Coaching in the Workplace: A Practical Guide for Small Business Managers
What workplace coaching is and how small business managers actually do it. GROW framework, 1:1 cadence, manager-as-coach skills, no L&D team required.
Coaching in the Workplace
A practical guide for SMB managers who do not have an L&D team or coaching certification
For about three years at one of my early companies, I told myself I was coaching my team. I was not. This guide covers what workplace coaching actually is, how it differs from managing, and how to run it through weekly conversations so your team stops routing every decision through you.
What I was doing instead was answering questions, solving problems faster than my reports could, and feeling productive while doing it. The team got the answer they needed in the moment. They also learned that my job was to provide answers, so they kept asking instead of figuring it out. By the time I had eight people reporting to me, I was the bottleneck for every decision in the company, and I genuinely believed this was good management.
The shift happened during a one-on-one (1:1) with one of my better engineers. He came to me with a complicated technical decision and started laying out the situation. About thirty seconds in, I started giving the answer. He stopped me, politely, and said: "I know what you would do. I came to figure out what I should do." That was the first time I understood that coaching is not the same as managing, and that I had been doing one while telling myself I was doing the other.
The audience here is small business managers who do not have an L&D team (learning and development), do not have a coaching budget, and probably did not get formal manager training before they started managing. That is why this guide skips the certification path and the enterprise tooling, and sticks to what works in small and midsize businesses (SMBs).
What Workplace Coaching Actually Is
Three things workplace coaching is not, despite frequent confusion. First, it is not therapy. Coaching addresses work-related capability and performance, not personal emotional or psychological issues. When a coaching conversation drifts into personal territory beyond the manager's competence, the right move is to refer to professional resources, not to keep coaching.
Second, coaching is not the same as mentoring. The direct manager usually does the coaching, and it focuses on current performance and capability; mentoring comes from a more experienced colleague (often outside the reporting line) and focuses on broader career navigation.
Third, coaching is not what most managers think they are doing. Most of what gets called coaching in practice is managing with extra steps: the manager still gives the answer, just with more questions wrapped around it.
Manager-led coaching needs its own definition because most coaching literature is written for one of two audiences: certified professional coaches running paid executive engagements, or enterprise L&D teams designing formal coaching programs across thousands of employees.
A small business where the founder coaches three managers, and each manager coaches three or four reports, looks like neither. The good news is that the small business version is simpler. The same frameworks work, with much less overhead.
MIT Human Resources defines coaching as an ongoing approach to managing people: one that creates a motivating climate for performance, improves the match between actual and expected performance, and raises the odds of success through timely feedback, recognition, clarity, and support.
A training executive quoted by SHRM (2020) draws the line more bluntly: management is about tasks, processes, and doing things right, while coaching is about development and behavioral change. Both descriptions point the same way. Coaching is a way of managing, not a program bolted on beside it.
Coaching vs Traditional Managing: The Distinction That Matters
The clearest way to understand coaching is to put it next to managing. Both are necessary. Both happen in the same 1:1 conversations. The skill is knowing which one the moment calls for.
| Dimension | Traditional managing | Coaching |
|---|---|---|
| Question vs answer | Manager provides the answer | Manager asks the question that leads to the answer |
| Time horizon | This week's deliverable | This quarter's growth |
| Who is talking | Manager talks 70% | Employee talks 70% |
| What gets measured | Output | Output plus capability growth |
| When it happens | When something is wrong | On a regular cadence regardless of issues |
| What success looks like | Task completed correctly | Employee can handle the next task without you |
Traditional managing focuses on what the employee should do. The manager directs. The employee executes. This is appropriate when the employee genuinely lacks information ("the deadline moved to Friday") or when the situation requires the manager's authority ("we are not pursuing that approach"). Most situations that look like they need managing actually do not.
Coaching focuses on what the employee should learn. The manager asks. The employee thinks. This is appropriate when the employee has the capability but needs to think through the path. Most working situations fit this pattern. The employee usually knows more about their specific situation than the manager does; the manager's job is to help them see it clearly, not to substitute their own less-detailed view.
The cost of getting this wrong is asymmetric. Coaching when the employee needs direction wastes time and frustrates everyone. Direction when the employee needed coaching produces dependent employees who escalate every decision. The first mistake is recoverable in five minutes. The second mistake compounds over years and is the reason many small business founders feel like every problem in the company is theirs to solve.
The Purpose of Workplace Coaching
Workplace coaching serves four practical purposes that compound over time: capability building, performance improvement, retention, and autonomy. Not every conversation needs to serve all four, and knowing which one a given conversation is for keeps it focused.
First, capability building: helping the employee develop the skills their current and future roles will need. This is the most common purpose. It shows up in conversations about how to handle a difficult customer, how to give better feedback to a peer, or how to think through a technical decision. The employee leaves with sharper capability, not just a finished task.
Second, performance improvement: closing specific gaps between current performance and what is expected. This is where coaching meets feedback. The manager has identified a gap (slow turnaround on customer responses, for example), the employee acknowledges it, and the conversation works on what is causing it and how to close it. Coaching alone cannot fix performance; coaching paired with clear feedback often can.
Third, retention: employees who feel they are growing stay longer. According to Gallup, organizations that build strengths into the workplace see up to 29% higher profit and up to 72% lower turnover. The retention effect is one of the biggest payoffs of consistent coaching at small business scale.
Fourth, autonomy: building employees who can handle situations without escalating them. This is the purpose most relevant to small business growth. Early on, the founder can be involved in every significant decision. As the team grows, that stops being possible, and coaching is what produces a team that can operate without the founder's constant input. Founders who do not coach hit a hard ceiling, because the team cannot scale beyond what the founder personally directs.
The autonomy purpose also has a measurement implication: coaching effectiveness shows up most clearly in performance review conversations a year later. Reports who have been coached well over twelve months reach the review with their own clear self-assessment, specific examples of what they grew through, and a thoughtful view of where they want to develop next. Reports who have been managed but not coached arrive without these.
Types of Workplace Coaching
Workplace coaching divides into four main types based on what the conversation is trying to accomplish. You do not need to formalize the categories, but knowing them helps you notice when your coaching has tilted too far toward one type and neglected the others.
For most small businesses, the right mix is heavy on performance coaching (weekly 1:1s) and manager-as-coach (default mode), with development coaching layered in monthly or quarterly. Skill coaching is occasional, time-boxed to a specific gap when one surfaces. Running all four types at full intensity at once is enterprise-level overhead; a small business should sequence them.
External coaching (hiring a professional coach for an employee) is rarely necessary in a small business and is usually targeted at specific cases: a high-performing employee struggling with the move into management, a founder working with an executive coach on leadership skills, a team leader working through a complicated political situation. Outside those cases, internal coaching from a competent manager produces better results at zero direct cost.
Coaching Styles in the Workplace
Coaching styles sit on a spectrum between telling and asking. The style is not a personality trait or a label you pick once; it is a dial you move depending on what the person in front of you needs this week. The mistake most managers make is running the same setting on everyone.
| Style | What it sounds like | When it fits | The risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Directive | Here is how I would handle it, and here is why | The person lacks context, or the deadline is today | As a default it produces reports who wait to be told |
| Non-directive | What options do you see from where you sit? | The person has the capability and needs room to think | Feels like a guessing game when they genuinely do not know |
| Collaborative | Here is what I know. Tell me what you know | Neither of you has the whole picture | Drifts into a chat unless somebody names a decision |
| Hands-off | Run it, and come find me if it turns | An experienced person on familiar work | Silence reads as indifference rather than trust |
| Developmental | Where do you want to be a year from now? | Monthly and quarterly conversations, not weekly ones | Stays aspirational unless it produces a real scope change |
Most managers have one default and cannot name it. Here is a useful exercise: after your next three 1:1s, write down which row you spent the most minutes in. Almost everyone is surprised, and almost everyone sits further toward directive than they believed they did.
Matching the style to the person matters more than picking a good one. A new hire in their first month needs direction with some coaching mixed in. The same person eighteen months later needs the opposite ratio, and if the ratio never moves they will read that as a verdict on their progress.
Manager-as-Coach: The SMB Default Mode
For small businesses, manager-as-coach is not a program; it is a stance. The direct manager is each report's primary coach by default, and coaching happens inside the regular 1:1 cadence rather than as a separately scheduled event. The approach fits small businesses for four reasons.
The manager has continuous context. Unlike an external coach who needs to be briefed on the employee's role and recent work, the manager already knows. This context advantage means coaching conversations can go deep faster.
The manager has authority to act on what the conversation surfaces. If the coaching conversation reveals that the employee needs scope adjustment or a different project, the manager can make that change. External coaches surface insights that often die because nobody has authority to act on them.
The approach scales naturally with the team. As the company grows and adds layers of management, every new manager becomes a coach for their reports. There is no separate coaching program to scale.
The relationship is ongoing. Coaching works when there is continuity from one conversation to the next, and manager-as-coach has that built in because the same person is in the room every week. According to Gallup, employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged as employees whose managers do not.
The biggest objection small business managers raise: "I am not trained as a coach." This is true and not the obstacle it appears to be. Manager-as-coach work does not require certification. It requires six core skills (covered below), basic familiarity with the GROW framework, and consistent practice. Most managers can become competent coaches within three months of deliberate practice, regardless of background.
Peer, Team, and External Coaching
The direct manager is the default coach, not the only one available. Three other arrangements are worth knowing, because each solves something the weekly 1:1 handles badly: peer coaching between colleagues, team coaching where the group is the client, and external coaching bought for one person and one problem.
Peer coaching
Peer coaching pairs two colleagues at a similar level who coach each other on a rotating basis, usually thirty minutes every other week with the roles swapping halfway through. It costs nothing, and it works on exactly the material people will not raise with the person who writes their review.
It needs structure or it becomes a complaining session. Give both people the same GROW questions, hold the time, and require a written way-forward step at the end of each half. Pairs that skip the structure drift within a month, which is the most common way this quietly dies.
Team coaching
Team coaching treats the group as the client rather than any individual in it. Use it when the problem lives between people rather than inside one of them: handoffs that keep dropping, decisions nobody will own, the same argument surfacing in every meeting. Business team coaching sessions run longer than a 1:1, usually ninety minutes.
They also need somebody who is not party to the dispute to hold the room. At small business scale the founder usually plays that role, and it works right up until the founder is one of the parties. That is the moment an outside facilitator earns the fee, and it is better to know it in advance than to discover it mid-argument.
External and executive coaching
External coaching is a purchase, so it needs a defined outcome and a review date. The benefits of executive coaching are real and specific: an outsider has no stake in the internal politics, the conversation is confidential in a way an internal one cannot be, and the time is protected in a way internal coaching never quite manages.
It fits a small number of situations. A strong individual contributor moving into a first management role. A founder with nobody to think out loud with. A senior hire who is struggling to land and is worth the investment. It does not fit as a substitute for the performance conversation you are avoiding, and corporate coaching bought as a perk with no goal attached burns real money.
Business coaching, where an outside coach works with the owner on the business itself rather than on the people in it, is a different purchase again. Both can be worth buying. Neither replaces the weekly conversation between a manager and their report, which is the only one that happens fifty times a year.
Executive coaching and mentoring get talked about as one thing, but a leader wants them for different reasons. Coaching is a paid engagement with a stated outcome and an end date, aimed at how the person operates right now. Mentoring is a relationship somebody agrees to, runs for years, and costs nothing beyond their time.
Which one to find first depends on the gap. Somebody who cannot see their own pattern needs the coach and the end date. Somebody who has never run a company at this size needs a person who has, and there is no reason to rule out both in the same year.
One note on ownership. If you have an HR person, their job here is to keep the cadence honest and to help managers get better at the craft, not to do the coaching themselves. Coaching runs down the reporting line or it does not run at all.
The GROW Framework: A Simple Coaching Model
GROW (Goal, Reality, Options, Way forward) is one of the most widely used coaching frameworks in workplace contexts. It was developed in the United Kingdom, spread through corporate coaching in the late 1980s and 1990s, and reached a wide audience through John Whitmore's Coaching for Performance, first published in 1992.
GROW has lasted because it is simple enough to remember in real time and structured enough to make conversations productive. There is no assessment to buy and no certification to hold, which is most of why it survives at small business scale.
Three things to know about applying GROW in real conversations. First, the stages are not strictly sequential. Real coaching conversations move between Goal and Reality several times before getting to Options. The framework is a checklist, not a script.
Second, the most common mistake is skipping the Reality stage. Managers want to jump from Goal to Options because Options feels productive. Reality is where the conversation surfaces what is actually getting in the way, and skipping it produces shallow Options that do not work.
Third, GROW does not fit every situation. It is designed for moments when the employee has agency and capability. When the situation calls for direction (a deadline change, a policy decision, an escalation), give direction, and save GROW for the next conversation that needs thinking rather than instructions.
