How leaders and their coaches describe outcomes of coaching for intentional change.

What is it about?

Executive coaching has been touted as an effective intervention for fostering positive change in individuals and organizations. Yet coaching practice in organizations is often decoupled from a scholarly theory of change that can provide insight into how positive outcomes are achieved. In this study we drew on intentional change theory to structure a coaching intervention and examine how leaders and their coaches described the most important outcomes of the coaching process, as well as how those descriptions shifted over time. Ten outcomes were identified, with the three most salient being increasing self-awareness, enacting change, and internalizing a personal vision. The last was most salient among leaders immediately after coaching ended, and this tended to dissipate over time. Yet it is still striking that the leaders being coached describe vision as a valuable and tangible outcome of the coaching process. The salience of vision immediately after coaching gave way to the salience of enacting change when measured 1 year later, thereby providing support for the proposition that discovery of one’s ideal self, operationalized as vision, stimulates sustained change. Overall, the leaders and coaches were relatively similar in their descriptions of key outcomes, with the exception that coaches reported leaders were enacting change months before the leaders saw it in themselves. These and other observations from the data are discussed vis-à-vis the theoretical underpinning of intentional change theory.

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Why is it important?

Thematic analysis of the most important outcomes of a coaching process based in intentional change theory revealed that leaders and their coaches report similar outcomes, with increased self-awareness, personal vision, and enacting change as the most frequent. The results further suggest that leaders are more attuned to internal changes and coaches to external behavior change immediately after coaching ends. Leader reports of behavior change increase steeply when measured 7 months later. This can inform measurement source and timing in research and program evaluation.

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