Article

5 Performance Coaching Techniques

May 07, 2025

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Emily May

Employee coaching requires more than a one-time conversation or annual review. It’s an ongoing practice that helps individuals grow and teams thrive. Today’s leaders use performance coaching to identify everyday opportunities to support their team members, from career development to suggestions for improvement. 

This article covers five performance coaching techniques and their importance to individual and collective success.

What Are Performance Coaching Techniques?

Managers use performance coaching techniques to support and grow employees. These approaches help team members reflect, overcome challenges, and set meaningful goals. With performance coaching, managers step into the role of manager as coach to unlock their team’s full potential.

Leveraging performance coaching techniques can improve:

Performance coaching empowers coachees to think for themselves and take ownership of their growth.

5 Performance Coaching Techniques

Now that you know the purpose and benefits of performance coaching, let’s explore five powerful techniques you can begin using today.

1. Listening to Understand

Before offering guidance, make sure you fully understand your coachee's situation. Allow them to share their ideas, wins, and challenges without interruption. During this time, engage in active listening. 

Active listening can look like:

  • Maintaining eye contact
  • Nodding or changing your facial expression to show engagement
  • Paying attention to non-verbal cues, like body language
  • Welcoming silence

Why it matters:

Listening to understand, rather than to respond, builds trust and psychological safety. It can also bring deeper performance challenges to the surface.

2. Asking Powerful Questions

Illustration of two professionals exploring a big question mark, symbolizing powerful questions in coaching.

Once you’ve collected the necessary context from your coachee and they’re ready for your input, it’s time to ask questions. Open-ended questions are powerful. They encourage others to think for themselves, reflect on challenges, and discover their own solutions. 

Powerful coaching questions might sound like:

  • “What’s getting in the way?”
  • “What are the options you can consider?”
  • “What is your ideal outcome?”

Why it matters:

As a performance coach, it’s not about having all the answers; it’s about getting curious. Thought-provoking questions encourage team members to take ownership of their situation, build confidence, and overcome challenges independently. 

3. Co-creating Development Goals

Goal-setting is a key part of performance coaching, but it works best as a collaborative process. Instead of setting goals for your team members, encourage them to take the lead. Co-creating goals gives employees a voice in their development and ensures their career path reflects their aspirations.

Work together to find out what your coachee wants to achieve and what success looks like from their perspective. You’re not there to decide their direction, but to support them on the journey. Putting them in the driver's seat makes them more motivated to grow in the areas that excite them most.

Why it matters:

Co-creating development goals is one of the more effective employee motivation strategies. It builds accountability, commitment to the outcome, and a sense of ownership.

4. Recognizing Employee Strengths

Illustration of two women celebrating growth and recognition of individual strengths.

Performance coaching isn’t only about goal-setting and problem-solving. These conversations are also a chance to highlight what’s going right. Recognition helps employees understand which behaviors to repeat.

Recognizing employee strengths might sound like: “You did an excellent job de-escalating the client’s concerns today with empathy and understanding.” Be specific, so they know exactly what they’re doing well.

Why it matters:

Positive reinforcement boosts confidence, reinforces outstanding behaviors, and strengthens team morale. It also supports motivation and overall well-being at work. 

5. Delivering Impactful Feedback

Receiving and applying feedback is a key component of career growth. In performance coaching sessions, you’ll need to offer feedback that helps your coachee improve without breaking trust. To make sure it's well received, ensure your feedback is:

  • Constructive
  • Specific
  • Actionable
  • Tied to behaviors and results, not personality
  • Rooted in improvement, not blame

Supportive and actionable feedback might sound like: “I noticed some key details were missing in the report. Let’s create a checklist you can use to make sure everything’s covered next time.” 

Need to strengthen your feedback skills? Check out ICAgile’s Impactful Feedback micro-credential to learn and apply proven feedback techniques. 

Why it matters:

Clear, supportive feedback helps employees grow with confidence. It also builds trust, deepens relationships, and drives long-term results.

The Bottom Line

Illustration of two women holding a growth mindset icon, representing positive impact through coaching.

Performance coaching is a powerful tool that can transform outcomes and results within your team. Techniques include active listening, asking open-ended questions, setting collaborative goals, recognizing wins, and delivering constructive feedback. These conversations help your team members realize their talents and reach their full potential. 

While guiding others on their learning journey, you’ll also grow your performance coaching skills along the way. If you need a partner in learning, take our Coaching Conversations class. In four hours or less, you’ll have foundational coaching knowledge, learn critical coaching skills, and know how to lead a coaching conversation.

Ready to coach with confidence? Find a class today. 

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TAGGED AS:
Leading Change, Agile Team Coaching, Agile Coaching, Expert in Agile Coaching, Enterprise Agile Coaching, Enterprise Agile Coaching, Coaching Agile Transformations, Expert in Enterprise Coaching, Agility in Leadership, Leading with Agility, People Development, Expert in Agility In Leadership, Coaching, Systems Coaching

About the author

Emily May | ICAgile, Marketing Specialist
Emily May is a Marketing Specialist at ICAgile, where she helps educate learners on their agile journey through content. With an eclectic background in communications supporting small business marketing efforts, she hopes to inspire readers to initiate more empathy, productivity, and creativity in the workplace for improved internal and external outcomes.

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