The Skill 35% of Employers Now Want From Procurement Leaders (and How to Build It)

The recently published CIPS Salary Guide 2026 found that 35% of employers now rank curiosity and critical thinking as a trait they specifically look for in Procurement talent. This was a top 3 skill, alongside negotiation and communication.

Our ability to be curious is shaped by many things: our biases, assumptions, beliefs and often…how safe we've felt to ask a question rather than try to have all the answers or appear certain.

So how do you build more of it, deliberately, once you're leading rather than doing?

A Reliable Route

One of the most reliable routes I've seen and experienced is learning to coach.

Curiosity is one of the solid components of being a great coach.

At its core, coaching is about learning to develop the people around you. Done well, it can be the difference between someone doubting themselves and someone stepping confidently towards a goal they weren't sure they could reach. Then the added benefits come alongside that: your own growth as a leader and skills that transfer directly into Procurement business partnering; seeking to understand what a stakeholder needs, rather than assuming it.

Here are three ways that learning to coach rewires how you think, and why Procurement leaders should be looking at coaching skills as the fundamental way of broadening their curiosity and leadership toolkit in an AI world.

1. Drawing out answers and solutions

Trained coaches learn to resist the urge to answer. You ask a question, then you wait. You ask another, and you wait again.

Being brutally honest, this is uncomfortable at first. But that discomfort is the whole point. The longer you stay in the question, the more angles you notice and you draw out new answers that change the game. That's building curiosity as a muscle.

2. Coaching trains you to notice assumptions…your own and others'

Good coaching practice means constantly checking: is this actually true, or is it just familiar? A coach learns to separate "what I've seen before" from "what's actually in front of me right now."

Apply that to Procurement, and it becomes a huge critical thinking upgrade. Instead of assuming that a stakeholder's objection means it's a rejection of Procurement, you start testing the assumption instead of taking it as a given. That single habit - pausing to check rather than pattern-matching on autopilot - is a huge part of what critical thinking actually is.

3. Coaching gives you a structure for reflection, not just experience

Senior Procurement leaders have plenty of experience. But the opportunity to take the space to effectively reflect and build upon it, due to the fast-paced nature of the role, is difficult to find. Learning to coach enables you to reflect in a way that helps you to continue building capabilities; a way of reviewing a decision, a negotiation, or a difficult conversation that goes beyond "how do I think that went?"

This is what turns experience into insight, rather than just more experience. And it's what allows curiosity to compound over a career, with ripple effects across the organisation.

It’s Fundamental in the Age of AI

Learning to coach doesn't just build these two traits in isolation; it amplifies your whole leadership toolkit. The same skills that sharpen curiosity and critical thinking also make you more adaptable, because you're no longer relying on one fixed way of reading a situation. And they deepen your relationships, because people notice when you're actually trying to understand them rather than manage them.

This combination of being adaptable, curious, critical, and relationship-led, is exactly what's becoming non-negotiable in the age of AI. AI can hold the data and generate the options. It can't read a room, sense what's really driving a stakeholder's resistance, or build the trust that gets a supplier to go further than the contract requires. That's still entirely on you. Coaching is one of the most direct ways to strengthen the part of your leadership that AI can't replace.

Ready to build a top 3 skill?

If you want to go deeper and develop one of the top 3 Procurement skills sought in by employers and to stand out as a Procurement talent, that's exactly what I'm delivering this Autumn. It'll help you build confidence and capability within your Procurement team as you coach them on their performance, it will elevate your Procurement leadership and it will give you the same skills to use with stakeholders in situations Procurement leaders face.

It's a globally recognised ILM coaching qualification tailored to Procurement. During the course you will learn how to be a great coach alongside other people-passionate Procurement leaders, and you'll also learn how to apply those skills in Procurement business partnering situations.

We start in September. You'll find all the details here: https://www.coachingforprocurement.co.uk/training