What Is a Coaching Mindset? Evidence, Growth and Change at Work
Every coaching conversation is shaped by two sets of beliefs: what the coach believes about the person in front of them, and what that person believes about their own capacity to change.
The term ‘coaching mindset’ often brings these beliefs together, even though they describe very different things: The first is the professional stance of the coach: curious, collaborative and open to the coachee’s capacity to think, learn and act; the second is the coachee’s belief that their own skills and capabilities can develop.
The two are related, but they are not interchangeable.
Without this distinction, a coaching mindset can become vague shorthand for positive thinking: ask good questions, believe in potential and assume that change will follow. Research presents a more complex picture. Coaching can support learning, performance, wellbeing and goal attainment, but its effects vary across people, approaches and contexts. The coaching relationship matters. So do motivation, opportunity, resources and the way work is designed (1, 2, 3).
For Kinwork, a coaching mindset is therefore best understood in two parts:
The professional stance of the coach, and
The coachee’s beliefs about learning and change.
Keeping these meanings distinct gives coaching greater precision - and helps us understand both its possibilities and its limits.
Photo courtesy Karolina Gabrowska and Kaboompics
The coach’s mindset: a disciplined professional stance
A coach’s mindset is not simply to be supportive or encouraging.
Nor does it mean the coach has to pretend they have no expertise on a particular matter.
Rather, a coach’s mindset is a disciplined way of entering and driving the conversation: attending closely, testing assumptions, sharing power and helping the coachee (client) develop their own understanding and agency.
The value of this stance becomes clearer when we consider the research on relationships, agency and change:
1) The relationship is part of the work
Coaching is a relational practice. In a study of 156 coach – coachee pairs, the coachee’s perceptions of coaching outcomes were significantly associated with their assessment of the working alliance, their own self-efficacy and the range of techniques used by the coach (4).
In practical terms, the working coaching alliance involves more than rapport: it includes sufficient trust, agreement about the purpose of the coaching and a shared understanding of how the work will proceed. A coach may have excellent questions and a sophisticated model, but these are unlikely to land well if the client feels judged, directed or misunderstood.
2) Agency is supported, not assumed
Self-determination theory proposes that people function more effectively when their needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness are supported. A large meta-analysis drawing on 881 independent samples found that interpersonal support for these needs was positively associated with need satisfaction, more autonomous motivation, wellbeing and performance (5).
A coaching stance therefore should not manufacture dependence on the coach. It should support the coachee to make meaningful choices, build capability and remain connected to relevant people and resources.
Importantly, autonomy support does not mean leaving someone without structure. Rather, it can include listening to the coachee’s perspective, offering a meaningful rationale, clarifying expectations, giving usable feedback and preserving choice wherever possible. The balance is important: too much direction can reduce ownership, while unstructured questioning can feel evasive when a client needs information, challenge or practical guidance.
3) The coach’s beliefs affect what they notice
The coach also brings assumptions about who can change, how quickly and under what conditions. Research with managers found that beliefs about whether personal attributes are relatively fixed or capable of development influenced managers’ inclination to coach employees. Across three studies, managers who held more developmental beliefs were more likely to engage in coaching, and an intervention designed to shift these beliefs increased the quality of their coaching intentions and suggestions (6).
This does not mean that a coach should assume every goal is attainable. A credible developmental stance holds two ideas at once: people can learn, and change is constrained by health, opportunity, power, resources, time and context. The coach’s mindset is therefore not limitless optimism. It is informed openness: resisting premature conclusions while remaining alert to evidence and constraints.
The coachee’s mindset: beliefs about learning and change
The second meaning is closer to the psychological concept of a ‘growth mindset’. This describes the belief that a particular capability can develop, rather than being entirely fixed (7).
Research on implicit theories (i.e. research on personal, unstated beliefs) suggests that personal beliefs can shape self-regulation. A meta-analysis of 113 independent samples found that more incremental beliefs were associated with patterns such as learning-oriented goals, mastery strategies and more adaptive responses during goal pursuit (8). In the workplace, this can matter when someone is learning a role, returning after injury, responding to feedback or adapting to changed demands.
Yet, growth mindset is often oversold.
Although much of the established growth-mindset literature was developed in education, a smaller but growing body of workplace research now examines coaching, helping and employee development:
Heslin et al. (2006) found that managers with more incremental beliefs about personal attributes were more inclined to coach employees (6)
Across a pilot study and five experiments, Rogers et al. (2023) found that a work-specific growth-mindset intervention increased employee helping. The effect depended partly on whether helping could support the development of both the helper and the colleague receiving support (9)
Wingen et al. (2024) conducted four preregistered studies involving 2,295 participants. Growth mindset was consistently associated with greater willingness to coach, largely through stronger expectations that coaching would help (10).
Importantly, the evidence is promising, yet still emerging.
The responsible conclusion is therefore neither that growth mindset is irrelevant nor that it is a universal solution. Rather, it is that mindset is one influence among many.
Where the two meanings meet
The coach’s mindset and stance shapes the conditions of the coaching conversation.
The coachee’s mindset shapes how they personally interpret challenge, feedback and the possibility of learning.
Each may influence the other, but neither operates in isolation.
A coach who genuinely expects development may be more willing to listen, persist and offer useful challenge.
A coachee who begins to see a capability as developable may become more willing to experiment, seek feedback or try a different strategy.
Yet neither belief can create resources that do not exist, remove an unsafe workload or repair an unjust system by itself.
This is especially important in workplace and occupational health contexts.
Work-design research shows that autonomy, demands, role structure, social relationships and other work characteristics shape worker performance and wellbeing (11).
Research on job-stress interventions has identified that individual-focused approaches can improve some individual outcomes, but tend not to produce organisation-level change; whilst approaches that include organisational change are better placed to affect both levels (12), and
Lovejoy et al (2021) similarly argues for changing the conditions that generate harm, including excessive demands, limited worker voice and insufficient support (13).
This demonstrates a clear boundary.
Coaching can help someone understand their situation, build capability, make decisions and identify where action is possible, but it cannot make an unreasonable workload reasonable, turn insecure employment into safety or transfer an employer’s responsibility for healthy work onto the individual.
What a coaching mindset looks like in practice
A responsible coaching mindset is visible in the quality of attention and judgment a practitioner brings to the work. It may involve asking:
What am I assuming about this person, their capacity or their situation?
Whose goal are we working towards?
Have I understood before moving to action?
Am I supporting agency, or subtly directing the client towards my preferred answer?
Does the client need a question, a reflection, information, challenge or referral?
What capability could be developed, and what practice or feedback would support it?
What environmental conditions could enable or obstruct change?
Is this issue within the client’s influence, the organisation’s responsibility, or both?
Am I staying within my competence and scope?
These questions move coaching beyond conversational technique. They require reflexivity: the capacity to notice how the coach’s expertise, values, role and power are shaping what happens next.
They also create room for different forms of help. At times, the most useful response will be an exploratory question for the coachee to consider. At others times, it may be clear information, a practical resource, consultation with the workplace or referral to another professional.
The coaching mindset should improve professional judgment, not replace it.
References
Cannon-Bowers, J. A., Bowers, C. A., Carlson, C. E., Doherty, S. L., Evans, J., & Hall, J. (2023). Workplace coaching: a meta-analysis and recommendations for advancing the science of coaching [Systematic Review]. Frontiers in psychology, Volume 14 - 2023. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1204166
Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., & Guillaume, Y. R. F. (2016). The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta-analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of occupational and organizational psychology, 89(2), 249-277. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12119
Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2013.837499
de Haan, E., & Nilsson, V. O. (2023). What Can We Know about the Effectiveness of Coaching? A Meta-Analysis Based Only on Randomized Controlled Trials. Academy of Management learning & education, 22(4), 641-661. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2022.0107
Slemp, G. R., Field, J. G., Ryan, R. M., Forner, V. W., Van den Broeck, A., & Lewis, K. J. (2024). Interpersonal supports for basic psychological needs and their relations with motivation, well-being, and performance: A meta-analysis [doi:10.1037/pspi0000459]. American Psychological Association.
Heslin, P. A., Vandewalle, D. O. N., & Latham, G. P. (2006). Keen to help? Managers’ implicit person theories and their subsequent employee coaching. Personnel Psychology, 59(4), 871-902. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2006.00057.x
Dweck, C. S., & Yeager, D. S. (2019). Mindsets: A View From Two Eras. Perspect Psychol Sci, 14(3), 481-496. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618804166
Burnette, J. L., O'Boyle, E. H., VanEpps, E. M., Pollack, J. M., & Finkel, E. J. (2013). Mind-Sets Matter: A Meta-Analytic Review of Implicit Theories and Self-Regulation. Psychological bulletin, 139(3), 655-701. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029531
Rogers, B. A., Christian, J. S., Jennings, R. E., & Lanaj, K. (2023). The Growth Mindset at Work: Will Employees Help Others to Develop Themselves? Academy of Management discoveries, 9(1), 67-92. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2021.0144
Wingen, S., Graczyk, T., Wingen, T., & Dohle, S. (2024). Mindsets at Work: Understanding the Positive Impact of Growth Mindsets on Workplace Coaching. Basic and applied social psychology, 46(5), 381-397. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2024.2382718
Parker, S. K., Morgeson, F. P., & Johns, G. (2017). One Hundred Years of Work Design Research: Looking Back and Looking Forward. Journal of applied psychology, 102(3), 403-420. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000106
Lamontagne, A. D., Keegel, T., Louie, A. M., Ostry, A., & Landsbergis, P. A. (2007). A Systematic Review of the Job-stress Intervention Evaluation Literature, 1990-2005. International journal of occupational and environmental health, 13(3), 268-280. https://doi.org/10.1179/oeh.2007.13.3.268
Lovejoy, M., Kelly, E. L., Kubzansky, L. D., & Berkman, L. F. (2021). Work Redesign for the 21st Century: Promising Strategies for Enhancing Worker Well-Being. American journal of public health (1971), 111(10), 1787-1795. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306283