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Solution-focused coaching sounds simple when we hear it. In practice, organisations ask a harder question: will it improve performance, reduce friction, and still hold up three months later when the coaching energy has faded and everyone is back in back-to-back meetings?
That is the standard Deep Impact works to. Founder Kenneth Kwan, CSP and author of Small Steps To Big Changes, has spent more than 19 years working with leaders in 40+ countries. The pattern he keeps observing: organisations are rarely looking for an inspiring conversation. They are looking for a way to make change sustainable in a workplace with hierarchy, deadlines, mixed cultures, and very little spare bandwidth.
In this article, we will look at where solution-focused coaching works best, why generic approaches often fall short, what actually changes in practice, and how to evaluate whether it is the right fit for your organisation.
Key Takeaways:
- Solution focused coaching helps people move from repeated problem analysis to visible next actions.
- Small, measurable progress tends to build momentum more reliably than broad declarations.
- It is most effective when linked to real workplace behaviours such as meetings, feedback, delegation, and follow-through.
- It works best alongside clear management structures rather than as a substitute for them.
- It can resolve complex situations when there is no clear root cause.
What Solution-Focused Coaching Means at Work
In a workplace setting, solution-focused coaching is not a motivational chat dressed up in corporate language. It is a disciplined way of helping people move from being stuck in the problem to identifying what progress would look like, what is already working, and what small next action is worth testing.
The global coaching field reflects the demand. According to the 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study, the number of coach practitioners reached a record 122,974 up 15% since 2023 generating an estimated USD 5.34 billion in annual revenue. Yet scale alone does not answer the real question.
From Problem Analysis to Next Actions
Most teams do not suffer from a lack of problem awareness; they can describe the issue in painful detail. What they often lack is a way to convert that awareness into movement.
As Kenneth Kwan writes in Small Steps To Big Changes, a fixation on problems prevents forward movement: over-diagnosing a problem can lead to a blame game, causing negative emotions such as anger, hopelessness, and defensiveness that destroy what little chance remains for a meaningful conversation.
Solution-focused coaching changes the centre of attention. Instead of asking why the issue exists, it asks:
- What is already happening when the issue is less severe?
- What would a preferred future of success look like in observable terms?
- What is the next useful action worth testing?
A 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that solution-focused questions were associated with a more positive shift in affect than problem-focused prompts. A University of Southampton meta-analysis further confirmed that psychologically informed coaching approaches including solution-focused techniques produced strong effects on goal attainment and self-efficacy. (Wang et al., Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology, 2023)
The book distils, the search is always for things that have worked well to create improvement, tracing marks of excellence and seeking to replicate them, rather than cataloguing what went wrong.
Why This Approach Appeals to Organisations Under Pressure
Organisations under pressure don’t need another programme that energises people for 48 hours and leaves no trace by the next monthly review. They need development that connects directly to work visible in the way managers delegate, escalate, and run meetings.
Solution-focused coaching fits because it is built around observable behaviour, not abstract reflection. A leader working with lean teams, high service expectations, and a full calendar cannot afford long, open-ended conversations that go nowhere.
What they can use is a structured way to identify what is already working, define what progress looks like, and take one clear action before the next session. That is what makes it practical enough to sustain.
Where It Sits Among Training, Mentoring, and Counselling
It helps to be clear about what solution-focused coaching is not, because the boundaries matter when choosing the right intervention.
Training is the right tool when someone needs to learn a skill they do not yet have.
Mentoring is the right tool when someone would benefit from the judgement and experience of a person who has done it before.
Counselling is the right tool when the issue involves emotional distress, mental health, or personal circumstances that require a different kind of professional support.
Solution-focused coaching sits in a different space. It is most useful when the person already has the resources the knowledge, the role, the experience but is struggling to translate that into consistent action. The challenge is usually behavioural and relational: how to lead a difficult conversation, how to build accountability in a team, how to influence without authority.
That is where solution-focused coaching does its best work.
Why Generic Coaching Advice Often Falls Short
A large share of coaching advice is written for a version of the workplace that rarely exists. It assumes people will speak frankly when asked, challenge ideas without consequence, and treat feedback as neutral data. In practice, the room does not operate that way.
Hierarchy shapes what is said out loud. Multicultural teams bring different norms around directness, silence, and what it means to disagree with a senior colleague.
What appears as agreement in a meeting is often more nuanced people processing, deferring, or waiting to see where authority settles before committing. Coaching that ignores these dynamics does not just underperform; it risks creating the illusion of alignment where none exists.
