Coaching Skills That Make a Great Manager (+ Tips to Develop Them)

In today’s workplace, being a great manager is about more than just overseeing tasks and hitting targets—it’s about guiding, mentoring, and developing your team to reach their full potential.

Managers who embrace coaching skills create an environment of growth, collaboration, and trust, empowering their employees to thrive.

In this article, we’ll explore the key coaching skills that set exceptional managers apart and offer practical tips on developing these skills to elevate your leadership and inspire your team to succeed.

Coaching skills your managers cannot afford to ignore

Building work relationships

Coaching is one layer deeper than regular work conversations. The first skill any manager needs to go that deep is the ability to build relationships. In coaching calls, team members open up about their weaknesses, struggles, dreams, and more. To have such discussions, the team member has to have a genuine relationship with the manager and trust them.

Managers can build relationships with team members by:

• Showing an interest in getting to know them
• Connecting regularly via one-on-one meetings and informal chats
• Having an open-door policy for better communication
• Offering help
• Appreciating team members for any significant contribution

Effective communication

Managers regularly set expectations and provide feedback. For both these aspects, managers must be able to share their thoughts in a way that makes sense to team members. Sadly, miscommunications are pretty common.

A Loom report shows businesses in the US lose $1.85 billion weekly due to miscommunication. Managers can improve communication with team members by:

1. Being specific in every ask
2. Staying approachable at work
3. Having frequent conversations
4. Asking for feedback

Active listening

Coaching is less about speaking and more about understanding the team members—carefully listening to what they say, reflecting on it, and responding.

As coaches, listening is an interaction rather than a passive process. Therefore, it is vital for building trust, improving communication, preventing misunderstandings, and encouraging a deeper connection.

A few ways managers can become better listeners are:

1. Developing a habit of listening to understand and not listening to respond
2. Being present in conversations. No parallel emails, slacks, or thinking of the upcoming client presentation
3. Clarifying rather than assuming by asking questions like, “Here’s what I’m hearing…is that right?”, “In other words, is this what you meant”?
4. Not judging the conversation as a manager but being neutral and responding as a coach

Emotional intelligence

As coaches, managers have to listen and understand their team members’ perspectives, which could be completely different from their own. And for that, they need emotional intelligence. It is the ability to understand and manage one’s emotions and also of those around them. It gives managers the empathy to put themselves in team members’ shoes and relate to what they’re going through.

A lack of emotional intelligence can also hinder coaching. Katie Stoddart, Leadership Coach, says managers who cannot handle stress will pass it on to their team members in coaching sessions.

So, managers should assess their emotions and the message they are putting across.

Managers can become more emotionally intelligent by:

1. Becoming self-aware of their emotions
2. Inviting constructive feedback
3. Using one-on-one meetings to understand team members
4. Listening without judgment

Powerful questioning

As a coach, managers do not give team members any answers straight away but help them find an answer. How do they do that? By asking thoughtful questions. Questions that invite introspection or make team members brainstorm solutions.

Examples of a few powerful questions that make team members think more are:

• What is getting in the way?
• How can you approach that differently?
• What are the possible next steps?

Managers can ask better questions by:

1. Asking more open-ended questions
2. Adding follow-up questions based on answers and letting the conversation unfold.
3. Avoid giving answers as questions. For example, “X worked for me in a similar situation. Did you try that?” This question is leading and doesn’t provoke thinking. The better question is: “What are the possible solutions?”

Goal setting

As coaches, managers solve present issues and think of possible avenues where an employee can grow and what success will look like. For this, goal setting, the ability to set clear goals, is essential: it helps to create a plan of action.

Michael Sonbert, the Founder and CEO at Rebel Culture, says:

Managers as coaches can ace goal setting by:

1. Keeping the long-term vision in mind while creating goals and further dividing it into smaller tasks or milestones
2. Verifying if goals are SMART(Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound)
3. Keeping goals aligned with the company vision
4. Documenting goals to monitor progress

Business storytelling

Business storytelling ensures managers communicate complex ideas in a relatable and engaging way. By sharing stories, managers can illustrate key lessons, inspire action, and make abstract concepts more concrete for their teams. Effective storytelling also fosters emotional connections, making messages more memorable and motivating.

In coaching, this skill encourages employees to see the bigger picture, relate to shared experiences, and feel more invested in both their own development and the organization’s success.

Carol Evans, a Corporate consultant and business coach, reveals that a coach who is an excellent storyteller can help team members envision where they are and where they can be. And how important they will be in the company’s future. It motivates team members to take action.

Managers can tell engaging stories by:

1. Understanding their audience
2. Adding enough context to a story by leading with facts or examples
3. Humanizing the story by speaking around emotions team members can relate to—for example, how things will look like when they achieve a specific goal
4. Making it action-oriented by having a takeaway that provokes action

Persuasion

When stories are not enough and team members need that extra push. Then, persuasion kicks in. Persuasion is influencing another person’s beliefs or behaviors. This skill helps managers convey their ideas so that employees buy into them and become more aligned with their vision.