The framework also fits neatly into a 30-minute weekly 1:1: about 5 minutes on Goal, 10 minutes on Reality, 10 minutes on Options, and 5 minutes on Way forward. With practice, this rhythm becomes automatic.
Six Core Coaching Skills Managers Actually Need
Six skills account for most of what makes a manager effective as a coach at small business scale. None requires certification; all are learned through practice and feedback, and most managers can develop competence in all six within 90 days of deliberate practice.
Three of these skills deserve a closer look: two because they are the hardest for managers to develop, and one because it is the most neglected.
Active listening sounds simple and is genuinely hard. Most managers listen to formulate their response. Active listening means listening to understand the employee's actual experience, with no internal commentary running. The test: when the employee finishes speaking, can you accurately summarize what they said before adding anything of your own? If not, you were not listening.
Resisting the urge to fix is the coaching skill that pays off most, and the hardest to develop. Most managers became managers because they were good at fixing things. Coaching requires sitting with discomfort while the employee thinks, instead of jumping in to provide the answer. The discomfort is real. The discipline of staying silent while the employee works through their own thinking is what separates managing from coaching.
Specific recognition is the easiest skill to learn and the most under-practiced. Generic praise ("great job!") does not coach because it does not specify what should be repeated. Specific recognition ("the way you handled the customer's escalation by acknowledging their frustration first before working on the solution was exactly right") tells the employee what to do more of.
Gallup's recognition research adds two things worth knowing here. The most effective recognition is honest, authentic, and individualized to how each person wants to be recognized. And only about one in three US workers strongly agree they received recognition or praise for good work in the past seven days.
Coaching Cadence: When and How Often
Coach on a fixed schedule, not "when needed": a weekly 1:1 is the base, with monthly and quarterly development conversations and an annual coaching review layered on top. Treating coaching as reactive is one of the most common manager mistakes, because it teaches employees that a meeting with their manager means something has gone wrong. A cadence makes coaching predictable and ongoing, whatever else is happening that week.
| Conversation type | Frequency | Length | Primary focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly 1:1 | Every week | 30-45 min | Current obstacles, capability building, recognition |
| Coaching working session | As needed | 30-60 min | Specific skill or situation requiring focused practice |
| Monthly development check-in | Monthly | 30 min | Progress on quarterly development goals |
| Quarterly development conversation | Quarterly | 60 min | Career direction, growth goals, scope evolution |
| Annual coaching review | Yearly | 60-90 min | Year retrospective, next-year direction |
The cadence sounds heavy, and the math confirms it takes real time. For a manager with five direct reports, weekly 1:1s of 30-45 minutes, monthly 30-minute development check-ins, and a quarterly 60-minute development conversation add up to roughly 15-20 hours per month of coaching time.
Those coaching hours are mostly not new time. They replace the chaotic ad-hoc check-ins that managers without a cadence end up having anyway, plus the firefighting that follows when a problem nobody coached on early turns into an escalation.
Three signals that a coaching cadence is healthy in a small business. First, weekly 1:1s rarely get canceled. When they do get canceled, they get rescheduled rather than skipped. Second, the development conversations actually produce action between sessions. If quarterly development conversations end with vague aspirations and never get revisited, the cadence has degraded into ritual. Third, employees bring agenda items to the 1:1s. If the manager has to provide all the topics, the conversation has reverted to status update mode.
According to Gallup, employees are 3.6 times more likely to strongly agree they are motivated to do outstanding work when their manager gives feedback daily rather than annually, and 80% of those who received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged. That is why the cadence is not optional: it is the main way manager-as-coach work actually happens.
Coaching a remote team
Remote coaching is the same conversation with two things removed: the corridor moment that used to catch a problem early, and the ability to read a room. Both have to be replaced deliberately. Virtual coaching works when the 1:1 is protected, the camera is on, and neither person is answering messages during it.
Two adjustments help. Leave longer silences than feel natural, because video compresses the pause that gives somebody room to think and people fill it with agreement instead. And write the way-forward step into a shared document during the call, so the commitment survives the connection dropping.
Digital coaching platforms that match employees with outside coaches on demand are the other option here, and at small business scale the price rarely clears the bar. A trained manager having fifty conversations a year beats a stranger having six.
What Good and Bad Coaching Conversations Look Like
A good coaching conversation has the employee doing most of the talking and ends with a specific commitment. A bad one has the manager answering questions and ends with nothing decided. The signals are not subtle once you know what to look for.