This is where a solution focused approach offers a more grounded alternative. Rather than pushing for a level of openness the context cannot support, it works with how the room actually functions. One of its core assumptions is that there is no single correct perspective, multiple views can coexist and still move the conversation forward.
In hierarchical or multicultural settings, this shifts the goal from forcing clarity too early to making space for perspectives before action. Instead of demanding immediate agreement, it allows alignment to form gradually and more authentically.
The practical effect is important: people are not forced to choose between honesty and self-protection. Progress happens because the conversation is structured to accommodate reality, not override it.
Hierarchy and Coaching Conversations
In many organisations, junior managers will wait for the most senior voice before revealing what they really think. A leader asks for honest input, the room nods, and the silence is almost respectful enough to be mistaken for alignment. By the time the senior voice lands, the range of possible responses has already narrowed.
In Deep Impact’s work with hierarchical, multicultural teams, one shift became clear: the coaching method had to make it genuinely safer for different perspectives to surface. The multi-partiality approach helping leaders acknowledge multiple valid positions before moving towards action supported better communication, fewer escalated conflicts, and faster decisions. The method mattered, but so did the cultural adaptation.
Accountability and Follow-Through
Polite agreement is one of the most persistent corporate illusions. Feedback is often softened to the point where the message no longer lands.
Accountability becomes diffused, as few are willing to contradict a senior stakeholder or openly challenge a colleague. The result is predictable: actions are agreed to, but behaviour does not change.
A solution-focused style reduces defensiveness by changing the direction of the conversation. Rather than asking “Why did this go wrong again?”, it moves towards “What was different the last time this worked?” or “What would a small sign of improvement look like next week?” The person remains fully accountable, simply approached in a way that produces answers rather than defence.
Small Steps To Big Changes reinforces this with a straightforward observation: clues to the solution are already in front of you. The coaching method’s job is to help people see and use them.
Where Solution-Focused Coaching Works Best
Not every workplace problem needs coaching. But there are cases where it is especially effective, where the issue is not lack of effort, but lack of traction.
First-Time Managers
First-time managers are often given a title before they are given a workable way to lead. Solution-focused coaching helps because it focuses on live managerial moments, what to do in the next one-to-one, how to ask a better question in a team check-in, how to notice early signs that accountability is slipping. Confidence becomes more believable when it comes from practice attached to real work, not from memorising leadership phrases nobody would say naturally.
Leaders Managing Change in Fast-Moving Sectors
Fast-moving sectors do not usually need more theory about change. They need ways to maintain movement when teams are already tired. A solution-focused approach fits because it breaks large change into smaller markers people can act on and review.
Small Steps To Big Changes illustrates this with the principle that small changes in the right direction lead to larger changes, building confidence incrementally rather than demanding a leap to the final goal.
Teams Needing Better Stakeholder Management
Cross-functional work often fails in an ordinary way: people keep talking about the same blockage, each function defends its constraints, the meeting ends with broad agreement and thin ownership. Solution-focused coaching shifts stakeholder conversations from blame and history towards contribution and next moves.
A case from the book “Small Steps To Big Changes” illustrates this directly. A procurement manager had spent six months trying to convince a Quality Department to accept a process change, meeting resistance at every turn.
After applying solution-focused questioning, shifting from diagnosing the problem to asking what needed to happen for the other party to say yes, he made more progress in a single conversation than in the previous half year.
High-Potential Talent Preparing for Wider Roles
High-potential employees need judgement, influence, and the ability to operate beyond their technical home ground. Solution-focused coaching connects development to role transition, helping future leaders explore what successful influence would look like with regional peers and which behaviours will signal readiness to senior stakeholders. For succession planning, that is far more useful than generic executive presence advice.
What a Solution-Focused Engagement Looks Like
Framing Goals Around Business Outcomes
A workplace engagement begins by clarifying the business context and the behaviours that need to change. Goals are framed in work terms: “Be more confident” is too vague. “Run weekly team check-ins with clearer ownership and fewer unresolved escalations” is a much stronger coaching target because people can observe it.
Sessions, Between-Session Action, and the Small Steps Principle
During sessions, the conversation is guided towards desired outcomes, exceptions, progress markers, and the next small action worth trying. Between sessions, the real work happens in the workplace small actions are tested, interactions are noticed, and participants return with evidence from actual situations rather than abstract reflection.
This rhythm reflects the core insight of Small Steps To Big Changes: momentum grows through action that is small enough to be repeated and visible enough to matter. Just as a trainer raises expectations incrementally, never demanding the full leap on the first attempt, effective coaching builds confidence through achievable wins rather than setting people up for failure with unrealistic targets.
Reviewing Progress
Progress needs to be reviewed, but should not be reduced to false precision. Useful reviews combine behavioural signals with business indicators: Has the manager delegated more clearly? Are fewer issues bouncing back unresolved? Is the team escalating earlier? Have cross-functional meetings become shorter or more decisive? This gives leaders enough evidence to judge whether coaching is affecting work without turning the process into a box-ticking exercise.
How Organisations Measure Whether It Is Working
The earliest signs are behavioural rather than financial: clearer delegation, fewer emotionally loaded escalations, more specific commitments in meetings. Teams notice that difficult conversations become shorter, calmer, and more useful.
A 2024 leadership coaching effectiveness study found that 87% of coachees reported improved confidence, with 88% of C-suite executives ranking culture improvement as a top organisational priority (Dion Leadership, 2024).
These are not soft signals. They are the first operational signs that thinking is changing what the book describes as the shift from amplifying useless change to identifying and amplifying genuinely useful change.
Operational Metrics to Track
- Engagement or pulse survey movement
- Retention in teams facing managerial strain
- Reduction in operational errors or rework loops
- Faster cycle times or shorter escalation paths
- Stronger cross-functional delivery measures
- Adoption rates for new processes or systems
Case Study –(Ken- I am not able to recall anything and WILL NOT be able to write this)
How to Choose the Right Solution Focused Coaching Partner
Start with credibility but do not stop at certificates.
Look for recognised credentials, evidence of leadership development work, and real experience in workplace settings similar to yours.
Test for cultural and sectoral relevance, a provider who has only worked in low-hierarchy environments may struggle in public sector or Asian organisational contexts where deference patterns shape discussion.
Format should match the problem. One-to-one coaching fits role transition and senior leadership judgement.
Team coaching fits cross-functional friction and alignment. Manager-as-coach formats often offer the best scale, building coaching capability into daily leadership rather than keeping it external.
Practical questions to ask any provider:
- How is confidentiality handled between participant and provider?
- How is success defined in observable workplace terms?
- How is consistency maintained over time?
What Actually Changes with Solution Focused Coaching
The strength of the answers matters more than the polish of the proposal.
Senior leaders do not need to be convinced that development matters. They have seen enough programmes, sat through enough workshops, and signed off on enough budgets to know the difference between something that shifts thinking and something that simply fills a calendar.
The question they bring to every serious investment is more specific: will this change how my people operate not on the day, not in the debrief, but three months later when the pressure is back, and the room is full?
Solution-focused coaching is built for that question. It does not work by inspiring people toward a better version of themselves.
It works by identifying what is already functioning, making progress visible in operational terms, and anchoring behaviour change to actions small enough to survive a demanding week.
That is not a modest ambition, it is the only kind of change that compounds.
Small Steps To Big Changes grounds this in a principle that is easy to overlook at senior levels: the signals of what works are already present in every organisation. The job is not to import a new model, it is to identify what is already producing results and build the conditions to do more of it.
For leaders responsible for culture, performance, and succession, that reframe changes where they direct attention and how they judge progress.
Deep Impact has applied this across complex organisations government agencies, large healthcare systems, regional MNCs where hierarchy is real, stakes are high, and the tolerance for development that does not translate is low. The work holds because it is designed for those conditions, not despite them.
If the goal is lasting change at the leadership level, the conversation worth having is not about coaching as a concept. It is about what your organisation needs to operate differently.
Talk to Deep Impact about solution focused coaching for leaders and teams
Frequently Asked Questions
Is solution-focused coaching suitable for senior leaders?
Yes, if it is tied to business outcomes. Senior leaders respond best when coaching is connected to decision quality, stakeholder influence, culture, and team performance not personal reflection in isolation.
How long does it take to show results?
Some behavioural shifts can be noticed within weeks, especially in meetings, delegation, and escalation patterns. Broader operational or culture changes usually take longer and depend on manager support, role clarity, and whether the organisation reinforces the new behaviour.
Can solution-focused coaching replace leadership training?
No. Training builds knowledge and skill; solution-focused coaching helps leaders apply those capabilities to live workplace challenges and sustain action after the learning event. They do different jobs and work best in combination.
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