Coaching and Developing Talent | Free Leadership Course

What you'll learn

The difference between coaching, mentoring, managing and giving feedback.
The GROW model, with questions for each stage and a full sample conversation.
Michael Bungay Stanier's seven coaching questions from The Coaching Habit.
How to adapt your approach with the skill/will matrix.
How to build an individual development plan using the 70-20-10 guideline.

Coaching is helping someone find their own answers and build their own capability, mostly by asking good questions instead of giving advice. It's the leadership skill with the longest payoff: every problem you solve for someone gets solved once, but every person you coach gets better at solving the next hundred problems without you. This lesson gives you a structure (GROW), the questions that make it work and a simple way to turn development goals into a plan.

4stages of the GROW model: Goal, Reality, Options, Will

7questions in Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit

70-20-10a common rule of thumb for development: experience, relationships, formal learning

Coaching is one of four ways to help

Managing"Here's what I need."

Focus: Goals, priorities, standards, deadlines.
Use when: Direction or expectations are unclear.

Sets the target

Feedback"Here's what I saw."

Focus: Past behavior and its impact (SBI).
Use when: Something specific should continue or change.

Holds the mirror

Mentoring"Here's what worked for me."

Focus: Sharing your experience, advice and network.
Use when: The person lacks knowledge you have.

Shares the map

Coaching"What do you think?"

Focus: Questions that help the person think and decide.
Use when: The person has the capability to find the answer.

Builds the muscle

The GROW model

GROW was developed in the 1980s by business coaches Graham Alexander, Alan Fine and Sir John Whitmore, and popularized by Whitmore's book Coaching for Performance (1992). It's a simple sequence for any coaching conversation, from five minutes in a hallway to an hour-long session:

Stage	Purpose	Questions to ask
Goal	Agree on what the person wants from this conversation and beyond.	"What do you want to get out of the next 20 minutes?" · "What would success look like in three months?"
Reality	Explore the current situation with facts, not judgments.	"What's happening now?" · "What have you tried so far? What happened?" · "On a scale of 1 to 10, where are you today?"
Options	Generate possibilities before choosing.	"What could you do?" · "What else?" · "If you had no constraints, what would you try?" · "What would someone you admire do?"
Will (or Way forward)	Commit to specific action.	"What will you do, and by when?" · "What might get in the way?" · "How committed are you, from 1 to 10? What would make it a 10?"

A sample GROW conversation

Dana Kowalski, the Chicago operations manager, is coaching Luis, a shift lead whose team keeps missing the 6:00 a.m. outbound truck cutoff.

Dana coaches Luis, shift leadChicago, Illinois · 15-minute 1:1

Goal. Dana: "What would you like to get out of our time today?" Luis: "I want to stop missing the 6 a.m. truck. We missed it four times this month." Dana: "What would good look like by the end of next month?" Luis: "Zero misses."

Reality. Dana: "Walk me through what happens between 4 and 6 a.m." Luis: "We pick in order of when orders came in. The big multi-line orders for that truck often end up last." Dana: "What have you tried?" Luis: "Yelling at people to go faster." (Both laugh.) "It doesn't work."

Options. Dana: "What could you do differently?" Luis: "Pick the 6 a.m. orders first. Or put my two fastest pickers on them." Dana: "What else?" Luis: "Night shift could pre-stage the cartons for big orders. And I could check progress at 5:15 instead of 5:45."

Will. Dana: "Which of those will you try first?" Luis: "Prioritizing the 6 a.m. orders and a 5:15 checkpoint, starting Monday. I'll ask night shift about pre-staging." Dana: "How confident are you, 1 to 10?" Luis: "An 8. I need the WMS to sort by truck." Dana: "That one's on me. I'll talk to IT by Wednesday."

Dana gave no answers. Luis left with three ideas of his own and a plan he believes in, and Dana took the one obstacle only she could remove.

1. "What have you already tried, and what happened?" belongs to which GROW stage?

Reality
Goal
Options

It explores the current situation and past attempts, which is the Reality stage. Exploring reality before options prevents people from proposing solutions they've already tried.

Seven questions that make coaching a habit

In The Coaching Habit (2016), Michael Bungay Stanier argues that managers should stay curious a little longer and rush to action and advice a little more slowly. His seven questions fit inside any one-on-one:

Kickstart: "What's on your mind?"
AWE: "And what else?"
Focus: "What's the real challenge here for you?"
Foundation: "What do you want?"
Lazy: "How can I help?"
Strategic: "If you're saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?"
Learning: "What was most useful for you?"

In a later book, The Advice Trap (2020), he names the urge to jump in with solutions the "Advice Monster." Taming it doesn't mean never giving advice; it means asking first. If you do share an idea, offer it as an option: "Would it help if I shared one thing I've seen work?"

