What Is Leadership Coaching?
In the words of Bill Gates, “Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.”
This sentiment rings especially true in today’s complex business environment. Leadership coaching – a professional development practice once reserved for underperformers – has become a strategic tool for high-achieving corporate executives. As organizations face rapid change and heightened competition, leadership coaching is emerging as a key to unlocking executives’ full potential and driving organizational success.
Leadership coaching is a one-on-one developmental partnership between an executive and a trained coach aimed at enhancing the executive’s leadership skills, self-awareness, and effectiveness. Rather than a consultant who gives direct advice, a coach acts as a confidential sounding board and guide. As coaching pioneer John Whitmore famously defined, “Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance; it is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.”
In practice, this means a coach uses insightful questions, feedback, and goal-setting to help leaders find their own solutions to challenges. A good leadership coach provides an outside perspective that even top executives can rarely get elsewhere. Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt observed that “the one thing people are never good at is seeing themselves as others see them. A coach really, really helps.”
By holding up a mirror to an executive’s behaviors and decisions, coaches increase self-awareness and reveal blind spots. This process is distinctly different from traditional training or mentoring: the coach doesn’t impose answers, but guides the executive to new insights and actions. The result is personalized, continuous learning for leaders who must constantly adapt in order to stay effective.