Three ways managers can be more persuasive are:

1. Leading conversations with facts
2. Establishing urgency of the task
3. Stating outcomes and possible benefits of action

Ability to give (and receive) feedback

As coaches, managers are supposed to give effective feedback to team members for their improvement and to help them achieve their goals.

Managers should also ask for feedback to check if their coaching is helping team members.

Here are the four points managers can keep in mind for giving effective feedback:

1. Being specific and not rambling by trying to say something nice and following up with feedback—constructive feedback is not harmful and doesn’t require any sandwiching between compliments
2. Keeping feedback timely, neither too much nor too little
3. Maintaining feedback as a two-way conversation where team members can ask follow-up questions
4. Watching out for the tone while communicating feedback

Facilitating learning and development

In the end, managers-as-coaches are helping employees learn, so the crucial coaching skill is the ability to create an environment that enables continuous learning and development.

Leaders and managers play a crucial role in developing a learning culture.

They can promote learning by:

1. Creating learning and development plans with employees and keeping track of them (i.e., offering support when needed)
2. Designing assignments that encourage experimentation, reflection, and learning
3. Giving priority to continuous learning and ensuring team members have time for it

Inclusive leadership

Team members from diverse backgrounds have different issues. And to coach them, managers need to understand their problems.

On top of it, we all have our unconscious biases. Unconscious bias is an assumption or belief that exists in the subconscious mind. Two common unconscious biases are gender bias and ageism.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion(DEI) training helps managers uncover their biases and make employees of different gender, races, abilities, ages, religions, sexual orientations, and other diverse backgrounds feel comfortable in coaching calls. It also ensures they can understand varied opinions and thoughts from a diverse workforce.

How to develop coaching skills in managers: Best practices

Here are three simple must-do steps to kick-start a coaching skills training program.

Educate managers

Firstly explain what coaching is to managers and how this training will help them. This step ensures managers get the purpose of the training and make the most out of it.

Roll out training

Once managers understand the expectations, it’s time to roll out training. You can conduct workshops or launch courses for all coaching skills.

Collect feedback

Lastly, take feedback from managers if the training is helpful and if they expect any improvement. You can also take employee feedback to track if they are benefiting from their managers’ coaching.

4 Coaching experts speak on why coaching skills training programs fail

Not onboarding managers

Fiorella Velarde, Executive Coach and Regional Director LATAM at Six Seconds, told us that organizations often make the mistake of not getting buy-in from the managers to be trained before any coaching training.

Managers don’t understand the objectives of coaching training and how it is helpful for them in their work. As a result, managers attend the training for the sake of compliance and do not make the most out of it.

Making the entire experience far from engaging

Chiraz Bensemmane, Founder at CoachTribe, says companies tend to go very broad and theoretical in coaching skills training programs, not giving leeway for more practical or adapted content. This leaves participants with information overload and no clear idea of how to use the information. It also affects training engagement.

Coaching training is to put theory into practice and use experiential training, role-playing, or cohorts, where managers can practice different situations. It makes the training more engaging and effective.

Having no accountability in place

Another big mistake organizations make in coaching programs is thinking their work is over after delivering the training.

Andrée Funnell, a Professional Coach and Trainer, says three blunders organizations make in planning any coaching skills training programs are:

1. No accountability from the manager once the training has been delivered
2. No measurement of practical use in the workplace and feedback from both managers and team members
3. No assessment method to ensure the coaching training has been a success

Tying coaching back to appraisals is the one way to ensure your coaching training program is not spray and pray. But you develop an end-to-end ecosystem for coaching to work.

Treating coaching as an episodic event

Coaching is not a one-time event in response to poor performance or low employee engagement.

• A new line-up of managers gets promoted every year
• Existing managers move up the ladder to higher roles
• The challenges managers face change
• Situations leaders deal with keep changing

Regular training equips new and existing managers to hone their skills and identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Grow your leaders and your teams with Deel Engage

Leadership development is a critical investment for the future of your company. At Deel, we believe in nurturing leaders who inspire, motivate, and bring out the best in their teams. We are committed to providing companies with the easiest and most convenient solutions to foster exceptional leadership.

Deel can help organizations nurture their leaders by:

• Providing individually crafted development plans and career pathing frameworks powered by AI
• Conducting competency-based feedback reviews to understand everyone’s strengths and weaknesses
• Scheduling structured, regular check-ins to track progress and ensure accountability
• Offering access to thousands of learning resources that can easily be added to development plans
• Align leaders and their teams and promote accountability and ownership with the goal management feature
• Use data analytics to track progress and measure outcomes

Additionally, Deel HR, our truly global HRIS solution, is always included for free.

Book a demo to see how our solutions will help you build your next generation of leaders.