What is Leadership Coaching? A Guide for Emerging Leaders
Leadership coaching: youâve seen it on LinkedIn. Heard it at conferences. Maybe even nodded along in a meeting about the new company initiative.
Is coaching worth your time and money? Or is it another place where youâll hear endless talk about "synergy"?
Leadership coaching is a structured, personalized process that helps leaders, or those folks on their way, improve communication, emotional awareness, decision-making, and overall team impact.
Leadership coaching isnât a fad. Itâs how well-intentioned but human managers stop winging it and start really leading.
For folks in leadership positions â managers, team leaders, senior executives â developing critical leadership skills while refining their personal leadership style is a must-have. Think of leadership coaches like personal trainers â not for your body, but your brain.
After all, some of the skills you're building on as a leader include emotional awareness, resilience, and the ability to inspire others â without losing your mind.
With corporate bosses expecting more from less, professionals today find themselves turning to coaching to better understand and communicate the impact of their work.
Whether you're leading a skunkworks project or heading an entire department, working with a trusted, external partner like a coach can be the difference between spinning in circles and becoming a leader who drives the company forward.
What Leadership Coaching Actually Is
Leadership coaching is not therapy, mentoring, or consulting. Itâs its own thing.
Leadership coaching helps you become a more effective leader by unlocking whatâs already there, focusing on the next most impactful step, and reminding you of your potential all along the ride. There are many different approaches and leadership coaching strategies, but it should never be seen as a fix.
A coach doesn't tell you what to do. Instead, a good coach helps you clarify your goals, recognize your strengths, see potential roadblocks before they happen, push back on assumptions, and build habits that align with the kind of person you say you want to become â in other words, a good coach brings true partnership, accountability, and high standards.
Why Invest in Leadership Coaching
Coaching goes far beyond performance reviews and quarterly targets â when done right.
Coaches work with clients to truly understand their personal goals, responsibilities, challenges, and ultimately what drives them under the hood. This can look like intake forms, discovery chats, and assessments, but varies for each client and coach relationship.
A good leadership coach asks powerful questions, guides strategic thinking, and holds you accountable throughout the coaching process. The more honest, vulnerable, and committed you are, the more likely youâll have success.
Working with a coach can completely transform how you lead, think, and collaborate. It can unlock promotions, higher salaries, and career shifts that bring exactly the energy you crave.
Benefits of Leadership Coaching
After alignment, your coach will suggest an approach that fits your specific needs and goals for personal growth. Staying committed between coaching sessions makes all the difference, otherwise progress may stall out.
If youâre aiming to build communication skills or boost emotional intelligence (also called emotional awareness)? Your coach might recommend targeted tools, exercises, or workshops. But attending is just the start, you'll only gain the experience from implementing what youâre learning as you go.
By working with a coach who holds you accountable, over time, youâll get a real grip on what makes a strong leader who creates strong teams. Coaching helps you better understand your team members, build strong relationships, and manage direct reports with clarity and empathy.
Coaching pushes you toward leadership potential, helping you align your personal values with your professional actions. It also helps you to learn how to recognize your emotions, and when others may be responding emotionally in real-time. This is a key aspect for handling pressure, conflict, and unforeseen challenges that arise in the workplace.
What to Expect During the Coaching Process
Leadership coaching is not a one-time conversation or a feel-good pep talk. Itâs a strategic, personalized process that unfolds in stages through active listening, honest dialogue, and candid feedback.
Each phase is designed to help leaders develop the tools they need to develop new skills and lead with clarity, confidence, and consistency.
Hereâs a quick break down of the core steps in the coaching journey, though it looks different coach to coach:
Initial Assessment
Before getting into the work, a coach will begin with a comprehensive assessment.
This step seeks to gain insights into your strengths, opportunities, and current approach. You might go through 360-degree feedback, personality assessments (like DiSC or MBTI), or in-depth interviews to evaluate your leadership style, communication skills, and how your team members perceive you.
Itâs also when you clarify your personal goals, career goals, and any specific workplace or team challenges you need to actively support.
Coaching Sessions
Think of coaching as a relationship built over time.
Once your goals are clear, you and your coach will meet regularly for focused, confidential sessions, usually between 30-60 minutes at a time.
This looks for everyone, but these are not random chats. Theyâre structured dialogues meant to help you explore your challenges in a brave space, reflect on your behavior, and explore new ways to lead more effectively.
Each session might center around a specific topic, such as handling conflict, delegating responsibilities, or leading through organizational change, but itâs up to you to steer the conversation and bring talking points for your coach to respond to.
The coach acts as a sounding board, offering fresh perspectives, strategic insight, and honest, constructive feedback.
Unlike traditional management training, this is about real-world application. Youâll often bring current situations to the table, such as difficult conversations with team members, high-stakes presentations, or leadership dilemmas and get practical support to navigate them in return.
Progress updates
No growth plan is perfect from the start â thatâs where regular check-ins and other progress updates come in. These touchpoints are designed to share quick updates, get help about a specific challenge in the moment, make adjustments, and celebrate wins.
Staying connected to the coaching process between sessions means the coaching work stays aligned with your evolving priorities, especially if youâre juggling multiple roles or shifting into a leadership position with more responsibility.
These can be tracked asynchronously, and can also be audio notes, allowing freeform, messy thoughts to develop between sessions in a trusted space.
Staying in sync helps you generate more momentum and accountability, so your coach can do a better job keeping your eyes on your destination and avoiding burnout.
Action Plans
Applying what you learn is how the impact becomes real. A coach will work with you to co-create personalized action plans, sometimes built using frameworks like the GROW model (Goal, Reality, Options, Will).
