Re‐orienting leadership coaching for sustainable effectiveness

The authors note that their “personal experience, client conversations, and research has led us to identify and highlight two critical issues where we see organizations consistently making serious errors that hold back the development of their leaders, waste money, and restrict the potential for longer term and sustainable effectiveness.” They note that organizations spend a considerable amount of money on outside coaching, yet this may not always be beneficial or cost‐effective for those organizations: “The first step,” they write, “is to understand when “a coach” can and can’t help. The second is to understand the difference between “a coach” (in other words a professional coach, or someone following such an approach) and leaders‐who‐coach. As a result, organizations can make the most of their coaching dollars, and their people.” They further clarify that “to determine when to use a professional coach, we use a simple question to address whether such coaching is a worthwhile endeavor: Does the executive need to develop and challenge themselves or do they need tools to function within their organization?” They conclude that solutions involve “creating leaders‐who‐coach who, as a result, will gradually enable a change in the underlying systemic issues.”