Advanced Coaching Skills Training

Course Highlights

This in-person advanced coaching skills training course will:

• Diagnose what is really causing a performance or follow-through problem before choosing a conversation.
• Clarify when coaching is the right move and when a leader should give feedback, provide direction, teach, remove a barrier, document, or escalate.
• Strengthen accountability by moving ownership back to the employee without blame, rescue, or overexplaining.
• Help leaders balance support with clear standards, expectations, and follow-up.
• Apply COACH as a practical structure for performance, ownership, accountability, development, and follow-through conversations.
• Use COIN when employees need clear feedback grounded in facts, impact, and next steps.
• Use GROW when the conversation is mainly developmental and tied to future capability.
• Respond to defensiveness, blame, silence, emotion, and passive agreement without losing the purpose of the conversation.
• Coach the thinking behind the work so employees bring stronger recommendations, better options, and clearer decisions.
• Send leaders back to work with a two-week plan for one accountability conversation and one development conversation.

Course Overview

Coaching is not the answer to every employee issue. Sometimes the standard is unclear. Sometimes the employee does not know how to do the work. Sometimes the system is getting in the way. Sometimes the employee has missed the same commitment before, and the conversation needs to become more direct.

This advanced course is for leaders who already understand the basics of coaching and need to handle the harder situations: uneven performance, repeated misses, weak ownership, defensive responses, vague agreement, and employees who bring problems without enough thinking behind them. The program helps participants pause before the conversation, read the situation, choose the right leadership move, and close with follow-through that can be seen.

The course begins with the shift from basic coaching to advanced coaching: from asking helpful questions to making better leadership choices. Participants examine common causes of performance gaps and decide whether the first move should be coaching, feedback, direction, training, barrier removal, documentation, or escalation.

The middle of the program focuses on structure, ownership, and accountability. Participants work with COACH as the main conversation map and connect COIN and GROW to the situations where each fits best. From there, the course moves into resistance, judgment coaching, and development planning. Participants practice language that keeps the conversation clear, respectful, and tied to action.

The session closes with realistic case work and a two-week coaching plan. Participants leave with a stronger way to decide when coaching helps, when it does not, and how to run conversations that improve performance, ownership, and future capability.

The following outline highlights some of the course’s key learning points. As part of your training program, we will modify content as needed to meet your business objectives. Upon request, we will provide you with a copy of the participant materials prior to the session(s).

Program Objectives

At this program’s conclusion, participants should be able to:

• Diagnose common causes of performance gaps, including clarity, skill, resource, priority, ownership, commitment, judgment, readiness, and system issues.
• Determine whether a situation calls for coaching, feedback, direction, training, expectation-setting, barrier removal, documentation, or escalation.
• Apply coaching techniques that strengthen accountability, follow-through, ownership, and independent problem solving.
• Conduct coaching conversations that balance support, challenge, and clear performance expectations.
• Use COACH to structure conversations for performance improvement, ownership, development, and follow-up.
• Use COIN to ground feedback in context, observable behavior, impact, and next steps.
• Use GROW when the conversation is mainly developmental and focused on longer-term capability.
• Address resistance, defensiveness, reluctance, blame, silence, passive agreement, and emotional responses without losing the purpose of the conversation.
• Ask advanced coaching questions that promote reflection, responsibility, decision quality, and employee ownership.
• Develop a practical coaching approach that supports immediate performance improvement, stronger team habits, and long-term capability building.

Workshop Modules

Advanced Coaching Shift: Moving from Skill to Judgment

This course opens by separating introductory coaching from advanced coaching. Introductory coaching often focuses on asking better questions. Advanced coaching starts earlier. Leaders must first decide what is really happening and what kind of conversation is needed. Participants will examine why some issues should be coached and why others call for a clear standard, direct feedback, training, barrier removal, documentation, or escalation.

Diagnosis Before Dialogue: Finding the Real Issue

This module gives leaders a practical way to read performance problems before they start talking. Participants will sort through common causes of performance gaps, including unclear expectations, missing skills, lack of resources, competing priorities, weak ownership, commitment problems, judgment errors, readiness gaps, and system issues. They will practice diagnosing workplace cases and deciding what the first conversation should be.

