Workplace Coaching for Improving Project Management Performance

Common Project Management Meetings

“Where are we against the plan?” asks the project manager of a multi-million-dollar project.

An awkward silence follows.

The project assistant lists several contextual reasons for the delay, while the finance officer notes that she is still waiting for invoices from the project assistant. The planned meeting quickly shifts. Accusations surface, unease spreads, and people begin defending themselves: “I’m not to blame – I’m doing my part.”

The project manager cancels the meeting and leaves for another round of discussions with the contracting authority.

Many project professionals have experienced similar moments. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, who is at fault, or how to sit with colleagues afterwards without carrying residual anxiety, uneasiness and a sense of failure.

And it all began with a single question. When – and why – did the conversation derail?

Protocols, Tools and AI… Yet Projects Still Fall Short of Full Value

Over the past sixty years, project management has steadily standardised its protocols to manage time, people and financial constraints. Logical frameworks, agile methods and AI-powered dashboards have given teams more tools than ever before. Yet when seasoned professionals are asked what separates a project that limps to completion from one that genuinely delivers, the answer rarely centres on a Gantt chart.

Beyond technical excellence, one element remains precariously balanced: judgement. This falls squarely on the project leader: How do I understand what my team members’ words really mean? How do I hold difficult conversations without draining motivation? How do I manage expectations when the plan must change?

Coaching Essentials

Workplace coaching supports certified project managers and team members, and complements AI-powered tools. It is a structured, ongoing, conversation-based process designed to help professionals improve current performance and reach their potential. Its core framework relies on questioning, reflection, and individual and collective goal-setting, rather than issuing directives.

The word “coach” was first used in the nineteenth century to describe someone who helped a person reach a goal. It was later adopted in sporting circles. The metaphor of a coach – someone who carries you from where you are to where you want to be – predates its business application by many decades.

Coaching differs from consulting or training (which transfer knowledge through theory and practice), mentoring (which transfers experience), and therapy (which addresses psychological difficulties).

It rests on the premise that the person being coached can find their own answers. The coach’s role is to support that discovery in a structured and predictable way. The development of workplace coaching has a striking parallel with project management’s own evolution. For decades, managers supported staff through hands-on guidance, mentoring and feedback as part of everyday supervision, even when these practices were not formally described as coaching.

The conceptual bridge between sport and business gained momentum in 1974 with Tim Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, which reframed coaching as helping people overcome internal barriers rather than simply correcting technical skills. That insight – that performance is often limited more by internal thinking than by external skill gaps – proved equally relevant in the boardroom and helped shape modern workplace coaching models.

Workplace coaching developed as a more distinct discipline during the late twentieth century, with figures such as Sir John Whitmore helping to adapt sports-coaching principles for corporate leadership development. The well-known GROW model became one of the approaches associated with this development. This coincided with a broader shift in project management away from rigid command-and-control structures towards more collaborative, participative approaches. Coaching was not incidental to that shift; it was one of its enabling tools. The same transition – from control towards collaboration – is occurring again today as agile and adaptive delivery models increasingly replace rigid, plan-driven ones.

How Workplace Coaching Improves Project Team Performance

Project management occupies an unusual position among professions. Its technical competencies – scheduling, budgeting, risk registers and governance – are extensively codified, examined and certified through frameworks such as PMP and PRINCE2. Behavioural competencies, however – communication, conflict resolution, self-management and collaboration – are far less systematised.

Yet these are the capabilities that most reliably determine whether a project succeeds to its full potential: influencing stakeholders without formal authority, making high-stakes decisions on incomplete information, holding difficult conversations and maintaining composure under sustained pressure. This mismatch is the strongest argument for embedding coaching into project management as a core discipline rather than an occasional executive perk.

First, project managers make decisions daily, often on incomplete information. A coaching approach builds the habit of pausing to examine assumptions before acting – a skill that compounds over a career in ways no single tool can match.

Second, project managers sit at the centre of pressure from contracting authorities above, team members below and stakeholders on every side. Burnout frequently arises because they are expected to be all-knowing. Coaching provides a confidential space to process that pressure, free from the evaluative undertone that often accompanies mentoring or consultancy.

