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SDI insight / Skills & readinessLeadership

Providing Coaches With the Right Tools for Success

Originally published February 28, 2018Guidance reviewed August 23, 20262 min current guide

SDI Clarity Insight — This article is part of our Knowledge Base, drawing on 20+ years of organizational design and talent development expertise. Explore our Leadership Development and Talent Consulting services.

Current practitioner guide

Give coaches evidence and routines they can use in the work.

Start with the performance evidence.

A coaching tool should help a manager see what is happening, compare it with the expected result, and form a testable hypothesis about why. Useful inputs include observable behavior, work samples, customer or quality signals, the conditions surrounding the performance, and the employee’s own perspective. A script that assumes every problem is motivation or skill can make the conversation efficient while sending the response in the wrong direction.

Design around recurring management moments.

The strongest support is organized around moments a coach already faces: setting expectations, preparing an observation, asking diagnostic questions, agreeing on practice, documenting a commitment, and following up. Each tool should reduce ambiguity at one of those moments without turning the conversation into a form-completion exercise. Managers also need permission to escalate process, role, workload, or tool barriers they cannot solve through coaching.

Inspect the follow-through, not tool usage.

A download count or completed coaching template does not establish value. Review whether expectations became clearer, practice occurred, feedback was specific, barriers were removed, and performance changed under the relevant conditions. Where the result does not improve, the system should prompt a new diagnosis rather than repeat the same conversation. That learning loop is what turns a coaching toolkit into operating capability.

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Read the original 2018 articlePreserved as historical context; the reviewed guidance above reflects SDI's current point of view.

It's no surprise that effective coaching can help alleviate employee retention and engagement issues. After all, the exercise is known to build trust, serve as inspiration, and provide more immediate feedback to those being coached. While coaching itself can be challenging, doing it without the right tools and resources available can make it more challenging than it needs to be.

Whether it be a motion graphic video, illustration, or infographic, visual resources serve as necessary tools in the belt of every successful coach.

They improve quality and focus of coaching conversations: While verbal and written coaching techniques alone are beneficial, the average person actually processes "visuals 60,000 times faster" than text. This means that not only are concepts understood more efficiently when visual resources are used, but more time is made available to dive deeper into the material. The use of visual resources also makes it easier to highlight key points, making them easier to store in long-term memory.

They serve as a takeaway from conversations: Coaches provide inspiration and guidance to those they lead, but obviously, they aren't available during all hours of the day. It's important for the individuals being coached to have something to look back on when coaches are busy and they're in need of a reminder of the topics discussed. This keeps those being coached focused on the job at hand and prevents confusion post conversation.

They create a more engaging experience: In order for individuals being coached to actively learn the concepts being introduced to them, they need to be engaged. This is why visual aids have been found to "improve learning by up to 400 percent". When the learner feels interested and drawn to the material, they will retain more of it.

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