The most reliable diagnostic for whether a coaching conversation is working is the talk ratio. In a coaching conversation, the employee should be doing 60-70% of the talking. If the manager is doing more than 50% of the talking, the conversation has reverted to managing. The fix is mechanical: ask a question and shut up, even if the silence stretches uncomfortably long. The discomfort of silence is the price of effective coaching.
The second most reliable diagnostic is whether specific commitments emerge. A coaching conversation that ends without "I will do X by Y" has not done the Way forward step. Without a specific commitment, the next conversation will start with the same situation, and progress will not compound. End every coaching conversation by writing down the commitment, even if it is just one sentence.
Workplace Coaching Examples: Four Situations
The fastest way to see the difference is to watch the same four situations handled twice. The middle column below is what most managers say, and the right column is the coaching version of the same moment. None of these are set-piece sessions; they are the ordinary minutes where employee coaching either happens or does not.
| Situation | The managing response | The coaching response |
|---|---|---|
| A report brings you a customer complaint they could have handled themselves | Forward it to me and I will call them | What did the customer actually ask for, and what would you send if I were away this week? |
| Someone misses the same deadline twice | The date is Friday, and it cannot slip again | Walk me through where the time went. What would have had to be different in the first three days? |
| A strong performer says they are bored | I will find you something more interesting | What part of the work still has something in it for you, and what would you want to own by the end of the quarter? |
| A new manager keeps postponing a hard conversation with their report | Here is exactly what to say to them | What are you worried will happen if you say it plainly, and what does another month of not saying it cost you? |
Notice what the right column does not do. It never asks a question the manager already knows the answer to, and it never withholds information as a test. Each one hands back a decision the person is capable of making, with enough constraint that they are not guessing at what you want.
Run the first row all the way through and you have a complete GROW conversation inside a single 1:1 topic. Agree what a good outcome for that customer looks like, get the actual sequence of what happened, put three possible replies on the table, then settle which one they send and when. It costs a few minutes more than handling the customer yourself, and the next complaint of that kind does not reach you.
Common Workplace Coaching Mistakes
Below are the seven most common coaching mistakes I have seen across small businesses and have made myself. Most stem from confusing coaching with related-but-different practices (managing, mentoring, feedback, therapy) or from underestimating what coaching actually requires from the manager.
The pattern behind most of these seven is the manager putting comfort (their own or the employee's) ahead of capability building. Giving the answer is comfortable. Avoiding hard feedback is comfortable. Skipping development conversations during busy periods is comfortable. The discipline of coaching is choosing the slightly uncomfortable conversation that builds capability over the comfortable one that does not. Over years, the difference compounds.
One mistake worth naming separately: treating coaching as a fix for hiring problems. Coaching can develop employees who have the right baseline capability and motivation. It cannot manufacture either from scratch.
If an employee fundamentally cannot do the job, no amount of coaching will compensate. The right move in those cases is direct performance feedback and (if the gap persists) a different kind of conversation entirely. Coaching is for capable employees who need to grow, not for situations that require performance management or termination.
How to Build a Coaching Practice From Scratch
For a small business starting from no formal coaching practice, the rollout is straightforward: build it in layers, starting with weekly 1:1s. The core setup takes about four weeks of part-time work, and the quarterly conversations and the founder's skip-level coaching follow in months two and three. After that, the practice runs on the cadence you have built, plus a quarterly review with your managers.
Three signals that the coaching practice is working, after the first six months. First, employees describe their managers as people who help them think rather than people who give them answers. Second, decisions move down the org chart. The founder is consulted on fewer day-to-day matters. Third, voluntary turnover trends downward and exit interviews include phrases like "I learned a lot here" rather than "my manager was unsupportive."
That third signal is worth watching closely, because so much turnover is avoidable. According to Work Institute's 2025 Retention Report, built on 123,297 exit interviews from 2019 to 2024, preventable reasons accounted for 76.3% of 2024 exits. Coaching is one of the cheapest tools a small business owns against that share.
Turning a practice into a coaching culture
A coaching culture is what you have when the questions travel sideways and upward, not only down the reporting line. Peers ask each other what they have already tried before offering a fix. A new manager picks up the habit by watching it rather than by reading a document. Somebody feels free to coach the founder.
