Rethinking coaching: Employee-led development

Supporting employee growth

Providing employees with meaningful opportunities to grow and advance in their careers has become an important factor in retaining talent. It signals that employees are valued—and that their future within the organization matters. As such, many organizations want to become more deliberate about offering coaching and development to employees at all levels.

However, translating that intent into effective execution remains a challenge. While coaching has become a widely accepted component of leadership development, it has historically focused on executives and senior leaders. Individual contributors and frontline employees might receive training or feedback, but they rarely receive developmental coaching designed to build behavioral capabilities that drive long-term growth and workplace success.

Why does this gap exist?

Why manager-led development breaks down in practice

The challenge stems primarily from the fact that traditional coaching does not scale well across entire organizations from an operational standpoint. A key reason is that responsibility for development typically defaults to managers—who are expected to guide growth and coach behaviors, often without formal training. This is particularly true for first-time managers, who are often promoted with limited training in managing others, let alone serving as effective coaches.

Equipping managers to coach effectively requires sustained training and reinforcement, which is difficult to maintain in fast-moving organizations. Even when managers are experienced coaches, maintaining consistency can be challenging amid competing demands and day-to-day pressures. What begins as strong intention to support employee growth often breaks down in execution.

A solution: An employee-led approach to coaching

At Infor™ Talent Science, we regularly hear questions from organizations trying to solve the “coaching” challenge, such as:

• Should this be a formal process led by managers—and how do we make it work across the organization?
• Our managers are busy, and most have never received training on how to coach—what can we do?
• If our company has struggled with a manager-led approach, are there other options?

After repeatedly hearing these challenges, we began to ask: Could we create an employee-led coaching tool that puts development directly into employees’ hands?

From concept to reality check

As we explored this idea further, we conducted research to see what tools might already exist in the realm of employee-led coaching. We found that while different tools supported coaching, development, and learning in various ways, none brought together what we saw as three essential elements:

• A truly self-directed experience designed for employees
• A clear grounding in behaviors proven and validated to drive success in a role
• A practical system that fits naturally into employees’ day-to-day work

That gap pointed to something bigger: This wasn’t just an interesting idea—it was an unmet need, with no clear blueprint for how an employee-led coaching experience might function in practice.

This realization led to a more practical question: What would it take—in terms of time, resources, and expertise—to design something that was both conceptually sound and practical to implement?

It was a journey—without a blueprint

As we worked through these considerations, we eventually determined that this was something we could realistically build—and so we began developing what would eventually become Personal Career Coach. At the outset, we knew we wanted this tool to provide a positive and meaningful experience—one that employees would genuinely value. Moving from concept to design, however, was more challenging than it first appeared. We needed to build something simple and intuitive enough for independent use, yet meaningful enough to drive real development outcomes.

Some of the foundational questions we immediately faced:

• How can we put this into employees’ hands in a way that is easy to access and use?
• What coaching activities can realistically be supported without manager involvement?
• Should employees coach toward their current role, future roles, or both—and who decides?

As it turned out, what seemed straightforward at a conceptual level proved more complex once we began designing for simplicity, usability, and impact at the same time.

Looking ahead

This is the first blog in a series sharing how Personal Career Coach came to life. In the blogs ahead, we’ll explore the goals that shaped its design, the decisions and tradeoffs that followed, and the lessons we learned along the way.