique tends to be specific, but praise tends to be vague. The net effect is that effective behaviors are under-reinforced while errors are over-indexed. The unspoken lesson is that the safest move is not to experiment.
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety has found consistently that when mistakes draw more attention than effective behaviors, people become risk-averse. They narrow the range of things they attempt. The learning curve flattens, and the organization's capacity for adaptation erodes quietly, in ways that only become visible when the environment demands something new.
The same leaders who would never tell a young athlete "just make the shot" routinely tell their teams "just hit the number" without ever identifying what behaviors, executed consistently, actually produce the result.
Four Moves for Leaders
Promotive coaching is not an instinct for most leaders. It requires deliberate practice. These four moves are a starting point.
1. Name the behavior, not just the result
When someone does something well, resist the reflex toward outcome praise. Slow down and identify the specific action that produced the result. "The way you structured those tradeoffs made the decision easy for the room" transfers something the person can use again. "Great presentation" does not. The test: could they repeat it based on what you said? If not, you've complimented, not coached.
2. Reinforce process when outcomes fail.
This is the hardest move and the most important. When a project misses, a pitch falls flat, or a decision doesn't pan out, find the behavior worth preserving before asking what went wrong. "The research was thorough and the framing was right; the timing was against us" is not spin. It is accurate, and it keeps the learner focused on what they can control.
3. Make specificity a standard, not an occasion.
Vague positive feedback signals that the leader wasn't paying close enough attention to say anything real. Build the habit of one specific observation per interaction: not a performance review construct, but a thirty-second comment at the end of a meeting. "The question you asked in the third quarter of that call changed the whole direction of the conversation" is the kind of thing people remember for years.
4. Connect behavior to purpose.
Promotive feedback is not complete until it is meaningful: until the learner understands not just what they did but why it matters. "That kind of framing is exactly what we need as we go into these negotiations" closes the loop. It tells the person that what they brought has value beyond the moment, and invites them to bring it again.
The Long Game
The Women's Sports Foundation's 2024 research, spanning seven generations of women, found that girls who participate in youth sports are significantly more likely to develop into leaders across all sectors of professional life. But the research is careful to note that participation alone is not sufficient. It is the quality of the coaching environment that determines whether those outcomes materialize.
The same is true in organizations. The teams that develop the strongest people are not those with the best performance management systems. They are the ones where effective behaviors are noticed, named, and reinforced consistently; where falling short of an outcome doesn't erase the quality of the effort that led to it; and where people learn, over time, that trying hard and executing well is seen and valued regardless of what the scoreboard says.
That is the model. And it scales.
Sources:
Aronson, Danny. Promotive Coaching framework. Sport4Growth, shared with the author, 2026.
BBC News. "The teenage girl who used football to resist child marriage." 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpv8r34mn0po
Sharrow, E., Staurowsky, E., and Davis, B. "Play to Lead: The Generational Impact of Sports on Women's Leadership." Women's Sports Foundation, September 2024. https://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/articles_and_report/play-to-lead/
Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018.