Coaching in the flow of work
The training was in March. The conversation is at 3pm today.
Shiken coaches your leaders in the moment — in Slack, Teams or the browser — through the difficult conversation, the performance review, the reorg. Grounded in your frameworks, everything it remembers about them, and the systems you already run.
Trusted by 30k+ people from top universities & businesses across the world
The moment of need
Nobody opens a course before a hard conversation
They message someone. The question is whether the thing they message understands them, and whether it can do anything about it.
It notices, rather than waiting to be booked
Scheduled check-ins, goal nudges and morning briefings run on their own cron and land in Teams or Slack — before the 1:1, not a fortnight after it went badly.
It already knows the person
It carries a persistent memory of every conversation, plus their goals, commitments, scored practice and their own recorded 1:1s — so nobody has to re-explain themselves before they can get help.
It does the thing, not just describes it
Logs the commitment, books the check-in, drafts the message, pulls the number from your CRM, assigns the content that closes the gap.
Coaching in the wild
What leaders actually ask, and what comes back
Sample conversations, not case studies — the question as it was typed, where it was typed, and the first few seconds of the answer.
I have to tell Priya she didn't get the promotion. 1:1 is at 3. How do I open it without her shutting down?
Open with the decision, not the context — you tend to bury the headline and it reads as hedging. Try: "Priya, the panel didn't move you to Lead this cycle. I want to walk you through why, and what I'm doing about it." Then stop talking. Two things to have ready…
- Your last 6 1:1 recordings
- Promotion framework
- Your feedback profile
Rehearsing a difficult conversation, ten minutes before it happens
Engineering Manager · Financial Services
41 sessions
The coach knew this manager softens bad news before they said a word — it is a recurring pattern in their own recorded 1:1s, read against the org’s feedback framework. Generic coaching hands you a script. A coach that has been in your meetings names the specific habit that will sink this particular conversation.
My review said I "lack strategic altitude". Honestly, what does that mean for me day to day?
Your scored practice and call reviews · last 90 days
- Framing the why6 sessions
- Delegation9 sessions
- Coaching others11 sessions
- Decision quality7 sessions
- Roleplay scores
- Call reviews
- Leadership framework
Turning a development theme into something to do on Monday
Senior Manager · Global Manufacturing
58 sessions
A review comment is a phrase nobody can act on. Read against this person’s own scored practice and real call reviews, and against the leadership framework the org actually uses, it becomes a two-line diagnosis and a concrete next move — months after the debrief, at the moment they thought to ask.
My team found out about the restructure from the all-hands, not from me. Half of them think their jobs are gone. What do I say on Monday?
Say the hard part first, in the team channel, before the Monday stand-up. Three moves:
- 1Name what they already know, including that you were not able to tell them first.
- 2Separate the two questions in the room: "is my job safe" and "who do I report to". Answer the second one now.
- 3Book 15 minutes with each person this week. Do not do this as a team meeting.
- Change comms pack
- Org announcement
- Your team roster
Coaching through a reorg the coach already knows about
Regional Director · Retail
33 sessions
The coach had already ingested the change-management pack HR published that morning, so it coached to this company’s restructure rather than to change management in the abstract. Leaders stop having to explain their own context before they can get help.
Is it normal to be this bad at this? I think I'm the wrong person for the job.
Nine weeks in, at the point where the job stops being the job you were promoted out of. That is the standard shape of it, not a signal. Let's look at what actually happened this week rather than the feeling…
- Your coaching history
- Manager onboarding path
A first-time manager asking the question they would never raise with HR
First-time Manager · Healthcare
12 sessions
This is the question that never reaches a human coach, because there is no human coach — and it would not be asked of one anyway. Reaching every manager instead of the top 1% is the whole point of coaching at this price.
Before my QBR — is my team's pipeline actually as bad as I think it is?
Pipeline coverage by rep · this quarter · from Salesforce
- Dani R.3.1x coverage
- Marcus O.1.9x coverage
- Yuki T.3.4x coverage
- Sam P.1.1x coverage
- Salesforce
- Last 12 call recordings
Pulling the real numbers into the coaching, not the remembered ones
Sales Director · SaaS
74 sessions
The answer arrived in the chat as a chart, from the CRM, in the ten minutes before the meeting. Coaching that can read the system of record stops being a conversation about feelings and becomes a conversation about Sam.
That went better than I expected. Can you hold me to the two things I said I would do?
Logged both commitments against your development goal. I will check in Thursday at 9, and again the day before your next 1:1 with Priya.
Created 2 commitments · scheduled 2 check-ins
- Your goals
- Your calendar
Coaching that writes the follow-up as well as giving the advice
Engineering Manager · Financial Services
41 sessions
The gap between good advice and changed behaviour is the follow-through. Because the agent can write — goals, commitments, scheduled check-ins, a nudge in the channel you already live in — the coaching does not end when you close the tab.
