What is Executive Coaching?

To understand what an executive coach is, we first must define “coaching.” According to the International Coaching Federation (ICF), coaching is defined as a partnership with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. Coaching is a client-driven process that’s distinct from other service professions, such as counseling, mentoring, consulting, and training.

An executive coach is a professional partner who engages with senior-level leaders in a thought-provoking and creative process to maximize their personal and professional potential. Unlike general life coaching, executive leadership coaching focuses specifically on individuals in demanding leadership roles who are steering an organization. This typically includes senior leaders, C-suite executives, managers, and emerging leaders.

An executive coach helps their client with:

Executive coaches are not the only types of coaches in the professional world. Many managers now take classes to develop their coaching skills so they can help their employees improve their performance, earn promotions, and advance into leadership roles. Both internal and external coaches offer different levels of support:

Career coaching – Provides support for employees looking to make a career transition, whether short- or long-term, including guidance on their professional development and job search. Career coaches may help with resume writing, job searches, online profiles, and job interviewing.

Life coaching – While not the most popular type of coaching within an organization, life coaches are still sometimes present internally. This specialty of coaching focuses on various aspects of life, including career, health and fitness, finances, relationships, and spiritual growth.

Organizational or business coaching – Provides business owners and entrepreneurs with support in identifying goals, creating strategies to obtain those goals, and boosting the overall performance of the organization

Performance coaching – Supports individuals within organizations who need to improve their work performance, often following performance appraisal results, regardless of level or job title

Leadership coaching – Provides coaching for those looking to grow and develop leadership skills, regardless of whether they are an individual contributor, manager, or senior manager

Many people confuse coaching with counseling or mentoring. Coaching is different from these practices in several ways. Coaching does not offer therapeutic outcomes like counseling. Merriam-Webster defines counseling as “professional guidance of the individual by utilizing psychological methods, especially in collecting case history data, using various techniques of the personal interview, and testing interests and aptitudes.”

Counseling offers introspection and time looking at one’s past, whereas coaching is future-oriented.

Mentoring is a self-directed, mutually beneficial, long-term relationship between two individuals for career advancement, in which the mentor does most of the talking and offers advice. While coaching is a true partnership among equals, mentoring most typically consists of a more experienced person directly guiding the mentee through an experience that the mentor has already been through.

Coaching is a conversation focused on helping others (coachees or clients) move forward toward their goals, hopes, and curiosities—not exploring their past. For coaching to be helpful, it should be directly tied to what the client wants to accomplish, through a process that is directed by the coachee, where the coachee is empowered to uncover and develop their own path to achieving their goal and does the majority of the talking.

Because coaches handle personal and sensitive information, they should abide by ethical guidelines. Some professional organizations, such as ATD and ICF, have developed such guidelines and codes of conduct that apply to the practice of coaching. Included in those guidelines are honesty, fairness, lawfulness, compassion, respect, loyalty, and dependability.

The coaching industry is one of the fastest-growing sectors worldwide. The estimated global total revenue from coaching in 2019 was $2.849 billion, a 21% increase over the 2015 estimate (ICF 2020).

Coaching is growing in popularity because it works. According to the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC), 99% of those coached were “satisfied or very satisfied,” and 96% said that “they’d repeat the process” (Hudson 2016). A third of all Fortune 500 companies include executive coaching as part of their standard leadership development for elite executives and talented up-and-comers (iPEC Coaching n.d.), and that figure is growing.

Most coaching dynamics will focus on an individual’s professional development and career coaching. The benefits of executive coaching include tailored strategic thinking for the organization, high-level leadership development, and performance coaching aligned with the company’s overarching goals.

Greiner, executive coach, expert, and author of The Executive Coaching Playbook: How to Launch, Run, and Grow Your Business, notes, “The core belief of executive coaching is that individuals are capable of change. It’s grounded in the observation that executive development is an ongoing journey needed to grow organizations and their own career path. Additionally, the client may need support in identifying any potential blind spots and using a clear method to improve themselves or their situation more rapidly and dramatically. Here’s where an executive coach comes in.”

As outlined by Paul Fein, an organizational development consultant and certified life coach, the executive coaching process is based on seven key areas.

Empower the client by being supportive of driving the use of strengths and special skills. This builds on the self-reflective approach and on the motivation to achieve goals.

Help the client find solutions through in-depth insights and understanding of critical issues. This is promoting the discovery of new and different ways to address challenges.

Enable the client to gain insights into new technologies and consumer product trends. This is to drive free thinking that builds on flexibility and adaptability to changes.

Drive the client to handle team challenges while fostering open, authentic connections. This is to accelerate organizational performance improvements and successes.

Grow the client to maximize communication messages with clarity and value. This is to find ways to overcome personal weaknesses and enhance information flow.

Assist the client in obtaining and evaluating constructive feedback for development actions. This is to identify and deepen learning and growth opportunities.

Support the client to secure critical business performance progress and outcomes. This is to help drive the importance of holding others accountable.

Because the coaching industry is largely unregulated, a proficient executive coach must possess a cross-disciplinary blend of verifiable expertise, such as:

The following executive leadership coaching models share similar elements: discovering the client’s perspective and reality, setting goals or objectives, offering differing points of view or options, and then choosing the best course of action to move ahead toward a desired state. This is rooted in a relationship built on trust and ensuring the client’s privacy while maintaining confidentiality.

While the ATD COACH model remains widely accepted, many coaches have used the GROW model since the 1980s in corporate settings.

GROW stands for goal, current reality, options (or obstacles), and will (or way forward).

This is a framework developed by Gerard Egan, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Loyola University Chicago, who became one of the most influential voices in counseling, communication, and organization development. He developed a structured model for helping people think through problems and act. It’s widely used in counseling and life coaching, but it can be transferable to many helping roles, including managers and leadership coaching.

The centerpiece is Egan’s three-stage model:

Stage 1: Current Picture (What’s going on?)

Stage 2: Preferred Picture (What’s needed?)

Stage 3: Forward Picture (What’s needed?)

This is often described as a problem-management and opportunity-development approach that doesn’t just fix issues but focuses on helping people create better futures. Egan’s work is essentially a bridge between counseling psychology and practical leadership conversations.

For executive coaching, it provides a clear conversation arc, a repeatable way to move from problem to insight to action, and a balance of empathy and accountability. Egan’s approach isn’t limited to professional coaches. It’s designed so managers can use it in everyday conversations, making it highly relevant for leadership development programs, manager coaching capability, and performance conversations.

Selecting the right executive coach requires a systematic evaluation to ensure a strong ROI. The organization or the leader should drive this process, not the coach.

1. The Vetting Phase

Evaluate candidates based on a scoring system that weighs their documentable experience in the four core areas: business, psychology, coaching, and ethics. Coaches should have a background that aligns with the specific industry sectors or functional challenges the leader faces.

2. The Interview Process

Conduct a 45- to 60-minute interview to assess “intangible” qualities. Key areas to explore include:

A professional, certified coach is always the best option, but it’s important to verify their skills. Always seek feedback from past clients to gain insight into the coach’s track record of effectiveness and ability to drive lasting success.

ATD has long understood the need for coaching in the workforce. We know coaching is a powerful development tool that leads to positive change and improved performance across careers and the organization as a whole. That is why ATD curates the best content from some of the most experienced coaches to develop coaching content and offerings.

Talent development professionals and managers alike use ATD to improve their ability to develop internal coaching programs, learn about coaching practices and competencies, and gain strategies to amplify their coaching abilities.

For access to more resources, including practical tools and templates, research, and insights, become an ATD member. For more ATD resources about executive coaching, visit the following: