Leadership coaching: types, benefits & impact
- Fraser Jones
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Effective leadership isn’t a happy accident. It’s developed through intention, reflection, and support. Competition across the market continues to increase with the rise in technology, and retaining talent has become ever more challenging. This means it’s more important than ever that leaders are given the tools to effectively lead teams, drive effective working cultures, and empower high performance.
Leadership coaching is one of the most effective ways to equip leaders with these tools. More than just professional development, coaching is a catalyst for personal and workforce transformation.
Leadership coaching empowers individuals to build self-awareness, navigate challenges, and align their leadership style with getting the most from their teams to meet the business needs. In this blog, we explore:
What is leadership coaching?
Leadership coaching is a structured cycle of professional development sessions that aim to improve executive performance and effectiveness. The sessions help CEOs and senior leaders identify goals and areas for improvement while giving them the knowledge, skills, and strategies to overcome barriers and unlock success.
Working with a skilled, accredited coach, the sessions usually focus on a set of specific development objectives tailored to the individual or team, with time to evaluate the cycle's effectiveness. At Culture Impact, our clients typically see the best development when working to a six-session coaching cycle. From here, some go on to further coaching cycles to continue their development in other areas.
The three types of leadership coaching - which is best for your business?
While it’s easy to become overwhelmed with all the different types of leadership coaching that are available, we offer three types for different scenarios.
Executive coaching
Executive coaching is the most traditional format of coaching that we offer. The one-on-one style is more personable, helping a CEO or senior leader identify and tackle patterns of behaviour that are holding them back.
Throughout the session, an executive coach will help them uncover strengths, navigate challenges, break habits, and refocus priorities to shape their leadership style to the needs of a business.
A one-on-one format is probably the most common form of coaching, as it allows individuals to work towards personal development goals while helping the performance of the business.
Team/group coaching
Some executive teams need to be taken on a development journey. In this case, it’s more effective for team performance to run coaching sessions in a group setting (and these sometimes run alongside separate one-on-one coaching sessions too). A professional coach will facilitate discussions and activities with a team to help them identify their collective strengths and weaknesses, and work through a development plan that will help them work smarter, together.
At Culture Impact, alongside one-on-one executive coaching, we often offer team coaching sessions for senior leadership or executive boards. This brings focus and alignment to the leadership within a business, while instilling effective patterns of behaviour that they should be modelling and signalling to employees throughout the workplace.
Pair coaching
There are times when two members of the team, or two leaders, need to collaborate and cooperate more effectively. When the effectiveness of their cooperation has a significant impact on the business, or if it is proving difficult, pair coaching is a powerful way to improve and optimise working relationships.
A coach works with the two leaders, creating space for the pair to share their perspectives, clarify their context, and share their endeavour. From this common ground, the coach can help them to work through their differences and air any conflicts constructively, helping them gain a deeper understanding of each other's viewpoints, strengthen trust, and improve collaboration. The pair usually works out an approach that ensures mutual and collective accountability.
If you’re still unsure about whether you need to bring coaching into your business, feel free to reach out to our team. We’ll help you assess the challenges within your business and understand if and what type of coaching would be needed to unlock leadership effectiveness.
The workplace benefits of leadership coaching
Self-development and awareness
The most obvious benefit of leadership coaching is the self-development it offers. Leaders come away with an awareness of their strengths and weaknesses, as well as how they need to show up to lead the organisation effectively. Leaders who have undergone coaching often see an increase in confidence, improvement in communication, and are able to build stronger relationships with all their stakeholders.
Strengthened culture and engagement
When a company invests in personal development, it’s a key signal to employees that the business cares about its people and is willing to invest in development to help wider outcomes. By creating this positive development culture, you’re more likely to see an increase in employee engagement, productivity, and retention. Some of your leaders will naturally lead in a way that builds the culture you want and need. Others will find it more difficult. Coaching can help them modify their leadership so that all your leaders are role-modelling the values and behaviours you need.
Increased organisational agility
The skills that leaders develop in coaching equip them to navigate complex challenges with resilience and adaptability. These skills will not only push an organisation forward, but they will also help leaders change direction when needed, which is crucial for surviving the constant external changes in today’s ever-changing world. When coaching develops the awareness and ability to respond constructively, leaders and managers naturally navigate challenges and difficulties with greater ease and effectiveness.
Improved business outcomes
Whatever the objective of coaching, all roads lead to improved organisational performance. If leaders are performing and communicating better, they’ll be modelling behaviours more effectively and will have the skills to lead an organisation to success.
Elevating coaching with psychometric assessments
Psychometric assessments provide another level of insight. The assessments build a clear picture of an individual's preferred behaviours, as well as strengths, weaknesses, and oversights in their personality. This helps leaders gain a new depth of self-awareness and discuss their key areas of development to inform an effective coaching plan.
Find out more about the value of psychometric assessments in coaching > (link to the Psychometrics blog)
Case study: Driving leadership excellence across borders
We recently partnered with a global operations management company to co-create and deliver a transformative Executive Leadership and Management Development Programme. Designed to empower emerging leaders across multiple international locations, the programme created a solution-focused peer network and integrated coaching, with a holistic focus that helped leaders understand how to lead self, others, and the business.
Coaching for workplace culture
A common misconception with coaching is that it only supports an individual’s personal development. However, coaching is often used by organisations to support culture change. Coaching sessions are used to help identify cultural patterns that may need addressing at scale across the business, or they can also be set up to address cultural issues that have already been identified. Additionally, if you’re currently going through a culture transformation, coaching can also be used as part of the journey by creating a space for employee reflection, challenge, and behavioural accountability.
Elevate your leadership with Culture Impact
At Culture Impact, we help leaders develop the skills to manage themselves, their teams, and their culture. If you’d like to find out more about how coaching can help your leaders have more honest conversations, tackle avoided challenges, and drive organisational performance, get in touch with our team today.