The CLEAR Coaching Model

CLEAR is commonly attributed to Peter Hawkins, a well-known figure in systemic and organizational coaching, and is generally dated to the same 1980s period that produced GROW. Where GROW was built for a fairly self-contained performance conversation — pick a goal, work it, commit to action — CLEAR was built with the wider coaching relationship in mind, and it shows in the two steps it adds that GROW leaves implicit: an explicit contract at the start, and a formal review that closes the loop on the last conversation's commitments before the next one even gets to Contract again.

The five steps, in a manager's actual words

Contract is the step most managers skip under time pressure, and it's the one CLEAR insists on: "what do you want to get out of the next twenty minutes?" or "is this a call-technique conversation or a pipeline conversation?" Naming this out loud prevents the common failure mode where a manager thinks they're coaching a skill gap and the rep thinks they're venting about a difficult customer.

Listen is deliberately its own step, separate from Explore — the manager's only job here is to understand the rep's account of the situation without redirecting it yet. "Tell me what happened, in your own words" and then genuinely not interrupting.

Explore is where the manager and rep work the situation together: testing assumptions, surfacing options, asking "what have you already tried" and "what would you do differently next time." This step blends what GROW splits into separate Reality and Options phases.

Action converts the discussion into a specific commitment — who does what, by when — functionally similar to GROW's Will step.

Review is CLEAR's most distinctive contribution: a named checkpoint, usually at the start of the next conversation, where the manager asks "what happened with the thing we agreed last time?" before moving on to anything new. Skipping this step is what turns a coaching program into a series of disconnected, forgettable check-ins.

Where it fits, and where it doesn't

CLEAR is the stronger choice when a manager runs recurring one-on-ones with the same rep over months, because the Review step gives the relationship continuity and accountability that a series of one-off GROW conversations can quietly lose. It's a heavier structure than necessary for a quick, single, informal coaching moment — grabbing a rep for five minutes after a rough call is a better fit for something leaner like AOR. And like GROW, CLEAR assumes the rep is roughly ready to problem-solve once Contract is agreed; if the real blocker is that the rep isn't emotionally invested in fixing the issue at all, that's a gap STEPPPA is built to address.

Reading about it isn't the same as running it

The Contract step sounds obvious on paper and is genuinely awkward the first several times a manager tries it live — most people's instinct under time pressure is to skip straight to the problem, not pause to negotiate what the conversation is even about. And a Review step only works if the manager remembers to actually run it, unprompted, at the start of the next conversation, which is a habit, not a fact you can memorize. That's exactly the gap between reading a framework and being able to execute it under real conditions — see The Practice Gap for the fuller argument.

Practicing CLEAR with AI roleplay

Frontline Coach ships CLEAR as one of 8 built-in coaching frameworks, alongside GROW and IGROW. A manager can rehearse a full CLEAR conversation against a simulated rep — including the Contract opening most people rush past — and the scored session shows up on the analytics dashboard so a coaching lead can see whether Review is actually happening across a manager's full roster, not just in the sessions they happen to sit in on. Ask Coach gives reps their own always-on line to revisit a commitment between formal reviews. See pricing for plan details.