What is leadership coaching?
Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.
Leadership coaching is a personalized and structured support program focused on developing the skills – behavioral and interpersonal – required by a leader or future leader to lead better.
Effective leadership coaching enables the coachee to better understand themselves, explore and sustainably integrate new leadership skills and behaviors, strengthen their impact, and achieve their goals. Through a structured and personalized process, leaders develop deep self-awareness and clarity on how they lead and impact others.
Unlike leadership training, which focuses on structured skill acquisition, or mentoring, which offers advice based on the mentor's experience, leadership coaching prioritizes the coachee's autonomy in developing their own solutions.
The coach's role in leadership development
Their mission is not to train, advise, or lead; it is to encourage the leader to question themselves, step back, and mobilize resources to find concrete and relevant solutions to their reality and unique challenges.
The coach acts as a benevolent but rigorous mirror, capable of confronting without offending. They create a safe space in which the leader can reflect, experiment, and develop the leadership skills and attributes that will transform them into a true leader.
The different types of leadership coaching
There are several effective leadership coaching models. The approach varies depending on the situation, challenges, and profile of the leader being coached:
- Strategic coaching: It is aimed at executives and leaders undergoing transformation, growth, or crisis to help them gain perspective, define their vision, and engage their teams. This type of leadership coaching focuses more on holistic thinking and anticipation than on individual management skills.
- Executive coaching: It targets senior executives, leaders, and managers to strengthen their leadership, strategic vision, decision-making, and team management effectiveness.
- Business coaching: It focuses on both the company's and the executive's development. Business coaching is suited to entrepreneurs and SME leaders.
- Behavioral coaching: This type of leadership coaching helps identify and modify attitudes or reactions that hinder performance or professional relationships. It aims to adopt more effective behaviors to improve communication, collaboration, and leadership.
- Onboarding coaching: It is offered to new leaders joining an organization or leaders who have recently started a management or leadership role to facilitate their integration, strengthen their legitimacy, and lay the foundation for effective leadership.
These approaches can be combined. For example, executive coaching can incorporate a strong strategic or behavioral dimension, depending on needs.
Why investing in leadership coaching is important?
Benefits for the coachee
- Self-awareness: Better understanding of your strengths, limitations, and motivations.
- Emotional intelligence: Greater ability to recognize, understand, and regulate your emotions and those of others.
- Resilience: Strengthened ability to face obstacles, bounce back from setbacks, and maintain a positive attitude.
- Emotional stability: Greater ability to manage stress and complex situations with calm and perspective.
- Strategic vision: Ability to align decisions with long-term organizational goals and anticipate strategic issues with clarity.
- Strong relationships: Improved interactions through a more open and assertive attitude.
- Self-confidence: Self-assertion in your leadership role.
Benefits for teams
- Constructive feedback: Smoother communication between leaders and employees and increased learning opportunities.
- Empowerment: Increased engagement through greater autonomy.
- Reduced tension: More peaceful conflict management and improved team cohesion.
- Engaging leadership: Ability to inspire and unite around common goals.
- Information flow: Better message transmission, both upward and downward.
- Climate of trust: More authentic and benevolent relationships between leaders and employees.
Benefits for the organization
- Strategic alignment: Managerial decisions in alignment with company priorities.
- Better collaboration: Cross-functional work facilitated and silos reduced.
- Improved change management: Transformations better accepted due to engaging leaders.
- Culture of progress: Continuous improvement dynamic.
- More agile organization: Increased ability to address complex challenges.
- Stimulation of innovation: Environment that inspires creativity, initiative, and new solutions.
51% of companies with a strong coaching culture report higher revenue than their industry peer group.
Who benefits most from leadership coaching?
The benefits of leadership coaching apply to all leaders. However, specific profiles reap significant benefits of such tailored support:
- New managers or leaders taking up their positions face decision-making isolation and the need to quickly define their managerial stance.
