Coaching is a powerful approach to helping people solve their challenges and supporting their growth. To implement a coaching practice, it’s important to learn how to steer a coaching conversation and what concrete questions and tools can be used in each conversation phase. This post provides a concise and hands-on model and toolbox of the coaching questions and tools I gathered over the years. I compiled everything into a cheat sheet called the “Coaching Steering Wheel”.

One-on-Ones are one of the most important and powerful tools for leaders. If done well, they can help you to spot issues before they escalate, unblock, establish trust, foster a culture of mutual feedback, and ensure the growth of all participants. This post provides a template incorporating the principles for great one-on-ones to achieve this more easily.

1-1s are the most important tool for every team manager. If done right, 1-1s can support the report to grow, to become and stay happy, motivated, and productive. However, you need a certain toolkit for 1-1s. This toolkit contains different 1-1 types, records, questions, personal notes, journey maps, and software that can be applied in practice.

Traditional hierarchy-based feedback flows are limited as they don’t consider the useful feedback of peers. To improve this, I suggest a “Complete Peer Feedback” session: All team members come together and share their appreciation and growth potential for their peers. In this post, I present our experiences with this approach, why we are enthusiastic about it and how you can adopt it.

Employee journey maps are a tool for preparing and structuring staff appraisals. They trigger reflection processes and reveal the employee’s motivation. Moreover, they can lead to interesting insights as they compare the different perceptions of the participants. And the best is: You only need two sheets of paper and a pencil.