Adapt with the skill/will matrix

Not everyone needs the same approach. In The Tao of Coaching (1996), Max Landsberg describes a skill/will matrix that matches your style to a person's capability and motivation for a specific task:

Like Situational Leadership, diagnose by task: someone can be "delegate" on customer calls and "guide" on budgeting.

2. A veteran nurse is highly skilled at patient education but has stopped volunteering for it since a new documentation system doubled the paperwork. Where is she on the skill/will matrix for this task, and what should her manager do?

Low skill, high will: guide her with training
High skill, low will: excite, which starts by finding out what's draining her motivation
High skill, high will: delegate it and step back

She has the skill; her will dropped. More training would miss the point. A coaching conversation ("What's changed for you with patient education?") can uncover the paperwork issue and what could fix it.

Turn development into a plan

The 70-20-10 guideline grew out of research on how successful executives learn, carried out at the Center for Creative Leadership in the 1980s, and was popularized by Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger. It suggests that about 70% of development comes from challenging experiences, 20% from relationships (feedback, mentors, coaching) and 10% from formal learning (courses, books). Treat the numbers as a rule of thumb, not a precise measurement: the point is that a course alone rarely changes behavior.

For a quarter with 40 hours set aside for a team member's development, a 70-20-10 split looks like this:

28 hours of stretch assignments, 8 hours of mentoring and feedback, 4 hours of formal training.

A one-page individual development plan (IDP)

Field	Example: Luis, shift lead → operations supervisor
Development goal	Run a full shift's planning independently by the end of Q2.
Experience (70%)	Builds the weekly labor plan for his shift; leads the Monday safety huddle; covers for Dana during her vacation week.
Relationships (20%)	Biweekly GROW sessions with Dana; shadows the day-shift supervisor for two shifts; monthly lunch with the transportation manager.
Formal learning (10%)	An online course on labor planning in Excel; this leadership course.
How we'll measure	Labor plan within 5% of actual hours for four straight weeks; zero missed 6 a.m. trucks.
Review dates	Every second 1:1; full review at the end of the quarter.

3. A manager budgets 60 hours over six months for an employee's development. Using a 70-20-10 split, how many hours go to formal training?

6 hours
12 hours
42 hours

10% of 60 = 6 hours of formal training. The other 54 hours split into 42 (70%) for on-the-job challenges and 12 (20%) for mentoring and feedback.

Asking a question, then answering it yourself.

Ask, then wait. Silence is where people think.

"Why didn't you…?" questions that sound like accusations.

Use "what" and "how": "What got in the way?"

Coaching when someone needs information or direction.

Teach the beginner; coach the person who has the capability.

Development plans that are just a list of courses.

Anchor them in real assignments, with feedback along the way.

4. In the sample conversation, Luis says he's an 8 out of 10 in confidence. What's the best follow-up?

"An 8 isn't good enough. Try harder."
"Great, see you next week."
"What would make it a 10?"

Asking what would close the gap surfaces the obstacle (here, the system's sorting) so you can remove it. It's a classic question for the Will stage.

Practice exercise

Jerome, the Atlanta shift manager, has a server, Aisha, who wants to become a shift lead within a year. She's great with guests but gets flustered when she has to tell coworkers what to do. Jerome can set aside 50 hours over the next six months for her development.

Write one question for each GROW stage that Jerome could ask in their next 1:1.
Split the 50 hours using 70-20-10 and suggest one activity for each part.

See solution

1. GROW questions:

Goal: "What would you like to be able to do as a shift lead that you can't do yet?"
Reality: "Tell me about the last time you had to ask a coworker to do something. What happened, and what was going through your mind?"
Options: "What are some ways you could practice giving direction before you're officially a lead? What else?"
Will: "Which one will you try this month, and how will we know it's working?"

2. Hours: 70% × 50 = 35 hours of experience (running pre-shift huddles twice a week, then leading side work assignments on Sundays); 20% × 50 = 10 hours of relationships (shadowing Jerome during two Saturday closes, and a 15-minute GROW debrief after each huddle); 10% × 50 = 5 hours of formal learning (lessons on feedback and difficult conversations, like the ones in this course). Total: 35 + 10 + 5 = 50 hours.

Summary

Coaching helps people find their own answers; use it when they have the capability, and teach or direct when they don't.
GROW (Alexander, Fine and Whitmore): Goal, Reality, Options, Will. Explore reality before options.
Bungay Stanier's seven questions, especially "And what else?", keep you curious instead of jumping to advice.
The skill/will matrix (Landsberg) tells you whether to direct, guide, excite or delegate for each task.
Build development plans around stretch experiences, with relationships and formal learning in support (70-20-10 as a rule of thumb).

Next lesson: Leading Change in Your Organization. You'll learn Kotter's eight steps, Bridges' transition model and how to handle resistance with specific scripts.