Conversation Choice: Selecting the Right Leadership Move

Once leaders understand the issue, they need to choose the right first move. This part of the course helps participants distinguish among clarifying expectations, giving feedback, coaching, teaching, directing, removing barriers, documenting, and escalating. Participants will work through realistic scenarios and prepare opening language that fits the situation.

COACH in Action: Structuring the Leadership Conversation

This module uses COACH as the main structure for advanced coaching conversations. Participants will practice keeping conversations clear, focused, and tied to follow-through. The work emphasizes facts, employee ownership, specific commitments, support, and follow-up.

Ownership Shift: Moving Responsibility Back to the Employee

In this module, participants examine one of the most common coaching traps: the leader solving too much. The group will identify dependence cues such as “What do you want me to do?” and “Nobody got back to me,” then practice responses that keep the employee responsible for thinking, options, commitments, and next steps. The emphasis is on ownership without blame.

Accountability Close: Turning Agreement into Follow-Through

Many coaching conversations end with agreement but no real commitment. This section teaches leaders how to close with action, timing, evidence, support, and follow-up. Participants will rewrite weak endings such as “Try to do better” and “Keep me posted” into clear closes that define what will happen, by when, and how progress will be reviewed.

Resistance Response: Staying Steady Under Pushback

This module prepares leaders for the moments when coaching gets uncomfortable. Participants will practice responding to defensiveness, blame, minimizing, silence, emotion, passive agreement, and debate over details. The work focuses on acknowledging the response without surrendering the point, returning to facts and standards, and moving the conversation toward ownership and action.

Judgment Coaching: Improving the Thinking Behind the Work

Advanced coaching is not limited to behavior or task completion. Leaders also coach the thinking that produces the work. In this module, participants will practice helping employees examine their reasoning, weigh risk, consider options, and bring stronger recommendations.

Capability Builder: Coaching for Growth and Future Roles

This part of the course focuses on developmental coaching for employees who need to build capability for larger work. Participants will use GROW to shape development conversations connected to business needs, real assignments, practice, feedback, guardrails, and visible progress.

Strategic Coaching Lab: Practicing the Full Cycle

The course then moves into integrated practice. Participants will work with cases that include more than one issue: performance gaps, ownership problems, resistance, system barriers, and future capability needs. Leaders will diagnose the issue, choose the first move, plan the conversation, handle resistance, close with accountability, and set follow-up.

Two-Week Coaching Plan: Applying the Work

The session closes with application. Each participant will identify two real coaching opportunities: one tied to accountability and one tied to development. Participants will choose the likely diagnosis, select the conversation approach, prepare opening language, and set a practical follow-up plan for use after the course.

Target Audience

This workshop is appropriate for groups that want to:

• Strengthen coaching beyond basic questioning and listening.
• Help leaders diagnose performance issues before choosing a conversation.
• Improve accountability and follow-through after coaching conversations.
• Prepare managers to handle defensiveness, blame, silence, and passive agreement.
• Build employee ownership without having leaders rescue or overexplain.
• Coach employees toward better judgment, stronger recommendations, and future capability.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is this onsite workshop for?

This instructor-led course serves managers, supervisors, team leads, and other leaders who already understand basic coaching and need stronger skills for performance, ownership, accountability, resistance, and employee growth.

How is this workshop different from an introductory coaching course?

An introductory coaching course usually explains what coaching is and teaches basic questioning and listening. This course starts at a more advanced point. Participants learn to diagnose the situation first, decide whether coaching is the right move, and handle harder conversations involving repeated misses, weak ownership, defensiveness, and poor follow-through.

Does this course focus only on coaching models?

No. The course uses COACH, COIN, and GROW, but the larger focus is leadership judgment. Participants learn when to coach, when to give feedback, when to clarify expectations, when to train, when to remove a barrier, and when a situation may need documentation or escalation.

How participatory is this course?

Very. This half-day program includes discussion, diagnosis practice, scenario work, conversation planning, response practice, and role play. Participants work with realistic cases rather than simply reviewing coaching concepts.

Will participants practice difficult coaching situations?

Yes. The course includes practice with accountability gaps, employee resistance, vague commitments, blame, passive agreement, and employees who bring problems without strong recommendations. The work is built around what leaders actually need to say and do.

Can this course be customized for our organization?

Yes. As with all Business Training Works programs, we can adapt examples, cases, language, and practice situations to reflect your workplace, industry, leadership expectations, and performance concerns.