Beyond Performance: The Transformative Power of Leadership Coaching

Photo by Evie S. on Unsplash

There comes a moment in every professional life that ruptures the familiar: the organisational restructuring. The stability of day-to-day life can be undone by a shift in leadership, a market tremor, or any disturbance of what is ‘known’. These changes can feel like a sudden demand for reinvention, re-establishing one’s place. Research challenges the corporate fantasy of coaching as mere performance enhancement. Coaching is not a tool for hitting targets, but a foundation for something more human, a navigation through disruption itself.

In Grant’s study, executives who received coaching during large scale change not only reported better goal attainment or clearer performance metrics, but experienced improvements in psychological resilience, wellbeing, personal agency and even a reduction of depressive symptoms. So what does this mean?

Coaching is being sold short, it is not simply target oriented, it is transformative; the part that is so often overlooked when approached with a corporate lens. Coaching is a life raft, the stabiliser in situations of great disruption, offering an opportunity to address the needs of the self within the organisation. Perhaps during times of disorientation, what is required is support, not performance metrics.

From the inside out, coaching reshapes organisations through the people it reshapes first. The benefits exude beyond company walls; extending to the coachee’s personal lives, through improved family relationships, self confidence and emotional stability. The illusion that professional life can be separated from personal life misses the essential point: the psyche doesn’t split at the office door. Change does not respect individual differences; when the organisation changes, so does everything within it, regardless of external experiences.

Coaching’s real impact flows through the whole system of a person’s life. While to a business measuring in KPIs this can seem too abstract, but refusal to acknowledge the most important effects of coaching, with focus only on performance, there is a whole narrative that is missed.

Leaders are rational – or so it is believed, but rationality is not consistent, nor is objectivity or decisiveness. In times of change, these attributes matter, but they fall short without grounding; resilience, emotional capacity, adaptability – all aspects of the psyche that have the power to be transformed through coaching. Solution focused thinking and leadership self-efficacy can hold far more power than technical expertise or performative confidence. Unfortunately, this is the result of a system built around the fantasy of the unshakeable leader, an impossible task if the work has not been done.

The true human work is learning to be present while everything is shaking; coaching allows the confrontation of self, rather than perfectionism.

Must coaching always be reactive?

What shifts when it enters the system before the crisis; in the quiet, ordinary times?

Most organisations will only realise the requirement for deep leadership development when crisis has already hit, but does this work, or is it setting someone up for failure? Instead, what if coaching was utilised to build psychologically grounded leaders, ready and prepared to undergo any organisational change, and used as a form of preventative care…

This all boils down to the real question: what is coaching actually for?

It’s for all of it.

Without adaptability, identity, resilience or positive psychological wellbeing, performance is unsustainable. It’s deemed a ‘performance improvement tool’ because it feels measurable, more measurable than the untidy human nature, but in order to truly accept coaching at its most useful, the unmeasurable qualities need to be accepted and welcomed as the fundamental truths to self-improvement. It feels dangerous, the uncertainty of deeper work, it’s harder to view coaching as a product, a service to attain. And maybe that’s the point.

Coaching helps when change shakes the self by offering steady hands. The value in coaching lies in the growth that can’t be measured, as it directly effects the growth that can. Change is transformative with the right support to grow. Depth psychologists would consider organisational change, the shift in identity, the stirring of the unconscious. When leaders say that they feel stressed by change, it is the awakening of something that has been ignored and buried. Coaching becomes a container, the opportunity to release the unconscious shadow aspects that activate under pressure; control, perfectionism, avoidance, identity crises, the ache to be seen as competent when the ground beneath feels thin. This is the true power of coaching, not only does it improve behaviour during an upheaval, but it allows leaders to move with the change, accepting the feelings that surface in uncertainty. When one’s outer world is being reorganised, the inner world must also. Coaching is one of the few professional spaces that invites that inner reconfiguration.

For the full article published in the Journal of Change Management 2013, find the link here:

Full article: The Efficacy of Executive Coaching in Times of Organisational Change

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