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Questionnaire Items Measuring Coaching

Definition: Coaching is an essential leadership skill that enhances performance by fostering dialogue and active listening, asking open-ended questions, challenging assumptions, and tailoring approaches to individual needs. It involves reframing challenges as opportunities, broadening perspectives, providing constructive feedback, empowering employees, and emphasizing future potential. Effective coaching supports growth and development by creating a receptive environment, encouraging introspection and self-reflection, demonstrating empathy, investing time, and driving meaningful impact.
Coaching skills help improve performance of employees. A few of the main components of coaching skills include:Coaching skills enable managers to build trust and foster open communication, creating a supportive environment where employees feel encouraged to share ideas, tackle challenges, and explore solutions. By empowering employees through active listening, insightful questioning, constructive feedback, and tailored guidance, managers help unlock potential, drive growth, and enhance overall performance.

People Skills
Interpersonal Skills
Collaboration
Trustworthy
Responsible
Client Focus
Customer Focus
Empowering Others
Employee Relations
Employee Development
Developing Others
Engagement
Co-worker Development
Coaching
Partnering/Networking
Conflict Management
Negotiation
Mediation
Teamwork
Recognition
Others
360-Degree Feedback Questionnaires Measuring Communication Skills:
Survey 1 (4-point scale; Competency Comments)
Survey 2 (4-point scale; Competency Comments)
Survey 3 (5-point scale; Competency Comments)
Survey 4 (5-point scale; radio buttons)
Survey 5 (4-point scale; words)
Survey 6 (4-point scale; words)
Survey 7 (5-point scale; competency comments; N/A)
Survey 8 (3-point scale; Agree/Disagree words; N/A)
Survey 9 (3-point scale; Strength/Development; N/A)
Survey 10 (Comment boxes only)
Survey 11 (Single rating per competency)
Survey 12 (Slide-bar scale)

360-Degree Feedback Questionnaire Items

The Coaching competency in a 360-Degree Feedback assessment includes items measuring .



Improving Performance
Improving Performance focuses on enhancing employee skills, productivity, and engagement to elevate workplace effectiveness. This dimension prioritizes mentoring, skill development, performance optimization, and maximizing employee output, ensuring individuals reach higher professional standards. It is primarily about continuous improvement in work quality, goal attainment, and structured coaching interventions that foster excellence.


Dialog and Listening
Dialog and Listening emphasizes active listening, empathy, and creating a supportive environment where employees feel comfortable expressing their thoughts, goals, and challenges. This dimension is about giving employees time and space to articulate their ideas, validating their perspectives, and fostering trust through open conversations. The emphasis is on listening attentively and ensuring employees feel heard and valued rather than immediately guiding them toward solutions.


Open-Ended Questions
Open-Ended Questions is focused on stimulating deeper thinking, exploration, and engagement through questioning techniques. Instead of just listening, this approach guides employees to uncover insights on their own by prompting reflection, encouraging innovation, and helping them analyze their intentions and motivations. Open-ended questions push employees beyond surface-level discussions, allowing them to explore challenges, opportunities, and solutions in a more meaningful way.


Challenges Assumptions
Challenges Assumptions centers on critical thinking and perspective expansion, prompting employees to question their existing beliefs, positions, and approaches. This dimension encourages employees to reevaluate their assumptions by asking clarifying and thought-provoking questions, ultimately leading them to new insights, alternative viewpoints, and deeper self-awareness. It fosters intellectual curiosity and helps individuals see situations from a fresh perspective rather than relying on preconceived notions.


Impactful
Impactful goes beyond performance metrics and emphasizes transformational coaching that addresses behavioral, interpersonal, and psychological aspects of development. This dimension aims to create meaningful change through customized coaching, behavioral improvements, and challenges that push individuals beyond their perceived limitations. Instead of just refining work-related skills, Impactful coaching seeks to foster deeper personal growth, strengthen relationships, and develop well-rounded professionals.


