Some coaching skills are more important than others when you are managing a team. Listening, giving feedback, showing empathy, asking good questions, and helping people set realistic goals can all make the coaching process much more useful.
What Are the Four Core Coaching Skills?
Even though I am going to go through the top 21 coaching skills for managers in this post, there are 4 core areas that I like to place these 21 coaching skills into, and the four I always use are the CPRC version that I created, meaning:
- Communication Skills – For example, being able to listen effectively and being able to explain things clearly when giving feedback.
- People Skills – Being able to show empathy and build trust with the coachee.
- Research skills – The ability, for example, to ask the right questions.
- Competence skills – The actual ability, experience, and knowledge to coach well.
There are other ways that some managers like to break down the 4 core elements, such as by using the LACE acronym to mean Listen, Ask, Challenge, and Establish.
Whichever key elements you use, these 21 coaching skills for managers that I list below all come within the 4 core areas and are worth working on if you plan to offer coaching.
What Are the Most Essential Coaching Skills for Managers?
As a manager, your ability to coach effectively can make a real difference to team morale, development, and performance.
Below are 21 key coaching skills every manager should build, grouped into four practical categories. These are the core competencies that support trust, communication, and growth in any workplace coaching relationship.
Coaching as a manager means guiding, supporting, and helping your team grow, not just telling them what to do. There are 21 key coaching skills that can make a real difference, and they fall into four main areas:
- Communication skills – like listening well, giving feedback, and being clear in what you say.
- People skills – such as empathy, building trust, and understanding others.
- Research and curiosity skills – including asking good questions, staying curious, and adapting as needed.
- Competence skills – such as setting goals, managing time, and taking responsibility.
Together, these skills help you coach in a way that builds confidence, strengthens your team, and improves performance across the board.
Communication Skills
1. Active Listening Skills
You might wonder why you need Active Listening skills as a manager, given that you are there to lead, to speak, and to communicate what needs to be done and how it should be done.
The mistake a lot of managers make, though, is to fail to understand the sheer value of learning exactly how to listen. To listen properly.
By learning to actively listen as a manager, you benefit from:
- Learning about what your team is unhappy with and needs help with.
- Insight and creative ideas that your team comes up with that might otherwise have gone unsaid.
- Valuable feedback as a manager can help you be a better manager.
- An understanding of any issues with workloads and motivation.
Active listening skills are something you should seek training in if you lack these skills. Or at the very least, just make a greater effort to listen more as a manager.
2. Feedback
I have already touched on feedback above in relation to listening skills, and indeed, feedback has a vital role in your role as a manager, both in terms of how you give feedback and how you receive it.
In terms of giving feedback, there are definitely right ways and wrong ways to go about providing it to your team.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach, as different team members take feedback on board in different ways.
One person might prefer to be told directly exactly what they have done wrong and how they can fix it because they have ambition and just want to improve and move forward, and they appreciate feedback.
Other staff might need to be managed more carefully, in that they might be more sensitive, and they might need more explanation and examples of the way forward.
In both instances, though, feedback should always be constructive and communicated clearly.
Do not, for example, leave it too long before giving feedback if something is important, because the value might be lost over time if you wait several weeks, for example, to provide the feedback.
It can be worth using feedback loops, whereby you use a continuous cycle of growth and improvement, rather than one-off conversations.
3. Positivity
I am not asking you to jump out of bed in the morning and celebrate the fact that you will be managing other people or coaching them today, but you should still approach coaching with a positive mindset.
Not only will you be helping someone else (feel-good factor), but you will also very likely learn something new along the way.
Managing and coaching can seem like a drag if not approached with a positive mindset, so, for your own sake, embrace it and enjoy.
4. Sincerity
While we have talked about empathy and emotional intelligence already (and both can be learned), sincerity is a little harder to learn, as it is more of a true reflection of our feelings.
Do you really want to be coaching or managing others? Do you really care, and do you enjoy helping others?
It might in truth be that coaching is perhaps not for you.
If you can be sincere and really enjoy helping and guiding others through managing them and by coaching them, life can be very rewarding.
People Skills
5. Empathy
The ability to show empathy as a manager coaching your team is vital in that you need to build up trust with the people in your team, and it is hard to build trust and psychological safety without being able to show empathy through understanding and compassion.
If you can show them that you truly understand what they are going through and that you can help, employees (the coachees) are far more likely to take on board what you tell them.
Of all the essential coaching skills for managers, being able to show empathy is arguably one of the most important!
6. Emotional Intelligence
Empathy is a part of Emotional Intelligence (EQ), but you also need to have self-awareness, motivation, and the social skills to work with others (in this case, to coach people).
EQ is one of the skills that make a great coach because it is what helps you to truly connect with the person you are helping.
7. Building Confidence
Are you able to help others build confidence by being a motivational force and source of inspiration for the coachee?
While coaching is different from mentoring in that you are helping the person find their own answers rather than directly telling them how to do something, you still need to help them build confidence in their ability.
8. Ability to Build Trust
When we discuss coaching skills for managers, many of these areas we talk about in this post overlap, and in this sense, empathy skills cross over with building trust.
Trust, you might agree, is essential in all aspects of work, and learning how to build trust in a coaching relationship can greatly improve coaching outcomes.
Coaching is no different and, in fact, it is an essential core element of the coach-to-coachee relationship and can greatly impact the effectiveness of the coaching.
Fail to build trust, and your employee engagement is always harder to come by.
9. Build Rapport
Trust and rapport go hand in hand, but rapport is different in that it is more about building a bond and a genuine connection.
Build trust well, communicate well with each other, and work well together, and rapport will likely develop naturally.