Third, coaching offers a flexible framework for deciding when to deviate from the plan, when to push back on unrealistic timelines, and when to have hard conversations with underperforming team members instead of simply writing another status report.

Fourth, coaching helps retain ambitious professionals who feel invested in their growth and are therefore less likely to leave for a competitor offering the same salary but no development path.

The Project Manager as Coach

While coaching project leaders improves their individual performance and that of their teams, the greater impact comes when project managers themselves embed a coaching style. This reflects a clear trend in contemporary practice: less command-and-control, more guide-on-the-side. For project leaders, this means changing how meetings are run, how questions are asked, and how one-to-ones are structured – asking rather than directing whenever the situation allows.

Project managers can embed coaching skills in several practical ways:

• Structure project meetings as reflective coaching conversations rather than pure status or lessons-learned sessions.
• Transform one-to-ones from routine status reporting into structured coaching dialogues.
• Include brief coaching-style debriefs on decision-making quality during stage-gate reviews, alongside traditional milestone checks.

Although workplace coaching is often delivered top-down or by external coaches, group or team coaching is equally valuable. Structured peer-coaching sessions – small groups of project managers supporting one another through live challenges – normalise coaching as a professional habit rather than a remedial intervention.

When coaching is offered only to underperforming managers, it carries a stigma that discourages honest engagement. Organisations that extract the most value position coaching as a growth opportunity for their strongest project managers – the people they most want to retain and promote.

Project Management Meeting (Scenario)

Project Manager: “What’s the biggest uncertainty you’re carrying right now?”

Project Assistant: “For me, it’s the suppliers. A few have become inconsistent with submitting invoices and supporting documents. I keep following up, but I’m never sure when they’ll respond. I worry that I’m becoming a nuisance if I keep pushing.”

Project Manager: “Thank you for sharing that. What impact does that uncertainty have on your work?”

Project Assistant: “I spend a lot of time chasing information instead of coordinating project activities. And I know the delays affect everyone else, which is frustrating.”

Finance Officer: “I didn’t realise that was happening. From my perspective, I only see invoices arriving late. I was beginning to think our internal processes were slowing things down.”

Project Manager: “That’s interesting. What uncertainty are you carrying?”

Finance Officer: “My concern is forecasting. When documents arrive unexpectedly or at the last minute, I can’t provide reliable financial updates. I’m constantly wondering whether the figures I report today will change tomorrow.”

Project Manager: “So both of you are dealing with uncertainty caused by incomplete information rather than a lack of effort.”

Project Assistant: “Exactly.”

Finance Officer: “Yes. It’s less about people not doing their jobs and more about not seeing the whole picture.”

Project Manager: “Hearing both of you, my own uncertainty is whether we’ve been asking the right questions in these meetings. We’ve spent a lot of time reviewing progress, but perhaps not enough time discussing what could prevent progress. Given what we’ve heard, what would make next week feel more predictable?”

Project Assistant: “I could create a tracker showing who has submitted documentation, who’s outstanding, and when I last contacted them. Everyone would have visibility.”

Finance Officer: “That would help me a lot. I could flag upcoming reporting deadlines in the same tracker, so we know which invoices are most critical.”

Project Manager: “I like that. What else?”

Project Assistant: “Maybe we spend the first ten minutes of each weekly meeting sharing our biggest uncertainties instead of only reporting completed tasks.”

Finance Officer: “That way, we can solve problems before they become delays.”

Project Manager: “I think that’s a valuable change. Progress isn’t only about what we’ve completed; it’s also about what we’re learning and anticipating together.”

Finance Officer: “I have to admit, I came into this meeting expecting another discussion about overdue invoices.”

Project Assistant: “Me too. Instead, I feel like we’re solving the reasons behind the delays.”

Project Manager: “That’s exactly what I was hoping for. We may not have eliminated every uncertainty today, but we’ve made them visible. And once uncertainties are visible, they become something we can manage together rather than something each of us carries alone.”

The three leave the meeting with a shared action plan, greater understanding of one another’s challenges, and renewed confidence that honest conversations about uncertainty can strengthen both relationships and project performance.