Customized Approach
Customized Approach emphasizes tailoring coaching sessions to fit an individual's unique needs, working style, and professional challenges. This dimension is centered on personalized goal-setting, structured learning activities, and adjusting methods based on each employee's capacity for growth. The focus is on aligning coaching to the employee's specific objectives, ensuring they receive targeted support for success rather than a one-size-fits-all development strategy


Reframing Issues as Opportunities
Reframing Issues as Opportunities focuses on turning challenges into positive learning experiences, shifting the mindset from obstacles to growth. Instead of questioning existing beliefs, this dimension guides employees toward finding solutions, seeing setbacks as opportunities, and viewing difficulties as stepping stones for improvement. It uses positive reinforcement to inspire resilience, adaptability, and problem-solving, ensuring employees feel empowered rather than discouraged by challenges.


Expanding Viewpoints
Expanding Viewpoints emphasizes broadening perspectives, encouraging creative thinking, and exploring alternative solutions. This dimension helps employees challenge their assumptions, consider different perspectives, and engage in brainstorming sessions to uncover new possibilities. It fosters open-mindedness and adaptability, guiding individuals to evaluate various viewpoints and innovative strategies rather than relying on fixed approaches.


Gives Feedback
Gives Feedback focuses on the content, quality, and delivery of performance-related information. This dimension is about providing factual, specific, non-judgmental input that helps employees understand what they are doing well, where they need to improve, and how to adjust their performance. It includes both formal and informal feedback, constructive guidance, and problem-solving support. The emphasis is on clarity, accuracy, and usefulness--ensuring the employee receives actionable insights without feeling attacked or defensive. In essence, this competency is about helping employees improve through information.


Empowering Employees
Empowering Employees centers on strengthening an employee's current agency, confidence, and ownership in their work and development. It focuses on helping individuals recognize their strengths, make their own decisions, correct their own errors, and use their talents intentionally. The coach acts as a guide rather than a director--offering ideas, perspective, and reflective questions that enable employees to take responsibility for their growth. The emphasis is on building self-sufficiency in the present: helping employees understand themselves, trust their judgment, and feel capable of navigating challenges with increasing independence.


Future Potential
Future Potential is oriented toward forward movement, long-term growth, and expanded possibilities by pushing employees to envision what they could become, explore opportunities, and stretch beyond their current capabilities. This dimension is about momentum--challenging individuals to reflect on future goals, consider new solutions, and focus on progress rather than past mistakes. Future Potential builds tomorrow's trajectory by encouraging employees to imagine, pursue, and prepare for what's next.


Focus on Development
Focus on Development is broader and geared toward ongoing skill enhancement, career progression, and overall performance improvement. Rather than personalizing each session, this dimension provides assignments, constructive feedback, and new experiences that help employees grow professionally. It is less about individual customization and more about systematically developing employees to meet organizational and career growth expectations.


Supportive
Supportive focuses on the emotional climate, relational foundation, and motivational environment the coach creates. It emphasizes trust, rapport, encouragement, and psychological safety--conditions that make employees feel confident exploring challenges, sharing openly, and taking risks. Supportive behaviors celebrate successes, highlight strengths, acknowledge personal or professional transitions, and demonstrate genuine interest in the employee's goals and aspirations. This dimension centers on how the employee feels during the coaching process and whether they experience the relationship as safe, affirming, and growth-oriented.


Increases Awareness
Increases Awareness focuses on deepening employees' understanding of their roles, responsibilities, and the broader organizational impact. Instead of expanding perspectives, this dimension ensures employees grasp their job expectations, workplace dynamics, and the factors influencing their success. It promotes clarity in responsibilities, organizational alignment, and awareness of personal strengths and motivations to enhance effectiveness in their roles.


Introspection and Self-Reflection
Introspection and Self-Reflection focuses on what happens inside the employee's mind during coaching. This dimension is about helping employees examine their assumptions, motivations, patterns, decisions, and reactions. The manager prompts deeper thinking through open-ended questions, encourages employees to analyze their experiences, and guides them toward uncovering insights about themselves. The emphasis is on cognitive and emotional exploration--helping employees understand why they act the way they do, what drives their choices, and how they can grow through increased self-awareness. In short, this competency is about facilitating internal reflection and personal insight.


Empathetic
Empathetic focuses on the manager's emotional attunement to the individual employee. This dimension is about understanding the employee's feelings, workload, challenges, and personal perspective. It includes noticing when someone is struggling, asking about accomplishments, investigating hurdles, and demonstrating genuine care for the employee's experience. Empathy here is interpersonal and individualized: the manager tunes into what a specific employee is going through and responds with understanding, compassion, and respect. The emphasis is on seeing and valuing the person--their emotions, their context, and their lived experience at work.


Invests Time
Invests Time focuses on the manager's commitment of time, presence, and availability to make coaching possible. It is about creating the conditions for coaching--setting aside uninterrupted time, meeting regularly, ensuring workload balance, and offering coaching at the right moments. This dimension reflects the manager's reliability, consistency, and prioritization of coaching as an ongoing practice. It focuses on the manager's external behaviors that demonstrate dedication to the coaching relationship. In essence, this competency is about showing up, making space, and ensuring coaching has the time and structure it needs to be effective.


Receptive Environment
Receptive Environment focuses on the manager's role in shaping the broader climate in which coaching occurs. This dimension is about creating conditions where employees feel safe, welcomed, and encouraged to engage in coaching. It includes normalizing coaching as part of the culture, reinforcing its value, demonstrating curiosity, encouraging proactive participation, and integrating coaching into everyday interactions. A receptive environment is about the systemic atmosphere the manager cultivates--one where coaching is collaborative, non-judgmental, and woven into the fabric of how the team operates.

Employee Opinion Survey Items

Effective communication skills empower employees to collaborate efficiently, make well-informed decisions, and significantly contribute to the company's profitability.



Improving Performance
Improving Performance focuses on helping employees reach higher levels of productivity, engagement, and excellence through targeted coaching and mentorship. This dimension highlights assisting employees in maintaining high standards, strengthening skills to enhance work output, monitoring coaching effectiveness, and leveraging mentorship to maximize performance. It prioritizes optimization and achievement, ensuring employees perform at their best within their current roles.


Dialog and Listening
Dialog and Listening focuses on creating an open, judgment-free environment where employees feel comfortable expressing their thoughts and challenges while being heard and understood. This dimension highlights active listening, giving employees space to articulate their ideas, encouraging discussion about personal and professional goals, and fostering trust and rapport. It prioritizes relationship-building and psychological safety, ensuring that coaching interactions are supportive and constructive.


Open-Ended Questions
Open-Ended Questions emphasizes using thoughtful, probing questions to inspire deeper thinking, uncover motivations, and encourage employees to discover solutions on their own. This dimension centers on guiding exploration, fostering innovation, clarifying intentions, and helping employees engage actively in problem-solving. It prioritizes critical thinking and empowerment, ensuring that employees develop self-awareness and problem-solving skills through well-structured inquiry.


Challenges Assumptions
Challenges Assumptions focuses on questioning existing beliefs, prompting employees to expand their thinking, and encouraging deeper analysis of their viewpoints. This dimension highlights using thought-provoking questions to lead individuals to discovery, insight, and action, while fostering critical thinking and new perspectives. It prioritizes mental flexibility and deeper reflection, ensuring employees question and refine their understanding to unlock better solutions.


Impactful
Impactful focuses on delivering coaching that creates meaningful, lasting change in employees' performance, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. This dimension highlights addressing behavioral challenges, providing customized coaching, helping employees push beyond self-perceived limitations, and ensuring coaching has a strong, tangible effect. It prioritizes depth and effectiveness, ensuring that coaching leads to real transformation in employees' abilities and workplace interactions.


Customized Approach
Customized Approach focuses on tailoring coaching sessions and learning activities to match individual needs, working styles, and professional goals. This dimension highlights structuring development plans that align with employees' capacities, setting specific and measurable goals, and adjusting coaching strategies to optimize engagement. It prioritizes personalization and adaptability, ensuring coaching resonates with each individual and facilitates meaningful progress.


Reframing Issues as Opportunities
Reframing Issues as Opportunities emphasizes shifting employees' perspectives to see challenges as growth opportunities, learning experiences, and pathways for development. This dimension centers on redirecting focus from obstacles to solutions, using positive reinforcement, encouraging resilience, and highlighting setbacks as steppingstones to improvement. It prioritizes optimism and motivation, ensuring individuals approach problems with a constructive, forward-thinking mindset.


Expanding Viewpoints
Expanding Viewpoints emphasizes broadening employees’ perspectives, encouraging creative thinking, and helping individuals explore alternative solutions and viewpoints. This dimension centers on brainstorming sessions, considering multiple paths forward, prompting employees to evaluate other options, and fostering adaptability in problem-solving. It prioritizes open-mindedness and exploration, ensuring employees become more receptive to innovative approaches and diverse perspectives.


Gives Feedback
Gives Feedback emphasizes providing clear, constructive, and actionable insights that help employees improve performance and refine their skills. This dimension centers on delivering factual, non-judgmental feedback, ensuring employees understand areas for improvement, guiding them toward solutions, and fostering an environment where feedback is seen as a tool for growth. It prioritizes clarity and continuous improvement, ensuring employees receive valuable input that enhances their effectiveness.


Empowering Employees
Empowering Employees focuses on helping employees take ownership of their decisions, recognize their strengths, and become more self-sufficient in their professional development. This dimension highlights encouraging employees to take initiative, providing guidance without micromanaging, and helping individuals refine their own skills and problem-solving abilities. It prioritizes autonomy and self-growth, ensuring employees feel capable and confident in making decisions independently.


Future Potential
Future Potential focuses on helping employees envision long-term success, explore opportunities for personal growth, and develop their capabilities beyond immediate challenges. This dimension highlights guiding individuals to focus on progress, encouraging forward-thinking, creating opportunities for development, and inspiring employees to realize their full potential. It prioritizes vision and motivation, ensuring employees embrace a mindset of continuous improvement and future possibilities.


Focus on Development
Focus on Development emphasizes identifying opportunities for growth, providing experiences that build skills, and fostering long-term career advancement. This dimension centers on guiding employees toward their development needs, offering feedback to stimulate improvement, creating learning opportunities, and supporting employees in acquiring new capabilities. It prioritizes growth and future potential, ensuring individuals continuously evolve in their skills and career trajectory.


Supportive
Supportive emphasizes creating an environment of trust, encouragement, and psychological safety, where employees feel comfortable exploring challenges and receiving guidance. This dimension centers on building rapport, celebrating achievements, offering reassurance during transitions, and fostering honest communication. It prioritizes motivation and emotional support, ensuring employees feel valued and secure in their development journey.


Increases Awareness
Increases Awareness focuses on helping employees understand external factors that impact their roles, responsibilities, and overall organizational dynamics. This dimension highlights clarifying job expectations, providing insight into the workplace environment, understanding organizational structures, and ensuring employees are informed about factors influencing their success. It prioritizes situational awareness and external understanding, ensuring individuals grasp their responsibilities and how their work fits into broader organizational goals.


Introspection and Self-Reflection
Introspection and Self-Reflection emphasizes encouraging employees to look inward, analyze their behaviors and decisions, and develop greater self-awareness. This dimension centers on personal growth, fostering deeper reflection on experiences, guiding employees in improving their mindset, and helping them explore their motivations and thought processes. It prioritizes self-exploration and internal development, ensuring individuals gain a deeper understanding of themselves to enhance their performance and personal growth.


Empathetic
Empathetic focuses on understanding employees' emotions, challenges, and perspectives to create a supportive and compassionate coaching experience. This dimension highlights attentiveness to employees' needs, investigating difficulties they face, recognizing workload pressures, and demonstrating genuine concern for their well-being. It prioritizes emotional intelligence and personal connection, ensuring that employees feel heard, valued, and supported.


Invests Time
Invests Time emphasizes dedicating intentional time and effort to coaching interactions, providing structured opportunities for development, and ensuring employees receive ongoing support. This dimension centers on setting aside time for coaching discussions, maintaining regular check-ins, balancing workloads to accommodate coaching, and ensuring employees have access to mentorship. It prioritizes commitment and availability, ensuring coaching is not just aspirational but actively integrated into daily work routines.


Receptive Environment
Receptive Environment emphasizes creating a structured, open space where coaching is embraced as a vital part of professional development. This dimension centers on integrating coaching into leadership practices, fostering a culture where coaching is encouraged, maintaining openness to feedback, and ensuring coaching is embedded in the organization. It prioritizes systematic and cultural reinforcement, ensuring that coaching is not just a one-time interaction but an ongoing practice.

Self-Assessment Items



Improving Performance
Improving Performance focuses on enhancing employee skills, productivity, and engagement to elevate workplace effectiveness. This dimension prioritizes mentoring, skill development, performance optimization, and maximizing employee output, ensuring individuals reach higher professional standards. It is primarily about continuous improvement in work quality, goal attainment, and structured coaching interventions that foster excellence.


Dialog and Listening
Dialog and Listening emphasizes active listening, empathy, and creating a supportive environment where employees feel comfortable expressing their thoughts, goals, and challenges. This dimension is about giving employees time and space to articulate their ideas, validating their perspectives, and fostering trust through open conversations. The emphasis is on listening attentively and ensuring employees feel heard and valued rather than immediately guiding them toward solutions.


Open-Ended Questions
Open-Ended Questions is focused on stimulating deeper thinking, exploration, and engagement through questioning techniques. Instead of just listening, this approach guides employees to uncover insights on their own by prompting reflection, encouraging innovation, and helping them analyze their intentions and motivations. Open-ended questions push employees beyond surface-level discussions, allowing them to explore challenges, opportunities, and solutions in a more meaningful way.


Challenges Assumptions
Challenges Assumptions centers on critical thinking and perspective expansion, prompting employees to question their existing beliefs, positions, and approaches. This dimension encourages employees to reevaluate their assumptions by asking clarifying and thought-provoking questions, ultimately leading them to new insights, alternative viewpoints, and deeper self-awareness. It fosters intellectual curiosity and helps individuals see situations from a fresh perspective rather than relying on preconceived notions.


Impactful
Impactful goes beyond performance metrics and emphasizes transformational coaching that addresses behavioral, interpersonal, and psychological aspects of development. This dimension aims to create meaningful change through customized coaching, behavioral improvements, and challenges that push individuals beyond their perceived limitations. Instead of just refining work-related skills, Impactful coaching seeks to foster deeper personal growth, strengthen relationships, and develop well-rounded professionals.


Customized Approach
Customized Approach emphasizes tailoring coaching sessions to fit an individual's unique needs, working style, and professional challenges. This dimension is centered on personalized goal-setting, structured learning activities, and adjusting methods based on each employee's capacity for growth. The focus is on aligning coaching to the employee's specific objectives, ensuring they receive targeted support for success rather than a one-size-fits-all development strategy


Reframing Issues as Opportunities
Reframing Issues as Opportunities focuses on turning challenges into positive learning experiences, shifting the mindset from obstacles to growth. Instead of questioning existing beliefs, this dimension guides employees toward finding solutions, seeing setbacks as opportunities, and viewing difficulties as stepping stones for improvement. It uses positive reinforcement to inspire resilience, adaptability, and problem-solving, ensuring employees feel empowered rather than discouraged by challenges.


Expanding Viewpoints
Expanding Viewpoints emphasizes broadening perspectives, encouraging creative thinking, and exploring alternative solutions. This dimension helps employees challenge their assumptions, consider different perspectives, and engage in brainstorming sessions to uncover new possibilities. It fosters open-mindedness and adaptability, guiding individuals to evaluate various viewpoints and innovative strategies rather than relying on fixed approaches.


Gives Feedback
Gives Feedback focuses on the content, quality, and delivery of performance-related information. This dimension is about providing factual, specific, non-judgmental input that helps employees understand what they are doing well, where they need to improve, and how to adjust their performance. It includes both formal and informal feedback, constructive guidance, and problem-solving support. The emphasis is on clarity, accuracy, and usefulness--ensuring the employee receives actionable insights without feeling attacked or defensive. In essence, this competency is about helping employees improve through information.


Empowering Employees
Empowering Employees centers on strengthening an employee's current agency, confidence, and ownership in their work and development. It focuses on helping individuals recognize their strengths, make their own decisions, correct their own errors, and use their talents intentionally. The coach acts as a guide rather than a director--offering ideas, perspective, and reflective questions that enable employees to take responsibility for their growth. The emphasis is on building self-sufficiency in the present: helping employees understand themselves, trust their judgment, and feel capable of navigating challenges with increasing independence.


