Coaching Conversations in 2025
Coaching Conversations with Tim Hagen, where we teach leaders and managers how to coach their employees. This is the ideal podcast for leaders, managers, and aspiring leaders to improve their coaching and leadership skills to create a more positive coaching culture within their teams.
In 2025, we're doing weekly podcasts on various coaching topics and strategies that will rotate throughout the month, as opposed to 2024 where the weekly episodes featured a monthly theme. Coaching Conversations will continue to have four episodes per month and we're going to sprinkle in masterclasses, which will be lengthier, workshop-style formats.
We also invite you to join the new FREE e-publication, the Workplace Coaching Times founded by Tim Hagen. This weekly newsletter contains expert insights on coaching strategies on specific topics like sales coaching, leading with empathy, and self-awareness techniques, and much more. We're a community of leaders, managers and coaches transforming workplace challenges into coaching victories—one conversation at a time. Subscribe here: https://coachingtimes.beehiiv.com/subscribe
Coaching Conversations in 2025
Coaching Nudges That Move People
Welcome to Coaching Conversations
We have created a NEW and Innovative line of books called Workplace Coaching Books. These books use QR codes with embedded audio and video lessons speaking directly to the reader. Each book comes with assessments and journal based coaching pages where they document what they've learned and what they've applied. In addition each book comes with the self analysis link that prompts them to share what they've learned and what they've put into action leading to greater learner application a
Coaching Talks is a dynamic leadership development speaking series customized to your needs. Need help spreading the value and application of workplace coaching? Let us help:
We provide many styles of speaking services:
- We provide virtual keynotes
- We specialize in 4 part virtual series (we always customize)
- We have a unique feature called "Speaker Tracks" where we send to all audience members reinforcement lessons after the talk (to the pc or cell phone), thus keeping people on track after the talk
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So, what is a coaching nudge? You know, recently we just redid our version of something called spot coaching. So there are three types of coaching: situational coaching when a situation is brought to our attention, like a project or employee knocking on the boss's door, and then observational coaching, which is very prevalent in the retail space where you can't really have formal coaching in front of customers, right? And so when you think about coaching, being observational, we tend to be triggered by what? Positive things or things we want to correct or fix. It's usually things we want to correct or fix. So, with that being said, what that really does for us is it leads into this thing called continuous coaching, which is, you know, really the foundation of what we teach here at Progress Coaching. But I have to tell you, I've fallen in love with spot coaching, and it's a form of a coaching nudge. You know, when I coach boys volleyball every year, I didn't care how good my team was. And my friend Chris Decker at Aurora, the CEO, would send me stuff, and he still does to this day, you know, videos from Nick Saban. And I was always an Alabama football fan. But what Saban would do, and people always thought he was so intense, you know, they'd be up 65 to nothing against Troy State. And people are like, why are you so intense? There's two minutes. Why don't you smile? And he goes, Because the process is completion. The process is, I owe it to the guys who are third and fourth string. I am not going to let down my intensity because it'll come off like I don't care. And he talks a lot about process. I think there's a process that goes on in our workplace. I think the process can be positive, neutral, or negative. When you think about workplace cultures, there's a process that led to that. The conversations that have been had, the conversations that have been allowed. Yet we don't really proactively think about getting up in the morning and saying, honey, I got to get in early. I want to prep for today and make it a great day for my employees. That typically doesn't happen universally at companies with all leaders. I'm sure some people do. And so what coaching nudges are is nudging. You are nudging people forward. It could be a note on the desk. It could be a card sent home. Recently, I just sent two books to clients saying, thank you for everything. They had provided me some referrals, sent them a couple books. You would have thought I built a Mount Rushmore. It's just a book through Amazon, but it's the gestures. We can help people feel great. Because you know what? During the day, they get a call from home. They get a call from the friend. Their boss might call them into the office and maybe something went sideways. There are things that we react to during the day that just don't make us feel great. But what if we as leaders, what if we as teammates were proactively looking for creative ways to nudge people forward? Now I often share this concept of change hill. Change hill is steep, it's muddy, and when it rains, it gets sloppy, and people will slide back to the bottom of the mountain while they're climbing it. And they will inevitably make a decision. Do I even want to try and go back up that hill again? That's where we need to grab our hand, put it in the small part of their back, and nudge them back up that hill. I know it's a little cliche, yet the fact of the matter is coaching nudges work. Now, for 30 some years I've been coaching volleyball. I don't care how good my teams are. And I remember, and I still remember, because I still talk to the dad. The dad came up to me once, he goes, How can you not get angry? They're playing terrible. Why aren't you yelling at them? And I said, Well, first of all, I don't, they're not my kids. I don't have a kid in the program. Number two, we will get there. There's a process. And I know if I get upset, they get upset. See, emotion triggers the same emotion. So when I get mad at you and yell at you, does it calm me down? Yet if I'm calm, doesn't it give you a perspective of, yeah, maybe I ought to be calmer? So the fact of the matter is that we have to be proactively thinking about fueling people's minds, fueling their brain, fueling their emotional state. Think about this just fundamentally. If you had a boss who called you into the office, put a note on your desk, sent a book home, called you back into the office at the end of the week, and his or her boss is in there with you, and the boss only praises you, how are you feeling right now hearing that? I'm pretty sure it didn't depress you. Probably got you feeling pretty good. Coaching nudges are powerful. So when I think about our course spot coaching, we literally teach in our course three to one ratio. Go look, schedule time, go look for the good stuff, and literally create tally marks on a sheet of paper by each employee's name on that's on your team of the number of positive nudges you gave versus constructive. And recently I just had a manager come back and say, Yeah, everyone's wondering what's going on. Our numbers are up, our metrics are up, our KPIs are up. And I remember somebody asking me, you know, what are you doing with that team? I mean, they're doing amazing. I go, they're just being positive. I mean, that's really kind of it. Now, we're getting into the formal parts of continuous coaching because nudges last so long. They last maybe an hour or two, maybe a day. If I give someone a handwritten note, 364 days later, they don't remember that note. Boy, they remember how I made them feel week by week. So, what are you gonna do to nudge your people forward?