This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Most managers have had exactly one hour of training in how to talk to their own people, and it was a slide about the feedback sandwich.

Everything else they learned by improvising, which is why the same conversations keep going the same way.

Where manager conversations break

The one-on-one turns into a status update, because nobody decided what it was for. Feedback gets saved up for the annual review and arrives as a list of grievances from March. The manager solves the problem instead of asking about it, so the person comes back with the next one. The mentoring programme launches with a kickoff and quietly stops in month three. And the review form gets copied from a template someone found, so it measures nothing anyone acts on.

None of this is a motivation problem. It is a skills problem, and skills can be taught.

What this course is

Thirty-four lessons across the five conversations a manager actually has. Coaching first, ten lessons of it — GROW, the balance wheel, clean language, listening, and the questions that make a person find their own answer instead of collecting yours. This is the part most managers skip and the part that changes everything downstream.

Then the one-on-one, which is where coaching lives in practice: what to do with the thirty minutes, the six types of 1:1, and how to launch them across a company including the ROI calculation that gets the project approved. Then feedback — what stops managers giving it, the six-step model, and how recognition works as part of the same system. Then mentoring: matching, preparation, the first meeting, boundaries, and how to end a mentoring relationship properly rather than letting it fade.

The two playbooks at the end

The last six lessons are different in character. They are build-alongs: you finish with a performance review form for a real employee, drawn from twelve templates and a library of 170+ competency phrasings, and a development plan on the 70-20-10 model with measures, budget and deadlines. Then the rollout for both — RACI, annual calendar, rating calibration, metrics dashboard, ROI.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. The processes here are the ones I ran, including the first mentoring programme I launched that died in month three.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Before you start

Pick one person on your team and one conversation you have been postponing. Run it after lesson seven. That single conversation will tell you more about your coaching than the rest of the course will. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.