Coaching in the Workplace: Your Complete Guide For Success

Any leader can develop coaching skills, and in turn, have an incredibly positive impact on team performance and morale.

As organizations start to place increasingly more focus on their leaders’ ability to develop others, coaching in the workplace is no longer ‘nice to have’—it’s essential.

If you’re interested in how to deliver coaching in the workplace, read on for examples, techniques, and methods you can use. To start designing solutions straight away, start your 1 dollar trial of Quenza.

Coaching in the Workplace Made Simple

Workplace coaching is “a training method that prompts leaders to clearly address objectives and support their direct reports, giving them space to communicate and receive guidance.”[1]

While organizational coaching is a rather broad umbrella term, it is almost always delivered by an internal employee, such as a manager or team leader.

Workplace coaching is “a training method that prompts leaders to clearly address objectives and support their direct reports, giving them space to communicate and receive guidance.”

Depending on the organizational context and coachees, it can also describe:

• Team coaching
• Executive coaching
• Career coaching
• Performance coaching, or
• Wellness coaching.

2 Examples of Effective Workplace Coaching

Because there are numerous organizational reasons for developmental initiatives, it’s common for workplace coaching interventions to have numerous objectives.

If you’re a leader, it essentially comes down to your client’s personal and professional goals and how they link to the success of your organization.

Consider the following examples.

Career Coaching

An employee might seek out career coaching in hopes of getting a promotion. This would generally start with coaching assessments to explore their skills, values, interests, and/or needs, and move on to goal-setting in which the employee and their supervisor/coach identify a suitable position for them to aspire to.

The coachee would typically create a personalized action plan to achieve their objective, which could cover how they will:

• Develop any necessary skills for the role
• Gain required qualifications or experience, and
• Overcome challenges along the way.

For the organization, a successful coaching outcome would be a new, qualified, and motivated internal manager who is already a great fit for the company culture.

If career coaching is your niche, you can find more useful resources in our career coaching program guide.

Leadership Coaching

Based on their performance review, a leader may realize that they are struggling to communicate effectively with their team.

Working with a coach might involve:

• Developing EQ skills through emotional intelligence training
• Productivity coaching to help them free up more one-on-one time for teammates, and
• They might also benefit from confidence coaching to overcome their challenges.

Here, effective coaching could result in better team relationships, fewer silos and bottlenecks, and enhanced organizational efficiency and performance overall.

3 Benefits of Coaching in the Workplace

Although its goals can vary greatly, there is plenty of consensus on the advantages of workplace coaching.

According to various sources, a few of these benefits include:

1. Higher levels self-efficacy in coachees: Broadly, this describes an increase in coachees; beliefs in their capabilities, and can positively impact workplace communications, performance, satisfaction, flexibility, and ownership, among other factors.[2][3]
2. Greater employee resilience and workplace wellbeing[4]
3. Improved team effectiveness: Primarily through improved psychological safety and more effective communication.[5]

How To Implement Coaching At Work: 7 Steps

In companies with a coaching culture, leaders receive the organizational support that they require to support and guide employees in their development.

Here, offering feedback, training, and learning opportunities are part of a business’ overarching strategy.

If a leader working in such an environment, there are a few steps to implementing a coaching program in practice:

1. Identify your employees’ coaching needs. Your employee may already have a goal in mind, but one-on-one conversations and assessments can also be useful starting points.
2. Clarify your coaching goals. In addition to the examples we’ve already seen, a few examples of employee goals include better stress management, retirement planning, problem-solving, or cultivating hard skills.
3. Roadmap your coaching program. This is about creating a coaching plan out of the development process—how long it will last, how many sessions you’ll require, whether it will be carried out online or offline, and what resources you’ll require (e.g. exercises, worksheets, frameworks, or psychoeducational tools)
4. Gather your materials. If you already have go-to resources, you can also upload your spreadsheets, videos, and more into Quenza Files. But given the personalized nature of workplace coaching, you will likely also need to design customized coaching activities. You can do this using templates in Quenza’s Expansion Library or design your own from blank templates in the Activity Builder.
5. Deliver your program. Your coaching plan will determine how often you meet and how much of your work together takes place asynchronously online. If you’ve used Quenza as coaching session planner, you can automatically chat with your coachee and deliver your materials to them through the app—in real-time or on a schedule.
6. Monitor your coachees’ progress. For each Activity you share with clients using Quenza, progress is automatically tracked in your Dashboard. Here, you can keep tabs on where they might need some encouragement, as well as generate reports of their results and send reminders if required.
7. Evaluate the success of your program. Evaluating success at the end of your collaboration is a great way to identify potential improvements to your approach and program. There are multiple ways to do this, including face-to-face discussions, tests, and/or feedback forms.

Coaching For Leadership

Beyond your coaching skills and the relationship you develop with your coachee, the success of your coaching program will ultimately come down to the efficacy of your tools for your client’s goals.

If you’re coaching for leadership, here are a few example templates that might work for you. These templates are accessible once you have signed up with Quenza.

1. The VIA Classification of Character Strengths & Virtues. Coachees can complete this exercise to identify the five strengths they believe characterize them best, as shown above.
2. Finding Your Ikigai can help leaders explore and connect with what is most meaningful to them career-wise by discovering the point at which their passions and talents converge with what others need and are willing to pay for.
3. Completing Sentences to Clarify Values. This exercise is a useful way for coachees to identify their personal values within eight different life domains, and practice more values-based leadership.

How To Coach Workplace Teams

When coaching teams, giving employees opportunities to reinforce each others’ learning is a great idea.

Using Quenza Groups, you can achieve this through live team chats; Quenza Group Chat is a convenient way for teammates to discuss results, challenges, or give each other feedback.

Take a look at our complete guide to delivering an effective team coaching program in the workplace: Ultimate Team Coaching Guide: Best Techniques and Tools.

6 Helpful Techniques and Methods

There is a vast suite of techniques and methods that you can employ to improve your coaching effectiveness.

While some of these are based ‘soft skills’ that may already come naturally to you, all of them can be developed with practice:

1. Active listening. This branch of skill includes summarizing, attending, reflecting, responding, and other techniques that can help you successfully understand your employees’ perspective and improve your relationship
2. Motivational interviewing. There are various ways that questions can be used to motivate, as well as solicit information from your coachees. Motivational interviewing skills can effectively open up coachees to the idea of change, by encouraging them to explore their own interests and values
3. Delivering feedback. Offering timely, specific, and constructive feedback not only helps coachees track progress but also keeps them engaged and motivated in spite of obstacles and challenges

Useful Tools

There is also a range of workplace coaching techniques that you can implement using established exercises and activities.

1. Strength-spotting. Numerous interventions can help you and your coachee identify their unique strengths and leverage them in their development. Quenza’s Strengths Self-Reflective Questioning Expansion, shown above, is one example [6]
2. Goal-setting. Proper framing is a useful technique when setting coaching goals. With the Reframing Avoidance Goals to Approach Goals exercise in Quenza, you can guide coachees to take an approach-based perspective rather than focusing on avoiding negative outcomes.
3. Building accountability. If you’re looking for a way to help employees ‘own’ their progress and performance, our Self-Contract template might be useful.

Ultimate Digital Tool For Workplace Coaches

While it’s always possible to design, deliver, and monitor a workplace coaching program without any particular software, it’s much, much easier to do so using a specially designed platform like Quenza.

Quenza is a purpose-built toolkit for everything you need to do when it comes to organizing and implementing your sequences, and comes with a host of features that allow you to customize every element of your solutions.

All you need to use Quenza is a laptop, tablet, or mobile phone, and the right subscription for how much coaching you intend to deliver. If you’re not sure what you’ll need, you can try out Quenza for $1 and see what suits your context.

9 Unique Ways You Can Use Quenza

There are a wide array of ways you can use Quenza–it all comes down to your coaching objectives and unique preferences for collaborating with employees.

Here are a few examples:

1. Customize Expansions from Quenza’s library of exercises, reflections, worksheets, and activities to save time
2. Create and send forms using the Activity Builder to gather feedback, onboard your coachees, or conduct pre- and post-coaching assessments
3. Add your organization’s logo to all your coaching resources, using Quenza’s White Label feature
4. Save coaching programs as customizable Pathways to reduce your prep time
5. Drip-feed materials to clients on autopilot using Pathway intervals instead of manual sharing
6. Check-in at important points in your coachees’ development using Quenza Chat
7. Bulk import team members and share activities with them all at once using Quenza Groups
8. Upload and share company documents securely and privately with your coachees using Quenza Files
9. Document your sessions and conversations, then save them to individual client profiles using Quenza Notes

Evaluating Progress with Quenza

Want to dive a little deeper into the insights you can harness using Quenza?

If you’re using your coachees’ results to deliver feedback or you want to keep an eye on their progress, you can view their results in real-time right from your Dashboard, as shown below:

If you’re working with teams, you can also generate reports to view statistics of collective and individual progress, as pictured:

When it’s time to evaluate the overall impact of your coaching, we recommend taking a look at the following article for a full guide to interpreting your team’s results: Workshop Feedback Forms: 11 Best Samples and Questions.

Final Thoughts

In growing, high-performing workplaces, coaching is a critical part of both strategy and culture.

As a leader, you play a pivotal part in building such a culture whenever you prioritize coaching in your teams and departments.

If you’re ready to take the first step by implementing a coaching program of your own, don’t forget to unlock your $1 Quenza trial for a month of unlimited access to all the tools you’ll need.

References