How to tell whether coaching is working

A leader can spend months in coaching, understand a great deal about themselves, discuss their limitations, and leave every session with a sense of clarity. Meanwhile, the team continues to wait for their decisions, difficult conversations are postponed, delegation exists mainly in theory, and meetings end without clear ownership.

Development is formally taking place. Yet almost nothing changes in the leader’s work or in the team’s results.

Why satisfaction with the process is not yet a result

I am cautious about discussions of coaching effectiveness that revolve around client satisfaction. A person may enjoy the process, feel supported, and understand the reasons behind their behaviour more clearly. All of this matters, especially for psychological wellbeing and inner resilience. But a company usually invests in coaching for different outcomes: the leader should make decisions, interact with people, withstand pressure, and influence results differently.

This is where one of the hardest questions in evaluating such work appears: how do we distinguish genuine leadership development from a good intellectual conversation about development?

What research reveals about changes in leadership behaviour

In July 2026, the European Journal of Training and Development published a study on the impact of executive coaching on leadership behaviour. The authors analysed responses from 686 executives across more than 300 organisations, predominantly Fortune 500 companies.

The leaders were asked how coaching had affected their work and what changes people around them had noticed. In total, the researchers examined more than a thousand open-ended responses.

Participants most often described changes in four areas:

• team management;
• communication;
• developing people;
• executive presence — the ability to act confidently and convincingly in difficult decisions and in interactions with people who matter to the business.

In the feedback they recalled receiving from colleagues, the most frequent changes concerned team interactions, communication, and executive presence.

The study has an important limitation: the authors did not collect independent assessments from colleagues. They analysed how the leaders themselves retold the feedback they had received. Self-selection, social desirability, and the entirely human wish to see a positive return on paid work may all have influenced the answers.

So this study cannot be used as proof that coaching is guaranteed to improve business performance. It shows something else that I find more useful: a leader’s development becomes visible through specific behaviour in their relationships with the team.

Insight is not yet change

The number of insights proves nothing by itself. Enjoying the process does not show that management has changed either. A leader may explain with great precision what they have understood about themselves, but the team will still work with how that person behaves during conflict, error, or a difficult decision.

People around the leader begin to notice that they listen differently, set clearer tasks, control every action less, enter difficult conversations sooner, and do not take responsibility back at the team’s first mistake.

A person may understand their problem very accurately. A leader may know, for example, that they overload themselves because they do not trust the team. They can see how anxiety makes them double-check other people’s work, interfere in decisions, and retain too much responsibility.

Understanding alone does not change the management system.

At the next meeting, risk appears, deadlines begin to slip, and the person returns to the familiar response: they take the decision back, offer a ready-made answer, and accelerate the team through their own effort. At that moment the psyche chooses the familiar way to regain control, even though the leader rationally understands its long-term cost.

That is why, in my work with leaders, it is important to connect psychological depth with a specific management situation. We may explore why it is difficult for someone to tolerate another person’s mistake or uncertainty, but then we must look at what they will do at the next meeting, in a conversation with a partner, during a conflict, or when transferring responsibility.

Change becomes established when a new behaviour survives contact with reality several times. The leader acts differently, receives the team’s response, analyses the consequences, and adjusts the next step.

This is why good coaching is always connected to a person’s real work. It cannot exist alongside it as a separate space for reflection.

The practical signs of genuine progress

The result of coaching does not necessarily appear immediately as growth in profit or productivity. Too many other factors stand between one person’s behavioural change and a company’s financial result. Promises to calculate the direct return on every coaching session therefore often sound more convincing than the data allows.

But we can observe signs of progress that are closer and more honest.

The leader makes decisions more quickly where they once spent weeks gathering more information. They stop taking back responsibility that has already been delegated. They address conflict directly before it turns into a political war between functions. The team brings options, not only problems. Meetings end with clear agreements that remain in force after everyone leaves the room.

Sometimes the change is less conspicuous. A person tolerates a pause and does not answer on behalf of an employee. They do not send an emotional message immediately after an unpleasant conversation. They admit that they do not know the answer. They stop agreeing to other people’s expectations when those expectations destroy their own priorities.

Each such action may seem small. Yet these actions gradually form a way of leading, and that affects speed, decision quality, team autonomy, and the organisation’s ability to move through change.

How to define a useful coaching goal

Before coaching begins, I would not settle for a broad goal such as “become a stronger leader” or “develop strategic thinking.” These phrases sound right but tell us almost nothing about whether real movement is taking place.

A useful goal should be tied to the situations in which effectiveness is currently being lost. For example:

• the leader remains the only decision point for most issues;
• the team avoids initiative after several harsh reactions to mistakes;
• conflict between two key people is already affecting the delivery of a shared strategy;
• a new senior executive has formally received the role but has not yet acquired real influence;
• the owner understands the need for change but repeatedly returns the system to manual control;
• the leader is overloaded even though the responsibility structure looks reasonable on paper.

Then we define which behaviour needs to change and who will be able to notice it. Sometimes the leader’s own observations and a review of specific episodes are enough. In other cases, short interviews with key stakeholders, a 360-degree assessment, or a follow-up review several months later can be useful.

The task is not to prove the coach’s effectiveness. We need to see whether the leader has begun to act differently where they previously reproduced the same result again and again.

Why knowledge alone does not change leadership

Most experienced leaders already know the standard advice: delegate, give feedback, ask questions, stay focused, develop the team, and avoid making every decision alone.

If knowledge were enough, the management-book industry would have solved most leadership problems long ago.

The difficulty appears when advice must be acted on inside a specific system of relationships. Delegate to someone the leader does not yet trust. Give honest feedback to a strong employee they are afraid to lose. Refrain from intervening when the team’s mistake may become visible to the owner. Set a boundary with a partner on whom part of the business depends. Acknowledge one’s own responsibility in a conflict where it is much easier to blame the other person’s lack of maturity.

At that moment, the leader is dealing simultaneously with their state, past experience, inner defences, real business risk, and other people’s reactions. Generic advice is not enough. The work has to hold all of that complexity and still lead to a concrete decision.

How I connect psychology, coaching, and leadership practice

My approach rests on more than twenty years of psychological practice, a foundational education in psychology, and several academic degrees in psychology. I studied executive coaching at a Portuguese university, trained in trauma work with Gabor Maté, and completed Yale University’s programme on human wellbeing.

Yet my work cannot be explained by education and certificates alone. Behind them is extensive practical experience with individuals, owners, executives, leadership teams, and organisations in which psychological processes very quickly become business processes.

In individual work, I therefore look simultaneously at the person, their leadership behaviour, and the system in which that behaviour appears. I need to understand what is happening within the leader, how their state affects decisions, what the team perceives, and what consequences this dynamic creates for the business.

We examine real decisions, conflicts, negotiations, relationships with the team, the difficulty of a new role, overload, and situations that keep repeating even though you already understand a great deal about them.

Sometimes the work calls for a coaching approach so the person can find their own solution and regain the ability to choose. Sometimes a mentoring perspective and direct professional feedback are needed. In some situations, we need to look more deeply at the psychological mechanism that repeatedly returns the person to the old response.

I do not separate these levels artificially, because in real life a leader does not arrive at a meeting with strategy, character, and nervous system in separate compartments.

We may discuss a person’s state, but we always return to decisions and behaviour. We may examine team relationships while also looking at the distribution of responsibility, influence, and the business context. We may work with a particular conflict while exploring the pattern the person reproduces across different situations.

The result is a change that can be seen at work, not only discussed in a session.