Getting there takes longer than the four-week rollout, and it mostly comes down to modeling the behavior yourself. Whatever you do in the first ten minutes of a conversation is the culture. If you answer, everyone answers. Two things speed it up: coaching your managers where their peers can see it, and asking to be coached out loud, so the practice stops looking like something senior people do to junior ones.
The place to start is your own next one-on-one. Before you give an answer, ask a question, and let the silence run long enough for the other person to fill it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is coaching in the workplace?
Coaching in the workplace is a way of managing in which the manager mostly asks questions instead of handing out answers, so the employee builds their own capability, performance, and growth over time. It runs as a regular, structured conversation, and it is one of the main ways people develop on the job. Where traditional managing directs tasks and checks output, coaching gets the employee to reason through a problem so they can handle the next similar one on their own. In a small business it normally happens in the weekly 1:1 each manager holds with every direct report. You need no certification, no special software, and no learning and development team to do it.
What is the difference between coaching and managing?
The difference is who does the thinking. When you manage, you tell the employee what to do; when you coach, you help them work out what to do and learn from it along the way. In a managing conversation the manager talks 70% of the time, and the aim is this week's deliverable. A coaching conversation flips that ratio, with the employee talking 70% of the time, and the aim is growth over the quarter. A manager needs both modes. The trap for most small business managers is using only the first one, which leaves them with a team that brings every problem back for them to solve.
What is the purpose of workplace coaching?
Workplace coaching has four main purposes. The first is capability: giving people the skills that today's job and their next one will demand. The second is closing performance gaps, meaning the distance between how someone is doing and what the role expects. The third is retention, since people who can see themselves growing tend to stay, and Gallup research links building on employees' strengths to markedly lower turnover. The fourth is autonomy: a team that resolves problems without escalating them, which matters in a small business because no manager can sit in on every decision.
What is the GROW model?
GROW is a four-stage structure for a coaching conversation and one of the coaching frameworks most widely used at work. The letters stand for Goal, Reality, Options, and Way forward. In the Goal stage, the employee names what they want out of the conversation. In Reality, the two of you look honestly at what is happening now and what has already been tried. In Options, the employee lays out possible routes before judging any of them. In Way forward, they commit to one concrete action and a date for it. The model is popular because every pass through it ends in a specific commitment instead of venting or vague encouragement, and it is short enough to hold in your head mid-conversation.
Do small business managers need coaching certification?
No. Coaching credentials (such as those the International Coaching Federation awards) are aimed at people who coach professionally. Internal manager-as-coach work does not require certification. The skills that matter for SMB manager-as-coach work are active listening, asking open questions, reflecting, holding the goal, resisting the urge to fix, and giving specific recognition. These are learned through practice and feedback, not through certification programs. Small business managers benefit more from regular practice with their direct reports than from formal coaching education.
How often should managers coach employees?
At minimum, hold a weekly 1:1 of 30-45 minutes with each direct report, because that 1:1 carries most of the coaching. Around it, add a monthly development check-in (30 min) on progress toward quarterly goals, a quarterly development conversation (60 min) about career direction, and an annual coaching review (60-90 min) that looks back over the year. Together, the weekly 1:1s and monthly check-ins take about 3-4 hours a month for each direct report, so a manager with five reports spends roughly 15-20 hours per month on coaching. That is less of a burden than it sounds, because regular 1:1s absorb the scattered, unplanned check-ins that would happen anyway, and a team without 1:1s tends to pull its manager into more firefighting.
Can coaching replace performance feedback?
No. The two are separate conversations that support each other. Feedback tells a person plainly how their performance compares with what the job requires; coaching helps them reason through what to do about it. When someone is falling short and does not realize it, no amount of well-phrased questions will deliver that message for you. A common trap is hiding a performance problem behind coaching questions because the direct version feels uncomfortable. The sequence that works is to state the feedback clearly first, and only then switch to coaching questions so the employee can decide how they will respond and what they will change.
What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?
Coaching is typically performed by a manager and focuses on the employee's current performance, skills, and goals. The coach does not need to have done the employee's specific job. Mentoring is performed by a more experienced person (usually outside the direct reporting relationship) and focuses on broader career navigation. The mentor typically has done the employee's job or a related senior role. Coaching is structured around questions; mentoring is structured around stories and advice. Many companies have both. Small businesses usually start with coaching from direct managers and add mentoring (often informal) as the team grows.