- Middle managers wish to develop their influence without direct hierarchical authority and are often caught between executive management's strategic expectations and floor's operational needs.
- Leaders undergoing transformation or strategic repositioning must adjust their vision, engage their teams, and make important decisions.
- Technical leaders are called upon to lead multidisciplinary teams and must transition from an expert role to an engaging managerial stance.
A third of all Fortune 500 companies utilize executive coaching as standard leadership development for their elite executives and talented up-and-comers.
When should you work with a leadership coaching expert?
Leadership coaching is relevant in transition, rapid growth, or crisis when traditional management practices – and even traditional leadership development programs – are no longer sufficient. This structure and personalized support guides the leader through their self-awareness journey and helps them reach key milestones in their professional development.
Leadership coaching programs can also be part of a preventative approach – that is before signs of weaknesses become breaking points.
Here are typical situations where leadership coaching is crucial:
- Starting a new position: Maximizing the impact of the first 90 days, establishing your leadership style, making a precise diagnosis.
- Crisis management: Adjusting your communication, keeping engagement high, leading with clarity.
- Team conflicts: Acting as a mediator, restoring trust, and pacifying relationships between team members.
- Exhaustion or disengagement: Preventing psychosocial risks, regaining a sense of purpose at work.
- Loss of impact or legitimacy: Redefining your management style by reconnecting with your natural leadership.
These transitions provide ideal opportunities to develop a growth mindset, creating effective leaders able to navigate change with resilience and confidence.
How to choose the right coach?
Choosing the right professional can make a big difference for the success of the leadership development process. It’s not only about technical skills, but also know-how and interpersonal skills. Two key factors should be given attention:
Coaching skills
An experienced coach who has supported leaders with profiles similar to yours will better understand your leadership challenges, responsibilities, and the realities of your environment. This field knowledge provides more targeted, relevant, and practical support.
Affinity with the coachee
The relationship between the coach and the coachee should be based on trust. Good communication, active listening skills, and the ability to create a space for reflection without judgment or hierarchical relationships are all signs of great compatibility.
An exploratory session is often helpful in validating affinity, not only on a personal level but also regarding teaching methods and support style.
What are the terms of leadership coaching?
Leadership coaching can take several forms depending on the organization's needs, objectives, and culture.
Formats
- Individual: This is the most common format for personalized work as it is focused on specific managerial challenges.
- Tandem: Two leaders (often at the same hierarchical level) are coached together to strengthen collaboration and co-development.
- Group: Several coachees (often from the same department or level of responsibility) work together on cross-functional issues, fostering collective intelligence.
- Hybrid: A combination of individual and group sessions to strengthen personal impact and team alignment.
Location
Coaching can be conducted face-to-face, remotely (through videoconference), or in a hybrid approach. Face-to-face coaching is preferred in most cases as it allows the coach to observe leaders’ behavior in their everyday work environment and provide guidance that is better tailored to their specific challenges (major transformation, conflict resolution, etc.).
The remote version is more flexible and may be preferred for coaching sessions like quick check-ins or coaching plan development.
Duration and frequency
On average, coaching sessions last 3 to 9 months, with a frequency of 1 session every 2 to 3 weeks. This regularity allows for long-term learning while providing time for practical application between sessions.
Tools
- Self-assessments or questionnaires (on values, sources of motivation, communication style, etc.).
- 360-degree assessments to gather different perspectives from peers, colleagues, and superiors.
- The UTrakk platform to help develop leadership coaching plans, follow up on coaching sessions, and measure the progress of coachees.
- Logbook, reflection materials, and feedback tools, as needed.
What is the leadership coaching process?
1. Assessment
This first step includes two sub-steps:
Organizational diagnostic (between the company and the management consulting firm)
This involves a process of reflection conducted by the company, often with an external partner such as Proaction International, to design customized leadership coaching programs tailored to its strategic and operational goals and organizational culture.
Objectives:
- Define the overall challenges of the leadership development program.
