Expertise May Have Made You a Leader, but Coaching Will Take You Further

But that model no longer holds. With AI rewriting job descriptions and generational shifts redrawing workplace norms, answers aren’t stable, and authority alone doesn’t lead to alignment. What moves work forward now is the quality of the relationships a leader builds with the people doing the work. Today’s best leaders create environments where people feel trusted, challenged, and free to think and solve problems for themselves.

That’s why coaching matters now in a way it didn’t before. Not coaching as an outside service or HR initiative, but coaching as a leadership style, built into the way a leader talks with the people who report to them every day. It moves away from the command-and-control instinct and becomes more developmental and focused on asking better questions. This spans everything from making someone feel supported rather than evaluated to letting them think through their uncertainty rather than solving it for them.

Evidence-based research is linking this approach to measurable outcomes. Leaders who adopt coaching see stronger engagement and better retention, and they are faster to adjust when things change. Their teams are also more willing to raise issues earlier. Leaders themselves benefit by becoming more effective and gaining emotional intelligence. A Gallup analysis focused on workplace engagement found that the biggest factor determining whether a team is invested in their work or just going through the motions is the person leading it, who accounted for roughly 70 percent of the difference.

Annual performance reviews are an area most organizations still rely on where the effects of a coaching approach are evident. These conversations, which are typically high-pressured, once-a-year meetings, are neither especially effective nor particularly loved. One of the first companies to try something new was Adobe, who in 2012 replaced annual reviews with a coaching-inspired process of regular check-ins centered around feedback and growth. Adobe later said the old review system had consumed about 80,000 manager hours a year and that abandoning it freed substantial time for more frequent and meaningful exchanges between managers and employees. The shift reflected a broader recognition that a single conversation once a year doesn’t do the work that more frequent conversations using the lessons of coaching do.

The same logic applies to leading through change. When an organization restructures or brings in a new technology, leaders tend to fall back on top-down messaging. That means they explain the rationale and timeline for the change and then go about generating buy-in through active persuasion. This sort of approach typically lacks the one-on-one conversations that bring to light what people are really feeling about the transition.

AI offers a clear example. While public discussion focuses on tools and productivity, the internal experience is more personal. People worry about their work changing or whether they’ll have a future at the organization. They also wonder if leadership understands what the change feels like from where they sit. Leaders who can’t engage these questions will struggle to bring people on board no matter how convincing their rationale. The insight is that coaching gives leaders a way to work through those areas without talking past them.

It’s also worth highlighting that as routine, analytical work gets absorbed by machines, the human side of leadership becomes more valuable. Judgment, trust, clarity, and the ability to help people through ambiguity are harder to automate and more essential to performance.

Research also shows that these are the sorts of interactions where real talent development happens. Leaders using a coaching style help people clarify their goals and build confidence in their own decision-making. Over time, this creates more self-reliant teams, stronger successors, and cultures where development happens continuously instead of mostly through formal training programs.

Ultimately, the key differentiator for most leaders when it comes to coaching ability isn’t a matter of instinct or personality. It’s just practice. The skills involved—from listening with real attention and asking questions that open things up to building psychological safety so people tell you the truth—are all learnable. It’s just that they run counter to how most leaders were trained. They require slowing down in an environment that rewards speed and sitting with ambiguity when instincts have been honed to resolve it. That’s why the most effective coaching development doesn’t happen through lectures or books. It happens through structured practice with real scenarios and feedback from people who’ve done this work at a high level.

The University of Chicago’s Executive Coaching for Leaders program offers an Executive Coaching course through the Chicago Booth School of Business, which is designed for leaders looking to take this step. Over eight weeks, participants work alongside experienced executive coaches and a cohort of peers to develop coaching-centered approaches to performance conversations, talent development, and leading through change. The course draws on person-centered coaching, positive psychology, and solution-focused frameworks, and includes a one-on-one executive coaching session. For mid- to senior-level leaders looking to shift from managing what gets done to shaping how people grow, it provides both the skills and the practice environment that make the difference.

The program also offers 1:1 executive coaching session packages that are ideal for leaders looking to make an impact in their organizations and on their teams, and who want focused time with professional executive coaches to work toward their unique needs and goals.