Designing employee-led coaching to be easy, helpful, and grounded in science

This series began by exploring why traditional manager-led coaching can be difficult to deliver across an entire organization, even with the best intentions. When coaching depends heavily on leaders who may not have the time or training to coach effectively, it can be difficult to establish a consistent coaching culture at scale.

This challenge shaped the design of Personal Career Coach—an employee-led coaching experience that puts development more directly in employees’ hands. The design was guided by clearly defined core goals surrounding what the tool delivers for employees and how it encourages meaningful engagement.

Coaching is expected to be motivating and helpful, yet in practice, it can sometimes feel heavy, stressful, or even discouraging. When coaching content is not shared in the right way, it can unintentionally trigger defensiveness or self-doubt, which is the opposite of what coaching is meant to achieve.

To create a more positive and engaging coaching experience, the Personal Career Coach was built around three priorities:

• Making the experience easy
• Keeping it positive and helpful
• Grounding it in behavioral science

Goal 1: Make the experience feel easy

Coaching can sometimes feel daunting. It may seem like extra work, too abstract or theoretical, or something that requires coordinating time with others. In an employee-led tool, those barriers can quickly lead employees to disengage or never even get started.

We want employees’ first impression to be:

• “This seems easy enough.”
• “This shouldn’t take a lot of time.”

Insights that are clear and concise

The Personal Career Coach starts by giving employees behavioral insights that build self-awareness. The insights are intentionally short and easy to digest.

Specifically, each insight describes the behaviors shown to support success in the role and how the individual compares with that benchmark, whether it’s a strength or an opportunity to stretch beyond their usual comfort zone.

To illustrate, here’s how Personal Career Coach presents the insight for the behavioral characteristic of “Caution”:

Activities that are approachable and low-lift

After employees review their behavioral insights, the second part of the coaching experience offers activities that help answer, “What actions can I take?”

Traditional coaching activities can sometimes feel overwhelming, especially when they involve intimidating interactions or multi-step commitments. Because the tool is employee-led, the activities needed to feel approachable enough for employees to take the first step on their own and continue engaging.

To support that goal, each one is designed to be:

• Bite-sized and manageable
• Practical
• Quick to start

One design decision that supports these objectives is building choice into the experience. Employees can choose from a range of activities—some that involve interacting with others and some that can be completed independently. This flexibility allows employees to choose what feels most comfortable and relevant, reducing emotional overwhelm and increasing the likelihood that they will take meaningful action.

In addition, all activities are displayed on one page, making it easy to view and consider all available options. Employees see a quick summary of each activity, as shown below. If a particular activity seems interesting, they can select Start to view additional details.

Another key design decision supporting an easy, low-lift experience was ensuring each activity could fit easily into a person’s regular day without feeling burdensome. The activities are small, practical actions employees can try during everyday moments, such as routine meetings or brief exchanges with a coworker. Additionally, because each activity stands on its own, employees can quickly begin any one of them without needing to complete others first, making the experience flexible, approachable, and easy to navigate.

Goal 2: Make the coaching feel helpful to the employee

A central goal for this self-led coaching tool was to ensure that employees experience it as genuinely beneficial. To achieve that, we designed the experience around two essentials: it should feel positive, and it should provide practical guidance that employees can use right away.

A positive experience

A positive coaching experience helps employees feel supported and valued rather than judged or discouraged, making them more likely to stay engaged and take meaningful action. Two design choices helped create that kind of experience:

1. Focus on strengths
Coaching materials and discussions often place considerable emphasis on weaknesses or gaps. When developing Personal Career Coach, it was a carefully considered decision to give equal weight to a person’s strengths. The rationale was that this balance could help make the coaching experience feel more positive and encouraging. Ultimately, the goal of this self-led coaching tool is to help employees identify small behavioral shifts that can support their success, whether that means building upon a strength or addressing a gap.

When coaching focuses on a strength, the activities help individuals build on a capability they already demonstrate, such as by using it more intentionally or adapting it to different situations. The aim is to help employees gain even more value from strengths they already bring a role.

For example, assertiveness may already be a strength for an employee. A coaching activity might help the employee consider how to express opinions with greater impact or adapt their approach for different audiences.

2. Behavioral stretch, not personality change
With Personal Career Coach, the emphasis is placed on a realistic behavioral stretch rather than core personality change. Growth is framed as small, situational adjustments—not as a need for employees to change who they are.

The “rubber band” analogy captures this idea:

We all have natural tendencies that are core to who we are. Like a rubber band, we can stretch beyond those tendencies when a work situation calls for it and then return to what feels most natural to us. But if we need to stretch too far or for too long, the strain can become unsustainable. In the same way, effective development should encourage small, realistic behavioral adjustments, as opposed to expecting people to become someone they are not.

With that in mind, Personal Career Coach helps employees recognize where a small shift in behavior or approach could help them be more successful at work, without implying that they need to fundamentally change themselves. 

Helpful guidance employees can use immediately

For coaching to feel truly valuable, it needs to offer more than a positive experience; it also needs to provide practical ideas and tips employees can use right away.

This sense of immediate usefulness is especially important with a self-led tool. When employees can quickly see how an activity connects to their own work, career goals, or day-to-day interactions, the coaching is more likely to feel relevant and worth their effort. As such, each activity was designed to help employees identify a clear next step they could try in the near term.

Goal 3: Ground the coaching in science

Finally, a key goal was to ground the coaching experience in behaviors that are empirically linked to success in a specific role, rather than relying on assumptions. To identify which behavioral characteristics to prioritize, Talent Science brings the same statistical rigor used in hiring, where validation standards are especially high. Those insights are then translated into a customized view of each person’s strengths and development opportunities, helping ensure the coaching focuses on what truly matters for job performance.

Grounding the tool in science builds trust in the coaching experience. As opposed to only receiving general development tips, employees receive guidance connected to behaviors that matter for a targeted role. That connection matters because employees are more likely to engage with coaching when they understand why a particular insight or activity is relevant to their success.

What’s next

These three goals—easy, helpful, and grounded in science—form the foundation of Personal Career Coach. To learn more about how this tool came to life, read the first blog in this series. In the next blog, we will explore additional goals that shaped the tool’s design, including how to approach manager involvement.