Coaching Skills

The point of coaching is to make other people more successful — to elevate someone’s skills, help them spot and clear their own roadblocks, lift their performance, and get them ready to operate at the next level. It’s one of the few things you do as a manager that compounds.

People muddle coaching together with training and mentoring, so it’s worth being precise:

• Training is helping someone acquire the skills to do their current job.
• Mentoring is offering advice and perspective drawn from your own experience.
• Coaching is both rolled into one, but pointed at a different target — their success, surfaced through their thinking rather than yours.

That last distinction is the whole game. Coaching isn’t you handing over answers. It’s you starting the right conversation and then getting out of the way.

What coaching is (and isn’t)

A few things to hold onto before you start:

• It works on two horizons at once — short-term performance improvement and long-term development.
• It’s a relationship, not an event. One good conversation isn’t coaching; a sustained one is.
• It can be formal or informal — a scheduled session or two minutes after a meeting.
• It’s about asking and listening, not supplying all the answers.
• It is not the right tool for every situation. Sometimes someone needs a decision, a directive, or training — not a coaching question. And it’s distinct from giving feedback: feedback tells someone what you’ve observed; coaching draws the answer out of them.

The coaching process

Most coaching conversations move through the same arc:

1. Discovery — start from genuine curiosity, not a conclusion you’ve already reached.
2. Their perspective — get the situation as they see it, not as you assume it.
3. Current vs. ideal — name the gap between where things are and where they want them to be.
4. Solution discovery — let them generate the options.
5. Action plan — turn it into something concrete they own.
6. Follow-up and support — come back to it; otherwise it was just a nice chat.

Goal setting

Goal setting is the hard part, and it’s where coaching often stalls — it can feel like a disruption to the day-to-day work. Push through it anyway, because achieving the goal is the entire reason the coaching exists. A few things that make goals stick:

• Have the person help set the goal — ownership starts here.
• Connect their individual goal to the bigger picture so it means something.
• Keep the commitment alive between sessions; don’t let it go quiet.
• Stay flexible — a coaching goal that no longer fits reality should change.

The GROW model

GROW is the most common framework for structuring a coaching conversation. It stands for:

• Goal
• Reality (the current situation)
• Options
• Will (the way forward)

You don’t need to march through it mechanically, but it’s a reliable spine when a conversation is drifting.

Goal

Start by establishing what they want out of this — a performance goal, a development goal, a problem to solve, a decision to make, or just a goal for this one session. Questions that open it up:

• What do you want to achieve from this conversation?
• What would you like to happen with ______?
• What outcome would be ideal? What result are you trying to achieve?
• Why do you want this — what benefits would come from getting there?

Reality

This step builds a shared, honest picture of where things actually stand — the scope, context, and magnitude of the situation.

• What’s happening right now — what, who, where, when, how often?
• What’s the impact of that?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how urgent or serious is it?
• What have you already tried? What’s underway?
• What do you think is holding you back? What’s the biggest challenge right now?
• Do you know anyone who’s pulled this off? What could you learn from them?

Options

Once you both see the reality clearly, move to the alternatives — and let them generate the list.

• What options do you have to meet your goal?
• What’s worked for you before — and how could you do more of it?
• What could you do differently? Who else could help?
• What’s the best and worst part of that option?
• What would get you a better result, or move you closer?

Will (the way forward)

The last step is commitment and a concrete plan. This is where good intentions either become actions or evaporate.

• Which option are you ready to act on? What’s your first step?
• What support or resources do you need to start?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely is this plan to succeed — and what would make it a 10?
• What obstacles could get in the way, and what’s your plan for them?
• What three actions can you take this week?
• How will you know you’ve succeeded? What’s the cost if you don’t act?

Be present

Managers wear a lot of hats in a day — strategist, problem-solver, firefighter — and your attention gets yanked in ten directions an hour. But coaching only works when you’re genuinely present, which is one reason a protected 1:1 is where so much of it happens. The person needs to feel that you’re focused, interested, and invested in them. Half-attention isn’t coaching; it’s a meeting they’ll learn to dread.

Coaching difficult people

When the person is hard to coach — defensive, prickly, or stuck — hold the line on three things:

• Keep a positive mindset.
• Suspend judgment.
• Give them the benefit of the doubt.

It’s the hardest to do exactly when it matters most, which is the whole point.

Learn more

• Coaching Skills for Leaders and Managers by Sara Canaday — LinkedIn Learning; much of this page’s structure comes from here.
• The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier.