Redefining Performance Coaching in the Workplace

Coaching means different things to different people, so it’s as good a time as any to redefine the term for 2025 and beyond.

First, let’s clarify a few things. A coach is not a trainer. While the terms are often used interchangeably, trainers facilitate the development of specific skills, while coaches enhance personal qualities, support general strengths, and encourage individualized thinking. Trainers generally work in group environments, taking a classroom approach to the instruction of specific topics or areas of expertise, while coaches work one-on-one, using a more abstract approach to things like goal-setting, overcoming challenges, and maximizing potential. (Group coaching sessions can also be highly beneficial, allowing team members to learn from each other, share experiences, and build a sense of camaraderie. These sessions can boost morale, enhance collaboration, and strengthen relationships within the team, ultimately leading to improved employee performance and job satisfaction.)

Coaching is also not to be confused with mentoring. Mentors provide insight into a particular field, like “management or “finance.” Like trainers, mentors are rooted in a specific expertise and the “student” receiving the mentoring, or mentee, is schooled in how to follow the mentor along the same path.

Types of Performance Coaching

There are different types of performance coaching within the larger workplace ecosystem. Generally speaking, effective performance coaching involves active listening, asking thought-provoking questions, and providing constructive feedback. Productive conversations between coach and “student” typically aren’t about considering mere solutions to a problem. Rather, they focus on how to find answers, how to devise unique workarounds, and how to come by innovative solutions. This approach, in contrast to training or mentoring, fosters independence, self-reliance, and critical thinking, and encourages employees to take ownership of both their personal and career development.

A few of the different types deserve focus:

• Leadership Development/Executive Coaching: Leaders are not, as they always say, born. At least not all of them. Many need to be trained up, coached, educated, nurtured, and massaged. Executive performance coaching helps would-be leaders better understand their strengths, acknowledge their blind spots and skill gaps, develop emotional intelligence, and focus on what it takes to be a capable leader of people.
• Professional Development: Performance coaching in professional development is narrower than standard performance coaching; it’s the process of developing, sustaining, and improving employee performance in the workplace. Managers can use PD coaching to provide career-related training, pointed advice for upskilling, and lots of constructive feedback designed to provide an outline for professional development.
• Performance Management (PM): Because it involves more of a top-down approach to coaching, traditional performance management is slightly out of favor in 2025. PM provides one-way feedback relative to performance. Today’s successful performance coaching programs involve listening to and collaborating, where the coach and the employee work to create a plan for learning and improvement moving into the future rather than looking back. While the basic end goal of improving performance is the same in PM, coaching is today is more collaborative and led in part by employees who can define their own goals and suggest how to attain them.
• Wellness and Resilience: Wellness and resilience performance coaching helps employees develop skills to manage stress, build emotional strength, and improve overall well-being. This type of coaching results in improved mental health, enhanced resilience, and the development of a more positive mindset, all of which can lead to increased productivity and engagement.

A Performance Coach’s To-Do List for 2025

There are a myriad of components that comprise effective performance coaching,  all of which are critical in constructing a credible coaching program.

1. Set Clear Objectives: Performance coaching is not about elevating poor performance. It’s a proactive way to encourage growth. By setting and supporting the goals of their employees, performance coaches play a key role in providing a clear sense of purpose.
2. Make It Personal: Each employee is unique and deserves an individual approach to coaching. Performance coaching needs to be tailored to address each individual’s specific needs to help them meet their full potential.
3. Healthy Communication: Encourage two-way dialogue in an effort to open healthy channels of communication. This way, your employees will feel comfortable sharing and expressing concerns as well as enthusiasm. Conversely, active listening on behalf of leadership will yield substantive communication to ensure coaching sessions are collaborative, respectful, and meaningful.
4. Make It About Solutions: It’s critical to adopt a solution-focused mindset rather than dwelling on problems. (Try this. It’s not easy!) By employing this philosophy, you empower people to take proactive measures with real benefit and therefore embrace continuous improvement.
5. Harness Strengths: Recognizing your employees’ strengths will help them to better understand their unique talents and how they can use them to their advantage. Getting employees excited about what they clearly do well will motivate them to engage more deeply in the success of the company.
6. Encourage Personal Development: Direct employees to find opportunities to enhance their skills. For example, encourage them to attend training or engage in job-related, self-directed learning. By motivating them to enhance their abilities, you can enable them to understand what it takes to stay ahead of the curve in an ever-changing business climate.
7. Get Creative: So much of great coaching involves the opening of the mind. Encourage out-of-box thinking and problem-solving. Provide employees with the chance to explore, innovate, develop, and solve. This kind of creativity is a confidence builder, fosters innovation, and emboldens people to tackle otherwise difficult challenges.
8. Lead By Example: It’s not all about words. When your behavior aligns with the coaching principles you espouse, you have instant credibility. This type of leading-by-example holds enormous influence over those paying attention to it.
9. Provide Feedback: Feedback is fabulously important. Dive into the process and deliver it honestly and in a timely way. Feedback is the most direct way employees can truly understand their strengths and areas for development. When they understand those aspects, their objectives for growth and success become much clearer.

In Conclusion

An investment in performance coaching is one that will undoubtedly yield significant benefits. Performance coaching helps L&D leaders build high-performing teams, and if done right, it is capable of meeting whatever initiatives the company has set its sights on.

That said, it’s not a one-shot deal. Performance coaching requires persistence, continuity, and a sincere belief that it’s a difference maker. It’s an ongoing process that demands commitment. By investing in this type of employee development, you are not only shaping the future of these people, but you are also contributing to the success of your organization.

Remember, a strong coaching relationship involves collaboration. By investing time and effort into this relationship, you will not only boost confidence and self-esteem, but you will create and cultivate two-way respect and a profound belief in the value of continuous learning and self-improvement.