Many companies still bring in a coach only when something has gone wrong, when a leader is struggling, or when performance has slipped. Used that way, coaching becomes a last resort, and leaders understandably keep it quiet. We need to shift this perception. The organizations that get the most from coaching treat it very differently. They start with what the business needs its leaders to deliver, then use coaching deliberately to prepare people for bigger roles, support them through major change and keep strong performers growing. That shift in perception, from fixing individuals to building the leadership the strategy depends on, turns coaching into one of the most valuable investments an organization can make in its people.
Beth Albright, a member of Pacific International’s Advisory Board, has led the HR function at the C-suite level across several global businesses. In this conversation, Margaret Jaouadi discusses with Beth how organizations can use leadership coaching to develop stronger leaders and build ready successors sooner.
Drawing on her experience with leadership coaching, Beth explains how to win executive support to deliver business strategy through intentional leadership development and builds a strong case for the difference coaching makes for leaders, their teams, and the wider organization.
Leadership Coaching: A Hidden Asset
Margaret: Resumes/CVs often list formal leadership programmes, yet almost nobody mentions coaching. Why do you think that is?
Beth: A couple of things are at play. One is organizational culture and how coaching is used. Many times, coaching is used to fix somebody, and that carries a stigma. People don’t know how others will perceive them saying, “I have a coach.”
The other is human dynamics, especially for senior people. We all have egos. A leader is happy to say they’ve done leadership development because it shows the company invested in them and they gained extra skills. But saying “I had a coach” might feel like admitting they didn’t do it on their own.
Yet every professional athlete has a coach. GE did it right because they were purposeful in developing their leaders. They had Crotonville, where they sent their high potentials to become better leaders. All your successful people should have coaches.
Margaret: What role has coaching played in your own career?
Beth: My best coach chose me. He started as a mentor who came to me and said, “I see something in you, and I want to help you navigate this organization and keep growing.” I realized he was really a coach, too. He ran scenarios and role-plays with me and asked good questions so I could learn to see things from a different perspective.
When I was a senior executive, one company assigned me a coach. Unbeknownst to me, the CEO was using that coach as a spy, and conversations I thought were confidential turned out not to be. It was a horrible experience, and I thought it was wildly unethical. That’s why confidentiality has to be absolute. Trust is huge in the coaching relationship.
Even with this experience, I still believe coaching is very useful: it has helped me improve and given me perspective. When you’re in the middle of a situation, you’re blinded. You need someone emotionally separated from it, with a broader aperture.
Margaret: When is the right time for a leader to have a coach?
Beth: I see four key times.
The first is when someone is preparing for a bigger role, one where success depends less on their individual expertise and more on setting direction, influencing others, building a talent bench and navigating complexity.
The second is when they face a significant challenge in their current role, such as an acquisition, a divestiture or a change in strategy. A coach can help challenge their assumptions, role-play, and think more strategically.
The third is when someone needs a course correction. It’s not my favorite, but it is the one that keeps getting airtime. Unfortunately, some people only get a coach once they’re already on a performance improvement plan, and those rarely succeed.
The fourth is the one organizations use least: when things are going well. If you only think of coaching as an intervention, you miss a richer platform with higher returns. If someone’s doing well, let’s make them great. How do you keep the momentum going? How do you keep them performing at a high level so they don’t get tired or too fixed on a way of operating that has worked for them while everything around them shifts? The business landscape is constantly changing, so leaders should be too. A coach gives them a broader perspective and bigger eyes. It’s an investment in the organization’s future needs, so your best people don’t stagnate. That’s the most overlooked use, and probably the most impactful.
Start with the business strategy
Margaret: A company wants to introduce coaching for its senior leaders. Where should it start?
Beth: Many organizations start with “who needs a coach?” The first question should be: what leadership capabilities do we need to achieve our strategy, and what do we need to do to strengthen the people who will deliver it? Once you know that, you can decide what type of coaching and what coach profile you want.
Your needs shape everything. Say you have an ageing workforce, you’ll need a lot of leaders soon, and you want to develop them from within. Then you want coaches who focus on succession and on getting leaders ready for the next job quickly. A very different coaching engagement is when merging two executive teams after an acquisition. Another is when you’re growing by leaps and bounds or moving into a new space. There are several different needs for a coach.
I’d position it as a strategic investment in the organization’s future viability, because people drive the organization. Then you need a few things in place. You need senior executives who support it. You need an organization willing to change, because if you coach somebody and the environment around them stays the same, they end up fighting it. And the leader needs to understand the intent, agree on the development outcomes and know how you’ll measure them.
