How do you make the manager to coach shift from managing tasks to coaching your team?

You can make the manager to coach shift by changing the ratio in your conversations. Leadership coach April Sabral's test: if you didn't spend 80% of a meeting listening and 20% talking, you're still managing. Replace task read-outs with questions, then coach the gap the answers reveal.

 April Sabral came back on the Blade to Greatness podcast this week to walk through the manager to coach shift she's been teaching retail operators since 2025. Casey Golden set the stakes in one sentence: this has been a hard sales year, holiday is coming, and teams are being graded on numbers the economy is setting for them.

 That's exactly the moment most of us reach for the to-do list. April's argument is that the to-do list is what makes the year worse.

What separates a manager from a coach?

The unit of work. A manager assigns tasks and checks completion. A coach asks questions and builds capability. April's framing is that ops consistency comes from systems and growth comes from questions. Both are required, and neither one does the other's job.

Her own words for the manager to coach shift - "you have to stop thinking yourself as a task assigner and start thinking of yourself as a growth coach."

Every time coaching comes up on a shop floor, somebody says a version of "that's nice, but I have a business to run." You do. Run it with your systems. Standards, expectations, targets, process. April is explicit that those structures come first, and the manager to coach shift adds to them.

Systems vs questions.

Systems get today's work done to standard. Questions get the person better than they were yesterday. A team running on systems alone executes well, stops improving, and leaves for an employer that develops them. April's point about exit interviews lands right here:

people say they want to be trained, and you cannot delegate your way to that.

Retail leadership coaching does it on purpose.

What is the 80/20 rule for coaching conversations?

 Spend 80% of a conversation listening and 20% talking. April uses the split as a self-check: walk out of the meeting, estimate the ratio, and if you did most of the talking, you were managing. It costs no budget and takes one meeting to find out.

I like this test because you can't fudge it. Most leadership advice is unfalsifiable, which is how it survives for decades without ever being wrong. This one gives you an answer in the hallway.

April's setup for it is the part I keep repeating.

On a sales floor, we drill associates to ask customers questions and respond to what they hear. Most retail people do this well. Then we promote them, hand them a team, and the skill disappears.

As she put it, you think you have to tell people what to do all day, and you don't.

Same person. Same building. New chair. The questions stop.

What questions should a retail leader ask in a daily huddle?

Two openers work in under a minute:

• what did you learn yesterday, and

• what will you try differently today.

April's advice is to write them down before you walk in, whether it's a huddle, a store visit, or a one to one, so you don't default to reading the list.

Preparation is the whole mechanism. Coaching is a skill, and skills get worse when you improvise them under pressure. Three questions on a card beats good intentions every time.

The third one is where the episode got uncomfortable for me. April ends a coaching conversation by asking: what did you learn from me today?

You might not like what you hear.

I said out loud on the recording what I suspect most leaders think. A lot of times you don't want to ask that, because you're going to hear something you might not want to hear. Which is exactly why it's the most informative question in the set. If the answer comes back "nothing," April has a follow-up that keeps the moment from going sideways.

I'll let her deliver that one in the episode. You'll have to listen to get that gem. It's one of the more difficult parts of the manager to coach shift that you likely may struggle with.

What should you say instead of "you missed target"?

Skip the miss. Ask the person to walk you through their process and where it broke down, listen for the gap, and coach that specific step. April calls it coaching the gap. A number is not coachable. A step in a sequence where somebody hesitated is.

The order of operations:

1. Do not lead with the number. If expectations were set clearly, they already know. Announcing it tells them you came to lecture. And who wants to listen to a lecture?

2. Ask for the process. "Walk me through your process. Where did it break down?"

3. Stop talking. You are listening for the gap, which is the only coachable object in the conversation.

4. Coach the gap. April's promise is that you will hear about three things you can help that person get better at.

5. Close the loop on yourself. What did you learn from me today?

April compares steps 2 through 4 to walking through the play with a sports team, and what I noticed is what it does to the temperature in the room. A lecture makes somebody defensive and quietly starts their exit. A walkthrough makes them a participant in fixing it. In her words, people don't want to feel lectured, "because if they do, they'll leave."

Her caveat is the honest part, and I appreciated her saying it on air:

asking those questions takes real skill and effort from the leader. It's slower than reading the list. That cost is the reason most people skip it.

How do you measure the ROI of positive leadership?

 Track three numbers before and after coaching training: turnover, customer reviews, and productivity.

April's position is that stores with positive leaders sell more and keep staff longer, and that turnover moves first, because pressure without coaching produces exits regardless of what sales do.

Leadership development gets cut first in a tight year because it's hard to quantify. Those three metrics are how you stop having that argument, and you already collect all of them.

You can see it when you walk in the room.

Then she said the line that made the episode: energy leaves evidence.

She can read it walking into a store. The person in front of her is tense, head down, finishing a task. Nobody has recognized them lately. Nobody has taught them anything lately. In her words, "it's transactional, versus transformational." The customer standing there feels the same thing, writes the review, and does not come back. That's how a coaching problem turns into a revenue problem, and why retail leadership coaching belongs in a margin conversation.

Her summary of the business case: "it's not fluff, it is profitable."

How do you coach when the numbers are not the team's fault?

Move the scoreboard to what the team controls: what they learned, what they tried differently, what they will change tomorrow. The economy sets the sales number. Coaching sets whether the team is still improving when the cycle turns, and whether they are still there to benefit.

Casey Golden asked the sharpest question of the episode, and it's the one every operator is living through.

When the economics of the moment drive the miss, people are trying to change something outside their control and they still take it personally. Her words: it's easy for everyone to get a little down or feel a little insecure.

Her own answer was the right one. Even when the sales are not there, a team can still be doing everything it is supposed to be doing for that growth mindset, and still be on path for when the environment changes. The manager to coach shift is what makes that claim true instead of comforting.

 What I am taking into Monday.

 Three questions, written down before the meeting:

• What did you learn yesterday.

• What will you try differently today.

• What did you learn from me today.

That's the manager to coach shift in practice, plus the discipline to stay quiet after asking.

My favorite moment of the recording came at the very end. Casey wrapped the episode by saying she had a new to-do list, on an episode about getting leaders off their to-do lists. Fair enough. Keep the list. The problem starts when reading it out loud is the whole meeting.

Frequently asked questions

What does it mean to move from manager to coach?

A manager assigns tasks and checks completion. A coach asks questions and builds capability. April Sabral's manager to coach shift keeps every system in place and changes what happens inside the conversation, because ops consistency comes from systems and growth comes from questions.

What is the 80/20 rule in leadership coaching?

Spend 80% of a conversation listening and 20% talking. April Sabral uses the split as a self-check: leave the meeting, estimate the ratio, and if you did most of the talking you were managing. It needs no budget and no training program.

What should a manager say when someone misses their sales target?

Skip the announcement that the target was missed, which the employee already knows. Ask them to walk you through their process and where it broke down, listen for the gap, and coach that specific step. Sabral calls it coaching the gap.

Can you measure the business impact of positive leadership?

Yes. Track turnover, customer reviews, and productivity before and after coaching or positivity training. Sabral's position is that stores with positive leaders sell more and keep staff longer, and that turnover moves first under sales pressure.

Does coaching cost you operational consistency?

No. Sabral is explicit that processes, structures, and clear expectations come first, and coaching sits on top of them. Her line is that ops consistency comes from systems and growth comes from questions, so retail leadership coaching adds to the operating model.

Hear the whole story.

🎧 The full conversation with April Sabral on the manager to coach shift runs 15 minutes on the Blade to Greatness podcast and is worth every one of them. .

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ricardo Belmar is a retail tech analyst, top industry influencer and host of the Blade to Greatness podcast, part of the Retail Razor Podcast Network, the #1 indie podcast network for retail, where he and Casey Golden level up your retail career with the key leadership skills you need in the age of AI from industry experts & retail leaders. He writes and speaks on retail technology, AI in retail, retail media, marketing, commerce strategy, and the leadership behind real retail transformation. He has spent his career working with retailers and the technology companies that serve them.

ABOUT THE PODCAST GUEST

April Sabral is a leadership and mindset expert and bestselling author of The Positive Effect, Incurable Positivity, and Positive Accountability for Teams. She is the founder of April Sabral Leadership, Ripple Leadership, Ripple OS, and Ask April AI, an AI-powered coaching and training platform designed to support retail, hospitality, and service-based business owners. April has trained thousands of managers to become confident, people-focused leaders. Her proven leadership system, The Positive Effect, has been embraced by top brands. These include Jimmy Choo, Tory Burch, Sunglass Hut, Victoria’s Secret, and Psycho Bunny. Her bestselling book by the same name was named a Top Global Retail Book by the National Retail Federation in 2025 and is featured in the Forbes Leadership Library.