The Complete Guide to Employee Coaching for Intentional Leaders

An example of a manager doing employee coaching with their team member

There's a particular trait that exceptional leaders possess—one I've observed again and again in organizations that thrive.

It’s the art of coaching.

These leaders see everyone around them as reservoirs of untapped potential. And they know how to draw out people’s brilliance and talents. They know how to help others grow and see possibilities that they couldn’t see themself.

Fortunately, coaching is a skill that anyone can practice and master. And the more you (or the leaders in your company) develop this skill, the more you'll be able to light that spark of motivation that turns good employees into stellar ones.

I’ve worked in HR for two decades and coached thousands of professionals. So in this guide, I’ll equip you with the practical frameworks and mindsets to level up your coaching skills or bring coaching into your company culture.

Why Employee Coaching Can Be Transformative

Bringing a coaching skillset into your culture or personal management style can be a game-changer for your company and your employees. Here are the main benefits of coaching.

How employee coaching helps your company:

Improves company performance. The Harvard Business Review reported on a study where portfolios of companies that heavily invested in employee development outperformed the S&P 500 by as much as 35%. There’s a reason 100% of Fortune 50 companies have mentorship programs—successful companies invest in developing their people.
Improves employee performance. Studies suggest that employees who receive coaching procrastinate less and make better decisions. Who wouldn’t want their company filled with employees who get more done and do it better?
Boosts retention. Companies that invest in employee development have 58% higher retention. And doesn’t it make sense that employees would want to stick around at companies that are helping them grow?

How employee coaching helps your employees:

More confidence. Effective coaching helps your team better understand their personal strengths, feel clearer on what role they play on their team, and solve problems themselves. That’s a recipe for confidence.
More competence. Coaching helps employees build specific skills to fill in their gaps, better achieve their career goals, and even make better decisions. Essentially, it helps employees do their jobs better and go above and beyond.
Higher employee engagement. Coaching helps employees connect their work to personal growth, bigger goals, and their strengths. That’s exactly why employees who receive coaching feel more motivated.

If you develop your coaching skills (or bring them to your company), it’s a win-win-win. You’ll become a better manager and leader. Your company will be more profitable. And your employees will feel higher job satisfaction and be more engaged.

What Exactly is Employee Coaching? (vs. Managing or Directing)

Employee coaching is a collaborative, growth-oriented conversation where the coach helps the coachee unlock their potential, overcome challenges, and take ownership of their career development.

An effective coach will typically ask powerful questions, listen deeply, and guide their team member into their own insights, while offering support, accountability, and empathy along the way.

I’ve seen plenty of well-intentioned leaders think they're coaching when they're actually doing something quite different. So let’s get clear on what coaching actually is, and what it isn’t

	Coaching	Managing	Directing
Example Phrase	“What do you see as your biggest challenge?”	“Here’s what needs to be done by Friday.”	“You should approach the project this way.”
Primary Focus	Reflection and growth	Tasks and deadlines	Instructions and methods
Role of the Leader	Facilitate critical thinking and development	Assign tasks and track outcomes	Provide solutions and guidance
Role of the Employee	Improve problem solving, find more motivation, and grow skills	Complete assigned tasks	Follow instructions
Outcome	People grow and own their work	Things get done on time	Things get done a certain way

A lot of successful coaching comes down to asking deep questions instead of providing answers and orienting toward their growth instead of just results.

The Fundamental Mindset of Employee Coaching

If you’re a manager and want to bring employee coaching into your meetings, it all starts with the coaching mindset.

If you can bring these four intentions into your coaching conversations, then the rest will take care of itself.

Undivided attention. The more presence you can offer, the more meaningful the conversation will be. Turn your phone on silent, eat your lunch beforehand, and be fully attuned to the person in front of you.
Curiosity. Let yourself become genuinely curious about your team member. What makes them tick? What gets them stuck? Who do they want to become? If you come into the session wanting to better understand your employee, then they’ll leave better understanding themself.
Belief in potential. So many of your employees can’t see what they’re capable of—they’re too afraid of failing, or too afraid of succeeding, or can't imagine that they’re cut out to be great. So they live out a smaller version of their lives and careers. But when you look beyond their self-limiting beliefs and genuinely see their greatness, you give them permission to become a bigger version of themselves than they ever thought possible.
Comfort with silence. In day-to-day conversations, many of us are terrified of awkward silence. But in a coaching session, rushing to fill in the silence can actually hurt your cause. Especially if you ask a hard-hitting question, silence is actually a good sign. It shows the other person is thinking deeply. Silence also gives space for more authentic responses instead of canned ones. Plus, if you resist the urge to jump straight into your next question, that moment of silence can allow an insight to deepen and take root.

When you embody these mindset fundamentals, coaching becomes less about applying techniques and more about creating a relationship where growth naturally happens.

That said, there are a few common traps I’ve seen countless managers fall into when they’re coaching.

Common employee coaching pitfalls:

These are pitfalls that every coach falls into. So, no shame if it happens to you! Just be on the lookout.

Giving (too much) advice. There definitely can be a place for advice in coaching, but it’s better to lean more on questions. Let your team member find their own answers instead of feeding them yours.
Asking leading questions with a "right answer" in mind. When your employee answers each question, it should be a moment of discovery for both of you. “Leading questions” set them up to give answers they think you want to hear, instead of answers that reveal something about themselves.
Turning it into therapy. It’s natural for coaching conversations to bring up emotions. And it’s okay to address their history as it comes up, but your orientation should be primarily toward their future: growth, job performance, and opportunity.
Solving the wrong problem. If you jump into solution mode too early, you might miss what actually matters. Slow down. Ask a few rounds of clarifying questions to make sure you’ve landed on the real issue, and not just a surface-level concern floating on top.

7 Foundational Employee Coaching Questions

If you implement the mindset tips above, you should be in great shape to lead powerful coaching conversations.

But if you want another helpful set of tools, here is a list of extremely useful questions to fall back on. They’re borrowed from Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More, and Change the Way You Lead Forever.

If you’re ever not sure where to take the conversation, chances are, one of these questions will help.

1. The Kickstart Question 👉 “What’s on your mind?”

This is a beautiful and simple question that opens the door to what matters most to the employee right now.

2. The AWE Question 👉 “And what else?”

This deceptively simple question can unlock endless insights.

When your employee wraps up a reflection, just ask, “And what else?”

You’ll be surprised that there is almost always more they’ll want to share if you ask.

3. The Focus Question 👉 “What’s the real challenge here for you?”

If you’ve tried your hand at coaching, then you’re probably familiar with this situation:

You’re twenty minutes into the session. Your employee has shared a lot of information and drama, but you feel a little lost in the details, and you aren’t sure which path to follow.

This question cuts through the noise and moves the conversation from surface-level issues to the root challenge.

4. The Foundation Question 👉 “What do you want?”

This question gets to the heart of what matters to your team member.

Amidst any challenge, asking what they want helps clarify their motivations and how they want to orient themselves through the situation.

5. The Lazy Question 👉 “How can I help?”

Bungay Stanier calls this the “lazy” question because it shifts the responsibility onto the employee to seek help rather than the coach to scramble to figure out how to help.

But in doing so, it also empowers your team member to figure out what support they actually need.

It also helps you avoid the slightly awkward situation where you extend yourself to help with a situation that they’ve got totally handled.

6. The Strategic Question 👉 “If you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?”

This question will help them sharpen their time management and boundaries. Putting any new item on their plate means something else won’t fit.

It’ll encourage them to be more thoughtful with their commitments, and will help them steer clear of overextending themself.

7. The Learning Question 👉 “What was most useful or valuable for you?”

This is a great way to end a conversation. It’ll help them package the session into takeaways they can bring with them. And it’s a great segue into creating an action plan.

3 Ways to Incorporate Employee Coaching into Your Organization

There are lots of ways to bring coaching into your company. Here are some key types of coaching formats to consider.

1. Manager-employee coaching

One of the easiest ways to bring coaching into your organization is to encourage your managers to bring coaching into their relationship with their team members.

That could look a few ways:

Regular coaching calls: Every 4–8 weeks, managers set up a dedicated 1:1 that’s not about tasks, but about professional growth, goals, and long-term development.
Growth-focused performance plans: Quarterly or annual coaching conversations where managers help team members find their growth edge and set measurable goals.
In-the-moment coaching: After employees complete a big presentation, deliverable, or project milestone, the manager sets up a short meeting to help them process what went well and what they could do better next time.

In-the-moment coaching is powerful because it’s timely—they get feedback right in the fresh moments after an achievement. That said, not every employee feels safe being vulnerable with their boss, and not every insight can emerge in a quick debrief. That’s why the most successful approach is for employees to receive coaching from multiple sources, each offering different perspectives and levels of trust.

2. Peer-to-peer coaching

Coaching doesn’t have to be a top-down arrangement.

Really, any employee can coach any other employee. The “coach” just has to give their full attention, be curious, and ask questions about the other person’s professional development.

To encourage this, your organization could set up peer coaching programs that match employees for monthly coaching conversations—either within their teams or across teams. Each person takes the role of coach to help the other think about their goals and growth.

Additionally, you can weave coaching into existing rituals. For example, maybe you dedicate 10 minutes of a team meeting for pairs to reflect on development questions with each other.

3. Hire in-house coaches

You could also consider bringing in professional coaches to work in-house, either as contractors or full-time employees.

The main benefit of this approach is that some employees may not feel comfortable being totally candid or vulnerable with their manager, but might feel safer with a neutral third party. Plus, if it’s a full-time coach, employees can have more access to them.

If you’re interested in in-house coaches, but aren’t quite sure, here’s an article on the pros and cons of in-house coaching.

5 Workplace Coaching Examples

Each employee is unique, so there’s no blueprint for what they’ll want to work on. But here are a few common workplace coaching examples to help you understand what direction you might want to take some of your coaching conversations.

1. Coaching for career growth

This is where you help your employee figure out where they want to go in their career path.

Do they have professional goals they want to set? Are there roles within the company they’d like to apply for? Any skills they’d love to add to their toolbelt?

Questions you might ask:

What skills would help you feel more fulfilled?
Who’s in a role you admire—and what can we learn from their path?
What would “next level you” be doing differently today?

2. Coaching for communication skills

So much work tension comes from miscommunications. There is no shortage of employees who:

Struggle to give feedback

Wince at receiving feedback
Are afraid to speak up at meetings
Send emails that come off as curt or cold

That’s why communication is such a prime area for coaching support. You can support your clients by role-playing tough conversations and helping them fine-tune how they express themselves with constructive feedback.

Questions you might ask:

How do you want others to experience your communication?
What’s a conversation you’ve been avoiding? What’s holding you back?
What’s one tweak you could make that would improve your communication this week?

3. Coaching for productivity

Even great performers can say yes to too many projects, get bogged down in busywork, or find themselves scrolling on LinkedIn instead of working.

In today’s workplace, being productive is no easy task. You need to do deep work and avoid the endless circus of internet distractions. You pick your top priorities amidst an overwhelming sea of competing tasks. And you need to take breaks to avoid burning out.

All that to say, most of us could benefit from upping our productivity skills.

Questions you might ask:

What are the 1–2 things that would move the needle most this week?
Where do you find yourself procrastinating? What’s underneath that?
What boundaries or habits would help you protect your best energy?

4. Coaching for leadership skills and development

This might be supporting rising stars as they move toward leadership roles, or helping uncover hidden leadership potential in employees who haven’t yet had the chance to shine.

Coaching can empower someone to take on a stretch project, propose a new initiative, or step into greater ownership during meetings.

Questions you might ask:

Where are you already showing up as a leader, even informally?
What kind of leader do you want to be known as?
What feels like your next edge in terms of ownership or influence?

5. Coaching through change or uncertainty

If a big change is happening in the company, then you can help individual employees find the strength and resolve to make it through.

Whether it’s a reorg, redeployment, layoffs, or an overhaul of processes, change can be very intense for some people. And you can help them adapt, orient, and stay grounded.

Questions you might ask:

What’s most challenging about this change for you personally?
What’s still within your control, even in the midst of uncertainty?
How have you handled change well in the past? What did you draw on?

These examples should give you a taste of what type of coaching conversations you could expect in your workplace.

Just remember that each person is unique. Some need soft, encouraging support. Others like direct challenge and tough love. The most powerful coaching happens when you drop your agenda and meet the person in front of you.

Want to Bring Your Coaching to the Next Level?

If you’d like to take further steps in investing in coaching your employees, you might be interested in the International Association for Career Coaches. We offer coaching training for your current managers, or you can bring in professional in-house coaches.

Either way, the fact that you’re thinking about how to bring a coaching mindset into your management style and culture shows that you’re building an awesome culture that empowers your employees. So keep it up!