Future Potential
Future Potential is oriented toward forward movement, long-term growth, and expanded possibilities by pushing employees to envision what they could become, explore opportunities, and stretch beyond their current capabilities. This dimension is about momentum--challenging individuals to reflect on future goals, consider new solutions, and focus on progress rather than past mistakes. Future Potential builds tomorrow's trajectory by encouraging employees to imagine, pursue, and prepare for what's next.


Focus on Development
Focus on Development is broader and geared toward ongoing skill enhancement, career progression, and overall performance improvement. Rather than personalizing each session, this dimension provides assignments, constructive feedback, and new experiences that help employees grow professionally. It is less about individual customization and more about systematically developing employees to meet organizational and career growth expectations.


Supportive
Supportive focuses on the emotional climate, relational foundation, and motivational environment the coach creates. It emphasizes trust, rapport, encouragement, and psychological safety--conditions that make employees feel confident exploring challenges, sharing openly, and taking risks. Supportive behaviors celebrate successes, highlight strengths, acknowledge personal or professional transitions, and demonstrate genuine interest in the employee's goals and aspirations. This dimension centers on how the employee feels during the coaching process and whether they experience the relationship as safe, affirming, and growth-oriented.


Increases Awareness
Increases Awareness focuses on deepening employees' understanding of their roles, responsibilities, and the broader organizational impact. Instead of expanding perspectives, this dimension ensures employees grasp their job expectations, workplace dynamics, and the factors influencing their success. It promotes clarity in responsibilities, organizational alignment, and awareness of personal strengths and motivations to enhance effectiveness in their roles.


Introspection and Self-Reflection
Introspection and Self-Reflection focuses on what happens inside the employee's mind during coaching. This dimension is about helping employees examine their assumptions, motivations, patterns, decisions, and reactions. The manager prompts deeper thinking through open-ended questions, encourages employees to analyze their experiences, and guides them toward uncovering insights about themselves. The emphasis is on cognitive and emotional exploration--helping employees understand why they act the way they do, what drives their choices, and how they can grow through increased self-awareness. In short, this competency is about facilitating internal reflection and personal insight.


Empathetic
Empathetic focuses on the manager's emotional attunement to the individual employee. This dimension is about understanding the employee's feelings, workload, challenges, and personal perspective. It includes noticing when someone is struggling, asking about accomplishments, investigating hurdles, and demonstrating genuine care for the employee's experience. Empathy here is interpersonal and individualized: the manager tunes into what a specific employee is going through and responds with understanding, compassion, and respect. The emphasis is on seeing and valuing the person--their emotions, their context, and their lived experience at work.


Invests Time
Invests Time focuses on the manager's commitment of time, presence, and availability to make coaching possible. It is about creating the conditions for coaching--setting aside uninterrupted time, meeting regularly, ensuring workload balance, and offering coaching at the right moments. This dimension reflects the manager's reliability, consistency, and prioritization of coaching as an ongoing practice. It focuses on the manager's external behaviors that demonstrate dedication to the coaching relationship. In essence, this competency is about showing up, making space, and ensuring coaching has the time and structure it needs to be effective.


Receptive Environment
Receptive Environment focuses on the manager's role in shaping the broader climate in which coaching occurs. This dimension is about creating conditions where employees feel safe, welcomed, and encouraged to engage in coaching. It includes normalizing coaching as part of the culture, reinforcing its value, demonstrating curiosity, encouraging proactive participation, and integrating coaching into everyday interactions. A receptive environment is about the systemic atmosphere the manager cultivates--one where coaching is collaborative, non-judgmental, and woven into the fabric of how the team operates.

Job Interview Questions



Improving Performance


Dialog and Listening


Open-Ended Questions


Challenges Assumptions


Impactful


Customized Approach


Reframing Issues as Opportunities


Expanding Viewpoints


Gives Feedback


Empowering Employees


Future Potential


Focus on Development


Supportive


Increases Awareness


Introspection and Self-Reflection


Empathetic


Invests Time


Receptive Environment