The Benefits of Coaching for Leadership Development

By Dr. Doris Blanton, CPC  |  08/04/2025

Are effective leaders born or made? This question has sparked countless debates in companies, educational institutions, and psychology labs.

If you have ever wondered whether you have what it takes to be a leader – or if becoming a leader is reserved just for people with natural charisma – the answer might surprise you.

While some people may believe that they cannot become leaders, overwhelming evidence points to leadership as a skill that can be developed. Fortunately, a powerful tool for developing leadership skills is the right kind of leadership coaching.

What Is Leadership Coaching?

Today’s leaders are faced with numerous challenges, such as:

• Handling supply chain problems
• Ensuring teams work well together, especially remote teams
• Attracting and retaining customers
• Coping with crisis communications
• Protecting intellectual property
• Directing social media efforts to promote their products and services
• Evaluating and adopting new technologies

Ideally, leadership coaching involves using a professional coach to teach modern leaders to handle these challenges and become strategic, empathetic, and collaborative. Leadership coaching teaches leaders to create an environment that enables others to thrive and to develop their leadership skills.

Leaders must possess a variety of hard and soft skills, including self-management, communication, and vision-setting. Through an effective leadership coaching program, these skills can be developed or strengthened.

How Can an Effective Leadership Coaching Process Benefit Both Current and Future Leaders?

Leadership coaching is most effective when it is personalized, uses a proven systematic methodology, and is aligned with a leader’s current and future needs. For current executives, leadership coaching allows them to become more effective leaders by highlighting aspects of their current leadership style – such as emotional intelligence and a lack of self-awareness – that need development.

For aspiring leaders, the benefits of leadership coaching include helping individual leaders gain a deeper understanding of how to:

• Build their strengths
• Fix their weaknesses
• Develop their leadership style
• Prepare to tackle real-world challenges

A leadership coach can provide a fresh perspective on a leader's challenges, especially by using self-assessment tools.

When focused, ongoing conversations with a leadership coach occur in a structured and consistent way, that improves an individual’s self-awareness and challenges assumptions that limit their leadership abilities. Leadership coaches act as trusted thought partners and sounding boards. Ultimately, these coaches help leaders develop the knowledge for:

• Navigating complex situations
• Understanding their blind spots
• Fulfilling professional and personal goals
• Making meaningful changes within an organization

What Does a Successful Leadership Coaching Program Involve?

Leadership coaching can be effective for many organizations, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. However, successful leadership coaching programs require three elements:

• Clear assessment processes that establish a leader’s basic capabilities
• Structured development plans that guide a leader’s progress toward desired outcomes
• Open communication that encourages trust, self-awareness, and honest feedback, which in turn leads to meaningful growth

When organizations integrate executive coaching into their leadership development programs, they must carefully select their coaches. Ideally, those coaches should be aligned with the company’s culture, leadership competencies, and business objectives.

The most effective implementations of leadership coaching integrate seamlessly into existing frameworks and support leaders at all levels. This integration enhances, rather than replaces, other leadership development activities and improves the coaching experience.

The Different Levels of Leadership Coaching

In the business world, there are leaders at various levels throughout an entire organization. Leadership coaching can be tailored to help these leaders with the most important facets of their jobs.

For instance, leadership coaching is an invaluable tool that can help:

• Senior leaders develop their strategy and decision-making skills and cultivate greater self-awareness
• First-time managers and mid-level managers develop a deeper understanding of how to manage team dynamics better, improve employee satisfaction, and refine their leadership style
• Emerging leaders enhance their communication skills and other skills that they will need as leaders, so that they can transition smoothly into a new leadership role

Ideally, good leadership coaching should strike a balance between personalization and alignment with organizational values. It needs to support leaders at every stage of their professional growth and improve their personal development.

Leaders Need to Align Both Their Personal and Organizational Goals

Effective leadership coaching can help leaders learn how to align their personal goals with organizational objectives. The goal is to identify where personal growth can drive professional success, overcome specific challenges, and support business goals at the same time.

Good leaders should cultivate a growth mindset and remain open to continuously developing their skills. Leaders with this open mindset view business challenges as opportunities, rather than threats. An open mindset makes those leaders more flexible and willing to consider new perspectives. They are also less resistant to positive change, but change is always present in today’s ever-evolving business world.

In conversations with a leadership coach, these leaders can determine what they want to achieve, why it matters, and how it contributes to their organization’s success. That knowledge then becomes a roadmap for their professional growth, which in turn can lead to improving organizational performance.

Good Leadership Coaching and Effective Communication Skills

All leaders need well-developed oral and written communication skills to communicate with their peers, clients, and subordinates. Leadership coaching helps leaders to move beyond just delivering information and connect with others through active listening and thoughtful questions.

For employees, good communication skills from leaders create a safe space for dialogue, encourage input for solving problems, and build trust. As a result, leaders can:

• Improve their self-confidence
• Build more effective teams
• Handle tough conversations
• Offer meaningful feedback
• Lead through collaboration

Incorporating Leadership Coaching Programs within Organizations

Ideally, organizations should create an environment where leadership coaching is encouraged and supported in a safe space. However, creating this type of culture requires a shift from occasional training events to regular daily conversations that encourage professional growth.

Managers will need to be trained in how to develop their leadership coaching skills for regular team interactions and create peer coaching networks to enable their peers to improve their skills. In essence, coaching conversations should become as routine as performance reviews.

Ultimately, leadership coaching leads to better leaders, who can create flexible, resilient organizations capable of navigating whatever problems they face in today’s business world. This type of organization can also help to attract and retain top talent, lessen the turnover of direct reports, and provide increased job satisfaction for employees.

Effective Leadership Is a Necessity for Today’s Organizations

Organizations constantly face change, remote teams, technological disruptions, and complex challenges that require effective leadership at any level. Traditional leadership development methods are no longer sufficient for today’s fast-paced business environment. Consequently, modern companies must use leadership coaching to systematically develop ethical, capable leaders prepared to tackle any business problems they face.

The Bachelor’s Degree in Management at APU

For adult learners who are interested in developing their leadership skills, American Public University (APU) offers an online Bachelor of Arts in Management. In this academic program, students can take courses involving topics such as management ethics, the principles and theory of management, and employment and labor relations. Other courses include strategic management and management communications.

This bachelor’s program offers multiple concentrations so that students can choose the concentration that best suits their professional goals. Some of these concentrations include leadership, talent acquisition and retention, and human resource management.

The B.A. in management has also obtained specialty accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP®). This specialty accreditation demonstrates that this academic program has been extensively reviewed for high quality by higher educational professionals.

For more information on this program, visit APU's business and management degree program page.

ACBSP is a registered trademark of the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs.