Highly successful companies will always advocate that “if you grow your people, you will grow your business.”Highly successful companies will commit to that philosophy by continually investing time, money, and resources into employee development.
Even in challenging and VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) cycles of business, they will ensure that they are doing everything possible to ensure the professional growth of their employees. As part of their strategic priorities, they emphasize the critical importance of coaching. That includes leaders coaching their direct reports, peers, and managers.
That means having the skills, the knowledge, and the courage to have meaningful conversations, many of which are difficult.
Why Coaching Matters
The starting point for establishing the organizational capability of a company to ensure successful coaching is to ensure that leaders receive the appropriate training and development.
Typically, that encompasses two workshops to build the skills necessary to be effective.
Workshop 1: Planning Performance
The first is one focused on Planning Performance as coaching is only successful if a leader has clearly established expectations for others. They need to be explicit about goals, required competencies for a role, and their own guiding principles.
Without this foundation, coaching is set up for failure. For employees it will feel like the “gotcha syndrome” where they were never told about expectations, but then, they get criticized for what they did or did not do. This in turn creates mistrust, disengagement, and resentment.
Workshop 2: Coaching and Feedback Skills
The second workshop that is critical is one focused on coaching and how to deliver feedback so that it is well received and has lasting impact. While there are multiple models for coaching, there are two primary types: facilitative and performance.
Coaching Types
Facilitative Coaching: Empowering Self-Solutions
Facilitative coaching is a collaborative approach where the coach uses active listening, open questioning, and constructive feedback to empower the coachee to discover their own solutions and to take action for professional growth.
The coach acts as a guide or sounding board, focusing on facilitating the coachee’s problem solving rather than providing answers, advice, or direct instruction. The goal as the biblical phrase goes is, “to teach them how to fish rather than giving them the fish.”
This methodology is particularly effective when the coachee has the appropriate competence and commitment, but needs support to expand their consideration of problems, opportunities, and action steps.
Steps for Facilitative Coaching Conversations
The key to success is following some key steps and asking some fundamental questions:
Plan the Conversation
- Prepare for the conversation by being mindful of the coachee’s needs and interests
- Focus on coachee’s agenda
- Review any relevant assessment/feedback
Clarify the Goal
- What do you want to accomplish today? What would success look like for you?
Explore Current Situation
- What’s going on? What makes this important now? How important on a scale of 1-10?
- What have you tried so far? What has worked? What has not worked?
Explore Possibilities
- Imagine a problem solved – what would be different for you?
- What else could you try? If there were no constraints, what would you do? Would you like some suggestions?
- If you tried “that”, how would that impact stakeholders and/or the business?
Lay Out a Plan of Action
- What are action steps you will take? When? What resources will you need?
- How can I support you?
As the conversation evolves, the leader should aim to talk no more than 5% of the time. Their role is to focus exclusively on asking powerful questions that help their coachee explore root causes and solutions.
Best Practices for Facilitative Coaching
In course of the conversation a leader should also do everything possible to listen mindfully and demonstrate the best practices below:
- Face the coachee
- Lean forward
- Keep body language open
- Maintain good eye contact
- Prevent/Avoid any interruptions or distractions
- Nod
- Allow for silence
- Paraphrase responses
- Give short responses
- Acknowledge emotion
With these as guiding principles, a leader can empower an employee to become more self-reliant, more confident, and more capable. Over time they will increasingly believe that they have the intrinsic skills to resolve issues and questions on their own.
Performance Coaching: Driving Behavior Change
Performance coaching, by contrast to facilitative coaching, is focused on providing positive or constructive feedback to others. It is generally more directive in nature and encompasses more statements than questions.
Its goal is to reinforce behaviors and skills that are creating valued business impact and to change behaviors and skills that are creating a gap in their colleague’s performance.
The key to success is rigorously following a coaching process that enables the colleague to hear the feedback without defensiveness, to understand the business impact of their behavior, and to “stop, start or continue” a specific behavior.
The 6-Step Process for Constructive Performance Coaching
The process for constructive coaching encompasses the following steps:
1. Ask Permission
Research has clearly shown that if a leader asks permission of the coachee to share some feedback, there’s a significant likelihood they will listen and act upon it.
The likelihood increases if the request is linked to a benefit. For example, “would it be okay if I shared some feedback with you that I believe will make a valued difference in your performance as a team leader?”
By asking permission and aligning it with a benefit a coachee will be less defensive and resistant. By contrast they will see the feedback as a gift.
2. Share Directly Observable Behavior
To start the coaching conversation, the leader needs to describe exactly what they have observed, heard, or discovered.
They need to create a statement that is purely about the facts and include no adjectives or adverbs that pass judgement. They, like Steven Spielberg, need to create video tape accuracy of just the data.
For example, “I observed in the meeting that you did not ask any of your colleagues for their perspectives and that you made the final decision on the project plan.”
3. Describe the Business Impact
To help the coachee understand the value of their feedback, the leader needs to describe the business impact of the observable behavior. They need to communicate the business impact for the coachee, for their team, for customers, for themselves, and for the larger organization.
By sharing “business impact” the feedback is no longer “personal;” it’s just “business.” This in effect enables the coachee to be more open and receptive to the feedback.
4. Check Coachee Perception
To ensure that they have a full understanding of the situation, the leader then needs to ask the coachee what their perceptions of the scenario are.
Maybe they were having a difficult day. Maybe they were unaware of their actions. Maybe there was a rational intention to be more direct in the meeting.
The key is to enable a two-way conversation. To start the conversation, a coach might lead with a question such as “help me understand what was going on for you in that meeting.”
5. Offer/Request Solution
At this stage of the process the leader needs to evaluate to what extent the coachee is candid and should determine their own solution. Do they have the competence, commitment, and confidence to be empowered with that opportunity?
If so, then the coach can ask “what do you think you can do differently or better in these meetings?”
If the leader perceives that the coachee is not yet capable of determining their own solution, then they can make some recommendation.
For example, they could say, “The next time we meet with the team, you should practice asking more questions, paraphrasing what others have said, and making consensual decisions.”
6. Ask for Commitment
To close out the coaching conversation the leader needs to ask the coachee for their commitment to change their behavior. This process ensures that the coach and the coachee have a “contract” and that there’s an agreement around next steps.
For example, a leader might propose, “can I have your agreement that the next time you meet with this team, you will be much more inclusive and facilitative and ensure that other points of view are heard?”
This sequence of coaching practices makes even the most difficult conversations a comfortable and logical process. It enables coachees to hear important feedback and to take steps to enhance their performance.
With positive feedback the coaching steps are almost identical, however, it’s unnecessary to check for coachee perceptions. The goal is simply to help the coachee understand what they did to create a valued business impact and to reinforce that they should keep doing what they are doing.
Three Best Practices for Leaders
To complement these coaching strategies, here are three highly recommended best practices.
- Keep a coaching journal. Once/week capture observations about direct reports. The more leaders can include specific factual data in their coaching the more likely they will be able to enhance their coaching and have their feedback “land” with meaning and impact.
- Use the last 5 minutes of every one-to-one with your direct reports for coaching. This consistency will enable you to have a significant and lasting impact upon their performance, engagement, and professional development.
- Over time be sure to implement a praise to criticism of 5 to 1. Research clearly demonstrates that positive feedback will have a more lasting behavioral impact. “Only positive feedback can motivate people to continue doing what they’re doing well and to do it with more vigor, determination, and creativity.”1
Conclusion: Create a Coaching Culture
Coaching, when skillfully employed, will make an immense and valued difference for leaders. It will drive higher performance and business results for individuals and teams; it will ensure accountability and productivity, and at the same time kindle engagement for employees, as they will experience the investment in their professional growth and career development.
The survey data consistently demonstrates that coaching is one of the most powerful ways to contribute to the bottom line. A recent study of Fortune 1000 companies2 showed these results from leaders who received coaching:
- An increase in productivity (by 53%)
- Increased customer service (by 39%)
- Increased retention of senior people (by 32%)
- Reduction in costs (by 23%)
- Increased bottom line profitability (by 22%)
Given this business impact isn’t it time for you and your company to create a culture of coaching?
1 Zenger and Folkman, HBR, March 2013
2 College of Executive Coaching, Jeffrey E. Auerbach, August 2026