Explain our retry/backoff design to me like I have to defend it to the CFO on Thursday.
Three sentences, no jargon: "Payments occasionally fail for reasons outside our control. The system now retries them automatically on a widening schedule instead of dropping them. It recovers about £40k a month that we used to write off." Then the one slide…
- Architecture docs
- Incident reviews
- Finance pack
The same coach, at the depth the question needs
Product Architect · Global Technology
67 sessions
A Product Architect used Shiken for deep technical debugging in one conversation and C-suite narrative in the next, and the quality held in both directions. One agent, your knowledge base, and enough context about the person to know which register they need.
I have to write Marcus's review and all I can remember is the last month. Help.
Pulled the year rather than the last month. Four things worth writing about:
- 1Q1: led the migration nobody wanted to own — three of your 1:1s reference it, no review draft does.
- 2Q2 dip lines up with the team change, not with him.
- 3Discovery depth is his one consistent gap across 14 recorded calls.
- 4Recency bias check: your draft spends 60% of its words on the last six weeks.
- 1:1 recordings
- Call scores
- Goal history
Performance conversations, grounded in what actually happened
Sales Director · SaaS
74 sessions
Recency bias is the most expensive flaw in performance management, and it is a memory problem. A coach that has been in the room all year fixes it without anyone having to keep better notes.
Where are my frontline leads actually struggling? Not what they tell me — what the data says.
Gap vs role target · frontline leads · 84 people plotted
- Difficult conversations52 below target
- Prioritisation32 below target
- Delegation20 below target
- Giving recognition9 below target
- Competency framework
- Diagnostics
- Coaching themes
Answers that stop being about the manager and start being about the org
Head of L&D · Logistics
29 sessions
Every coaching conversation is also a signal. Aggregated — never per person, never a readable transcript — they tell an L&D team where the organisation is actually weak, which is a far better needs analysis than a survey nobody fills in.
Illustrative examples built from the way the product is used. Names and figures are fictionalised.
Personalised, not generic
Enterprise knowledge, personalised to the individual, when they need it
Most AI coaches know the person only from what they type. Shiken is also the platform holding your framework, their practice scores and their real conversations — so the coaching starts targeted instead of getting there eventually.
Your IP
Your leadership framework, competency model and change packs, uploaded as knowledge and bound to the coach — so it coaches to how your organisation says this is done, with every answer cited back to the document it came from.
The individual
A persistent memory profile, their goals and commitments, their scored roleplays and the reviews of their real calls and 1:1s. The coach opens knowing what happened last time, not asking them to summarise it.
The organisation
Meetings, docs, CRM, helpdesk and calendar — read through the permissions of the person asking, with every answer cited back to the meeting, doc or video it came from.
The assessment layer is Skills Intelligence, and the practice layer is roleplay and scoring. Both feed the same coach.
It takes action
Advice is where most coaching stops. Here it is the halfway point.
The coach has tools, not just opinions — so the follow-through is built into the conversation rather than left to the leader's memory.
Where it lives
One coach, one memory, every channel your leaders already use
A conversation that starts in Teams continues in the browser. No new app, no separate login, no re-explaining yourself.
Slack
DM or in-channel, with proactive nudges
Microsoft Teams
Bot DM and proactive cards
Website / intranet widget
Embed anywhere, SSO-aware
For frontline and field leaders
Coach room
Voice and avatar sessions with goals and commitments
Integrations
The answer is only as good as what it can read
Connect the CRM, calendar, drive, helpdesk and HR systems your leaders already work in, and the coaching stops being generic advice about pipeline and starts being about Sam.
3,200+ apps through managed connectors, plus a public API and webhooks on every plan.
Leaders tell it things they would never tell HR
That only holds if the transcript stays out of the dashboard. Retention defaults to summaries and commitments rather than full transcripts, admin reporting is cohort-level, and there is no path from an org report to an individual conversation.
Coaching at scale
Human coaching reaches your top 1%. This reaches the other 99%.
The leaders who need coaching most are the ones no coaching budget has ever reached: first-time managers, frontline supervisors, shift leads. Per-seat pricing and a free tier mean the constraint is your rollout plan, not your budget.
See pricingSecurity
Safe to point at your actual people data
The coach sees only what you connect it to, answers with the permissions of the person asking, and cites where each answer came from.
Coaching in the flow of work FAQs
Coaching that reaches a leader at the moment the problem is in front of them — the message before the difficult 1:1, the question at 11pm before a performance review, the reorg announcement they found out about in the all-hands. It lives in Slack, Teams, WhatsApp or a widget on your intranet rather than in a course they have to remember to open, and it carries the same memory across every one of those channels.
Put a coach in the room before the conversation, not after it.
Bring your leadership framework and the systems your leaders already work in. We'll show you the coaching your managers get on day one.