How it works in practice:
Define a clear goal
Assess reality
Explore your options
Create the will or commitment to act
A coach will encourage you to try new approaches with your team, be willing to ask for honest feedback, and reflect on the results of what youâre learning.
This will help you become a more effective leader through practice, not just theory.
These tools also address your longer-term vision. The higher you shoot with your goals, the more your action plans should align with the stars. Your coach can suggest specific skill-building exercises, stakeholder management strategies, and ways to better support high-potential employees under your watch so your 2035 actually looks like what you think it should â in 2025.
Coaching Tools
Depending on the coaching provider or the coachâs methodology, you may also use:
Leadership journals to document insights and decisions
Communication logs to track interactions, thoughts, and ideas
Emotional intelligence assessments to track growth in self-awareness, empathy, and regulation
Templates for constructive feedback, performance reviews, or onboarding new roles
All of this reinforces the belief that coaching is a process, not an event. It's about integrating leadership into your daily actions, so you show up consistently as your best self, whether in boardrooms, Zoom calls, or 1-on-1 check-ins with your direct reports.
Types of Leadership Coaching
Executive Coaching
Executive coaching is designed for high-level leaders like CEOs, directors, VPs, and senior executives who are responsible for making complex decisions and leading at scale. Think: folks who often face intense pressure, conflicting priorities, and the need to align people, processes, and performance.
In executive coaching, the focus goes beyond basic leadership skills. It goes deeper into strategic thinking, vision casting, organizational alignment, and legacy-building.
Coaches help leaders refine communication skills, increase self-awareness, and develop tools for leading with positive impact. Thereâs also an emphasis on business acumen, helping executives bring a profits and people approach.
Performance Coaching
Performance coaching focuses on developing emerging leaders and high-potential employees who may not be in top-tier positions yet, but show incredible promise.
These individuals are eager to learn, often actively asking for feedback, and ready to stretch their leadership capabilities. This type of coaching aims to close specific performance gaps or prepare individuals for new roles within an organization.
Team Coaching
Unlike individual coaching, team coaching is about optimizing the way a group works together.
Whether itâs a leadership team, department, or project-based crew, this style of coaching focuses on group alignment, shared accountability, and smoother collaboration.
In team coaching, a leadership coach works with the whole group to spot friction points, encourage open and constructive dialogue, and co-create a space where effective team management practices can be implemented.
The coach may observe meetings, facilitate workshops, or hold group coaching sessions to tackle communication gaps, role clarity, or breakdowns in the team culture.
Strategic Coaching
Strategic coaching focuses on vision, long-term planning, and influence.
Perfect for senior leaders and professionals who are in roles demanding transformational change â heads of innovation, founders, senior project managers, or government officials leading systemic reform. These folks may seek strategic coaching once, or on an ongoing basis. Even coaches work with coaches!
The goal is to elevate a leaderâs ability to think and lead at a higher level.
A great strategic coach helps refine leadership vision, clarify long-term goals, align teams around mission-driven priorities, and provide consistency in the face of uncertainty.
Transition Coaching
Transition coaching supports professionals who are stepping into new roles. Maybe theyâve just been promoted, joined a new organization, or shifted industries entirely.
What should be an exciting moment can also feel extremely overwhelming, especially if thereâs pressure to perform right away. This is a recipe for burnout.
A coach, in this context, acts as a trusted support during the transition period, helping the leader adapt quickly, build confidence, and establish credibility with team members and peers. They may also focus on a specific issue or challenge perceived to be holding back the employee from success in their new role, if thatâs what the client identifies.
Developmental Coaching
Developmental coaching emphasizes building foundational leadership capabilities over time.
Itâs often tied to a leadership program, one great example being the Leadership Academy offered by the Small Giants Community, or integrated within larger coaching programs offered by corporations, non-profits, or even federal governments.
This type of coaching helps leaders evolve in alignment with their personal values, vision, and long-term aspirations. Itâs ideal for those who want to grow into a role they arenât yet ready for, but have the drive and commitment to get there.
Itâs also common for leaders undergoing professional coaching for certification, such as becoming a professional certified coach themselves, to go through developmental coaching. These may be cohort based and often last six to 12 months or longer.
These experiences include goal setting, regular feedback, peer collaboration, and a focus on lifelong learning in a shared environment.
How to Choose an Effective Leadership Coach
With so many focus areas and a-million-and-one coaches on social media, how do you pick the right leadership coach?
Itâs an art, not a science. A few criteria to help you decide:
Credentials: What level of certification matters to you? Look for certifications like the International Coaching Federation (ICF), a coach with a track record of results and verifiable testimonials, and affiliations with trusted schools, businesses, and community organizations.
Alignment: Coaching is a personal experience. You should feel both comfortable and challenged by your coach. The right coach should understand your career goals, values, and vision for the future.
Approach: Find someone who works with your pace, preferred learning style, and day-to-day challenges. For example, ADHD certified coaches may be able to help more effectively with ADHD-related work challenges like time management and focus, and will have a better understanding of what approaches may or may not work best for a client with ADHD.
Keys For You
Leadership isnât a title, itâs how you act. And great leadership is built through acts of intention, reflection, and trial-and-error. You have to be willing to make mistakes, fail, and try again, all while owning responsibility for the outcome.
It can be a lot for anyone to carry, especially for the first time. With a coach by your side, youâll at least know youâve got someone in your corner who keeps showing up for you as you keep your commitment to growing thoughtfully.
And when leaders grow, so do the people around them, their companies, and their communities. Weâre riding with those folks.