Margaret: Whose responsibility is that?
Beth: The CHRO must translate the strategy into leadership development needs. If this is our strategy, what do our leaders need to deliver it, and what type of coaching will support them? The talent development team can then work with business leaders and coachees to pin down the needs, agree on how to measure progress, and find the right resources. Coaching shouldn’t be the intervention. It should be part of a broader system for developing leaders who can deliver the strategy.
Margaret: Senior leaders often say they don’t have time for coaching. How would you respond?
Beth: That mindset tells you how they view coaching: as an individual intervention rather than a strategic business lever. As a leader, you don’t have time not to get coaching, because it makes you stronger and better able to run the business. Delivering the strategy is their job, and coaching helps them do it.
I once heard someone say that most people spend their careers climbing. Once you reach a certain point, you stop climbing, so what do you do? You radiate. I think that’s a beautiful image. The level doesn’t have to be the C-suite. You reach a level you’ve chosen, and then you radiate. Having a coach helps you do that, and the impact on the people around you, beneath you and above you, on your customers, shareholders and stakeholders, is amazing. We all want to go outside when the sun is shining, because it feels good. Coaching helps leaders radiate.
Margaret: When coaching works, what changes in the leader and in their team?
Beth: Leaders become more self‑aware and more self‑confident. They begin to recognize how their behaviour affects others, their aperture widens, and they become more purposeful in how they use their team.
For the team, a more self-aware leader holds higher-quality conversations and is more open to dissenting opinions. When the leader listens more carefully, the team is more willing to share what it thinks, and research after research shows that teams with a range of perspectives make better decisions.
There’s a difference between being a boss and being a leader. If someone has been a boss, I’d suggest their team hasn’t been as effective as it could be. As the leader radiates more, it creates the conditions for the team to use more of its collective intelligence. They make better decisions, move quicker and stay aligned. Coaching doesn’t automatically transform the team, but it helps the leader develop the people beneath them and gather information to drive the strategy forward.
One sign of a good leader is that the team can operate effectively without them. If every decision goes through the leader, the team isn’t working at full capacity. When the team knows the expectations, and perhaps the leader is coaching them too, they feel empowered and do better work. The strongest teams still need a leader, but they aren’t paralyzed when the leader changes.
Potential Versus Readiness
Margaret: How does coaching strengthen succession planning?
Beth: Organizations do a good job of spotting potential. But we’ve all seen the candidate who has been “ready in two to four years” for six years. Potential and readiness are cousins, but they aren’t the same. Coaching moves candidates from potential to readiness.
It gives them a structured way to develop the skills they need for the next level, including different ways to lead. Moving from individual contributor to leader is hard, and leading the team you used to be a member of is a really, really hard transition. Coaching makes development deliberate, instead of assuming someone with potential will just inherently be good. Go back to what the organization needs from its successors, and you can develop exactly those skills so people are ready sooner.
Coaching doesn’t replace relevant experience. You still need to give people stretch assignments and roles that test them before you put them in the job. Those let them demonstrate their capabilities, and coaching acts like a flying buttress, shoring them up through those transitions.
Harvard Business Review wrote about the seven seismic shifts leaders go through, and one of them is moving from bricklayer to architect. I think of it as going from first-chair violinist to conductor. The skills that got you noticed aren’t necessarily the skills you need to succeed in the next job.
Margaret: What’s your best advice for HR leaders who want executive buy‑in for a coaching initiative?
Beth: Stop talking about it as coaching and start talking about it as an organizational strategic initiative. I cannot say that enough. Senior leaders are responsible for delivering results, managing risk and building the organization’s future. When HR presents coaching as coaching, leaders think, “I’ve got all this other stuff to do.” When you say, “This will help you solve a business imperative, reduce risk, deliver results, spot opportunities and move the strategy along,” that’s a different conversation.
I always told my HR team that we have to get better at speaking the language of business. If you introduce a new initiative in HR language, it won’t resonate. Speak the language of business and people will listen.
Find a credible executive sponsor too, because HR isn’t always in the room when these decisions are made, even the CHRO. When a senior business leader says “this is good for business and what we’re trying to achieve,” it stops being just an HR initiative.
It isn’t about fixing people. It’s about not leaving your leadership capability to chance. Make coaching a business‑led investment in the organization.
For a confidential chat about how Pacific International can assist you with your Strategic and C-suite hiring or Succession Planning challenges, please contact Adam Nuzie or one of our Heads of sector.