I’ve recently been spending time with our leadership coaches as we create their video profiles, which are used to help leaders who have been offered coaching to get a better sense of which coach they would like to work with.
As I listened to our coaches thoughtfully responding to the questions I asked, it became an opportunity to get ‘under the hood’ of coaching: what do leaders experience when they work with a coach, and how and why is coaching so impactful?
I asked our coaches how previous clients have described the experience of working with them. I was interested in what it feels like to be in the room, or on the screen, with one of our coaches.
One thing that stood out from these conversations was that coaching is very different from someone telling a leader what they should do. Coaching provides a space where leaders can talk honestly about what's going on for them, including the things they haven't fully worked out yet or don't feel comfortable discussing elsewhere. Leaders are often used to being the person that other people look to for direction. They are not used to saying: I’m not sure where to go from here. Coaching can create that space. One coach spoke about working with a leader who was stepping into a bigger role and wondering whether they were really ready for it. Another described a leader facing “two truths” that were pulling them in different directions. Often these are challenges that leaders don’t feel they can easily say out loud at work, but they are exactly the kinds of things coaching can help them sit with and work through.
Coaching is both about creating space and helping a leader move forward. One coach talked about the value of helping leaders move from a vague sense of “I need to improve” to a much clearer picture of their own patterns, especially how those patterns show up under pressure. This captures something very practical about coaching: the situation may not immediately change, but the leader starts to see it differently. And once they see it differently, they often have more choice in how they respond.
The balance between supporting and challenging was another interesting insight. Coaching is both - the support creates enough trust for the leader to be honest, and the challenge helps them see something they may have been missing.
A lot of the magic comes from the questions our coaches ask. Questions that make someone pause and reconsider - what are they assuming? what are they not noticing? what conversation have they have been avoiding? One of our coaches put this beautifully. She said coaching can involve asking the kinds of questions people may not have had the courage to ask themselves.
I also heard that it often only needs to be a small shift in understanding for significant progress to be made. Sometimes there is a light-bulb moment. Other times they might just finally have language for something they’ve been thinking about for weeks, and that can change the way they enter their next interaction.
Another common theme was how valuable it is to work with a coach who is outside the organisation. The coach is not caught in the same politics or pressures and can listen differently. For leaders who are carrying a difficult issue, that can make the conversation feel quite different from the ones they are having day to day.
To summarise what I heard from our coaches, leaders they work with experience someone compassionate, curious and grounded, with enough warmth to create trust and enough honesty to challenge them when that is what will help them move forward. I have also experienced this myself. There is something quite powerful about working with a coach who is fully in your corner, but can also challenge and stretch your thinking. That combination of support and challenge is what makes coaching such a unique and powerful experience.