- Choose the support formats (individual, group, tandem, etc.).
- Identify the leaders to support.
- Determine the key leadership skills to develop.
- Align the coaching with the corporate culture and strategic business goals.
- Formalize the commitment through a contract specifying the duration and frequency of sessions, the terms and conditions, and the roles of each participant.
Individual diagnostic (between the coach and the coachee)
This step helps create personalized coaching plans, once the leadership development programs have been defined by the company.
Objectives:
- Organize an exploratory meeting to establish a connection, build trust, and validate compatibility between the coach and coachee.
- Define the coachee's objectives (e.g., cultivate better team management, build stronger assertiveness, improve communication, etc.).
- Identify key behavioral indicators to measure success of the leadership coaching plan.
2. Exploration
This second stage aims to expand leaders' awareness and self-knowledge to better understand the impact of their actions and behaviors on others.
- Assessments and diagnostic tools (personality tests, 360-degree feedback, etc.).
- Analysis of behaviors, beliefs, strengths, and challenges: The coach helps the coachee highlight their personal traits.
- In-depth work on values, leadership vision, and managerial stance.
The coach helps the coachee uncover new insights that lead to deep, transformative change.
3. Action
Once the issues are clarified, it's time to act and move from “why” to “how.” This is the transformation phase.
During regular sessions spanning the set period, the coach supports, challenges, asks specific questions, and helps the coachee implement lasting changes.
- Definition and implementation of concrete action plans aligned with set objectives.
- Experimentation with new behaviors and leadership styles in daily work.
- Regular feedback to adjust actions, reinforce what works, and correct what hinders progress.
Each session enables strategic reflection and practical implementation, both aligned with the initial objectives.
Thanks to Proaction International's coaches, our managers now feel fully confident and better prepared to fulfill their role with their teams.
Gérard Robitaille, Financial Controller in KEFOR case study
4. Consolidation
At this step, transformation has begun. The goal is to stabilize the acquired leadership skills and prepare the leader to be autonomous once the coaching is over – it’s about moving from a temporary attitude to a sustained evolution of leadership.
- Synthesis of key learnings.
- Identification of behaviors to maintain, monitor, and avoid.
- Development of a maintenance plan or post-coaching roadmap – how to maintain momentum and continue progressing independently?
- Recognition of concrete results (feedback from colleagues, progress measured against set objectives, etc.).
5. End of coaching
The coaching process ends with a final session including a debriefing and future projections. It should be conducted positively, celebrating progress, and leaving the coachee in full control of their continued development.
- Final assessment of the coachee's progress.
- Final evaluation of objectives.
- Sharing of feedback, successes, and future opportunities.
A closing meeting can be held with the company to share overall lessons learned without revealing the confidential content of the coaching sessions.
Make your leaders and organization growth
I've seen our managers flourish thanks to leadership coaching. They're more present on the floor, more confident, and they deliver with the daily management system. The approach and the digital tool enabled them to become excellent leaders.
Karen Maynard, Director of Human Resources in Zavida case study
Leadership is no longer a matter of stature, control, or certainties. Today, it relies on questioning oneself, continuously learning, actively listening, and adapting. This is precisely what leadership coaching activates – an inner transformation that has both a personal and collective impact.
The challenge goes far beyond individual development. When deployed in an organization, leadership coaching becomes a cultural trait. It paves the way for healthy, empowering, motivating, and high-performing work environments.
Coaching leadership teams and encouraging them to become coaches for their employees means instilling a new leadership style that is less directive and more motivating. This style promotes autonomy, collective intelligence, and continuous improvement – essential foundations for a sustainable performance culture.
In this sense, incorporating leadership coaching programs in your organization fully aligns with operational excellence. Investing in this type of support triggers a dynamic of long-lasting growth that spreads throughout the entire company by positioning the human capital at the center of its strategy.
So, what is leadership coaching? It is the key to high-performing, sustainable, and competitive organizations.