Research Skills
10. Questioning Skills
The ability to ask the right questions is a skill in its own right, in that the ability to ask good open-ended questions that invite the coachee to open up and express themselves and what they really need is important.
Ask closed questions, and you will find it much harder to elicit valuable information from the coachee, making your own role as coach or manager that bit harder.
This coaching activity for developing questioning techniques is useful if you want to provide training on questioning skills.
View the Coaching Training Materials for training managers
11. Adaptability
The ability to be adaptable is yet another incredibly handy attribute to have when we talk about coaching skills for managers.
When you start the coaching process, there generally needs to be an agreed length for which the coaching will take place, and there should be clear aims and objectives from the start.
Having said this, though, coaching can take you in many directions as the coachee’s journey may result in unexpected findings, and this can change everything.
As the coach, be ready to adapt as circumstances change.
12. Curiosity
As a coach, you also need to be curious and be interested in learning yourself, as by coaching others, the range of interests and paths that coaching can take is numerous.
If you have an innate interest in learning and exploring new things and directions, this trait is inevitably very helpful in coaching.
13. Analytical Skills
As a coach, we need certain skills ourselves to truly do the role justice, and one such skill is the ability to be analytical.
Given that coaching is often about problem-solving and finding appropriate solutions, having great analytical skills (or learning and improving these skills) is useful.
Competence
14. Time Management
One of the coaching skills for managers that might not initially seem so important does, in fact, play a useful role.
Failure to manage the coaching process well in terms of time can cause the relationship between coach and coachee to quickly break down and trust to be lost. This time management comes in a few forms, such as:
- Time for the overall coaching process.
- Keeping scheduled meeting times and arriving on time.
- Ability to agree on when to meet and schedule things.
15. Ability to Coach (vs Mentor)
It can be so easy to drift into mentoring someone when the intention is to coach, and there is a real difference between the two.
If you are happy to combine the two and it fits with the overall aims, then that’s fine, of course, but otherwise, try to avoid mentoring someone.
Mentoring, in essence, is when you teach someone how to do something, whereas coaching is when you guide them to find their own answers (see the post on mentoring vs coaching: key differences in leadership development).
16. A Growth Mindset
Having a growth mindset as a coach is also incredibly helpful, in that you are more likely to succeed in producing positive outcomes if you have this type of mindset.
Just to explain, in short, a growth mindset is an approach whereby you believe that achieving something is not predefined, but that you believe that hard work and effort can help you achieve goals.
17. Goal Setting
Goal setting is central to the coaching process, with end goals, aims, and objectives essential from the start.
Using the SMART goals concept can be particularly useful as a coach, so that you set measurable and achievable goals for the coachee that you both work toward.
Another useful framework is the GROW model, which looks at the Goal, current Reality, possible Options, and the Will or way forward. It can help give coaching conversations a clear structure without the manager simply telling the coachee what to do.
For a more flexible coaching framework, see our 7 Spiral Coaching Steps Model, which allows managers to revisit earlier stages as goals and circumstances change.
18. Subject Matter Expertise
Why were you chosen, or did you volunteer in the first place?
Generally speaking, to coach someone, you don’t need to be an expert in their specific area, as coaching is not about being an expert in a topic or area but helping other people find their own answers.
However, in some cases, some expertise in a related area can be useful, particularly if you are the coachee’s line manager.
For example, if you are a manager in a manufacturing business, you may coach employees who have a variety of jobs that you may not have specific knowledge about. For instance, your experience is in sales, but the employee you coach is a web developer.
You don’t need to be a web developer to coach them, but it may help that you have experience in the type of business environment in which you both operate (i.e., manufacturing).
So, it is possible that you have some level of expertise in the area that the employee or coachee is keen to benefit from.
A surprising benefit (surprising because many coaches do not realize this when first coaching) is that you can actually also gain an awful lot out of coaching, and that can help you further develop your subject matter expertise.
Coaching pushes you to learn from yourself, from having to go sometimes in different directions within your industry/sector.
Likewise, the coachee might network and meet people you do not know in the industry, and the coachee can often provide an invaluable link to other industry insiders that you did not previously personally know.
19. Experience
Having experience over time, i.e., 20 years in a specific industry, you might not be considered an expert per se on the specific job that the employee is doing, but you are in a position the coachee may hope to reach one day.
You’ve experienced the ups and downs in your given industry or job role; you’ve seen how the role has developed and changed, and you have enough knowledge of certain tools.
We are also skilled enough to be a coach for something. As long as you have 3 or more years of experience in something, you are much more experienced than someone who is completely new to the sector.
Again, specific experience in an industry is not necessary to coach someone (as inspiring them to find their own solution is what coaching is about). However, sometimes it can help, especially since in the workplace, the roles of mentor and coach can overlap.
20. Accountability
You need, as the coach, to make sure that accountability is built into the coaching process that you are running.
As part of the goal setting (see point 17), we need to make sure the person being coached takes responsibility to follow through with the work needed to make the process work.
As the coach, though, you also need to explain and guide the coachee in terms of accountability.
Learn more about accountability in our post on the 5 Cs of accountability.
21. Dealing with Difficult People
Not every coaching partnership goes well. Let’s make that clear.
Even though the coach and coachee should be carefully matched up, this does not always happen.
Sometimes the process simply falls apart for a number of reasons, be it because of lost motivation, a change in circumstances, or so on.
As the coach, being skilled or at least having an understanding or training in conflict management can be extremely helpful.
Further Resources
If you found this article on coaching skills for managers helpful, you might also enjoy checking out the coaching skills teaching materials below:
View the Coaching Skills Training materials for trainers to teach in the workplace.
