Executive Coaching Leadership Development Builds Overall Performance

Chris Lecatsas-Lyus, MBACP, uses a physical observation to describe the change that coaching can produce in leaders. “They stand taller,” she says. She’s highlighting the release of tension that builds up over years of having to perform certainty in every meeting, of worrying that delegating is a career risk, and of believing that question-asking instead of answer-providing is a sign of weakness.

Understanding that dynamic has been Lecatsas-Lyus’s focus for more than two decades coaching senior leaders. Trained in psychotherapy and counseling alongside her coaching work, she is currently a doctoral candidate at Chester University researching psychological trauma. She leads the executive coaching provision for the global Executive MBA (EMBA) program at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and has helped design the Executive Coaching for Leaders program that includes an eight-week course in Booth Executive Education rooted in that trauma-informed psychotherapeutic foundation.

A core premise of the course is that today’s leaders need a more reflective repertoire for dealing with moments when command-and-control habits fall short. Teams trying to adapt to AI-driven transformation, intergenerational tensions, changing performance demands, and a broader climate of interpersonal uncertainty. “When a coaching relationship is working at its best,” she says, “it offers a deeply human experience. It’s uniquely enriching for the coachee, but it’s also uniquely enriching for the person that’s doing the helping.”

At the same time, Lecatsas-Lyus is quick to highlight the misconceptions that surround the field. Some leaders see coaching as the place senior people go to be fixed. Others see it as a feel-good service that hands clients whatever validation they’re looking for. The proliferation of AI chatbots offering coaching-style affirmation has only intensified this latter misunderstanding. “I’ve found more surprise recently from people whose ChatGPTs are telling them, ‘Of course you should write your CV in iambic pentameter,’” she says. “A real coach challenges you. They will do it respectfully, but they will still have to do it.”

Where Coaching Helps Leaders Grow

What leaders typically need challenging on, Lecatsas-Lyus has found, is the assumption that good leadership means having all the answers. This makes having questions, and having the courage to ask them, challenging. The resistance, she suggests, is that just asking the question concedes a gap in what the leader is supposed to know. “It takes a great deal of courage to do it, which is why a lot of leaders don’t,” she says. “It’s coaching that can offer both the framework and the permission for taking that step.”

She points to delegation as an area where leaders similarly have room to grow. Leaders frequently hold onto work because they know others won’t do it exactly the way they want it done. “The internal narrative is, ‘I will do it better,’” says Lecatsas-Lyus. The trap is treating delegation as a question of standards when really it’s a question of development.

“Delegation can be experienced as a risk,” Lecatsas-Lyus says, “as there’s a commitment of time, and there’s an investment to the person’s development, and a vulnerability to your being uncomfortable that needs to happen.

“The whole point of becoming a leader is to not just do,” she adds. “It’s to also be strategic and develop others.”

Lecatsas-Lyus describes a coachee at an international bank who recognized through coaching that his leadership style had to change. As he became comfortable with delegating more, he found new time for strategy and his team took on more of its own development. His working relationships across the team grew stronger as well and the change ultimately moved him to a more senior role.

Listening fully can be an even harder skill. It’s something everyone knows is important and yet few do it well. “When you’re actually being truly listened to, it can feel like an almost foreign experience,” Lecatsas-Lyus says. “Most of us don’t experience that at work.”

Developing Leadership Coaching Skills

It’s when leaders develop skills in these sorts of areas, like delegating rather than doing or asking rather than answering, that coaching-based leadership becomes practical rather than abstract. It shows up in how a manager gives feedback or asks a team member to identify options instead of simply complying with instructions. For the UChicago course, which is built for mid- to senior-level managers, participants practice these moves through real leadership scenarios, peer coaching, role-play, self-assessment, and conversations.

Coaching also changes how teams and organizations work. The research Lecatsas-Lyus points to includes randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses that link coaching to stronger goal attainment, resilience, and workplace well-being. In her own practice, she’s seen how the effects extend outward from the leader. As teams gain psychological safety, collaboration and communication improve and people grow more willing to name problems and propose solutions.

Lecatsas-Lyus offers an example of a senior leader at a global energy firm who had been told his reputation was holding back his career. With his coach, he built a plan with specific behavioral changes to which he then held himself through regular sessions. Within six months, his midyear appraisal had shifted, and within a year, he was placed in his firm’s high-potential pool.

Lecatsas-Lyus describes the approach of the Executive Coaching for Leaders program as rooted in a Chicago Booth ethic—one that is more rigorous and more grounded in expertise, and less satisfied with superficial formulas. The Chicago Booth ethic also involves depth of experience, with Lecatsas-Lyus underscoring that the coaches she works with during the course “sit at that wonderful intersection of knowing a great deal and being quite geeky about it, while also having thousands of hours of coaching experience.”

Coaches within the program have worked with clients in over forty countries and draw on psychometric tools such as Hogan and Myers–Briggs. They also cover the full span of leadership development, from self-awareness to business execution to career outcomes. That depth shows up in how much the coaching is used by Booth EMBA students and alumni, who have drawn on it at high rates for more than a decade.

Each week of the course presents a real management situation and participants then spend most of the hour in triads coaching each other through the conversations every manager faces, like hiring, developing people, and managing performance. The idea is that coaching is a skill people learn by deliberate practice and not just by hearing or reading about it.

What gets reinforced through that practice is a stance toward other people that therapists call unconditional positive regard. It begins from the assumption that the person across from you deserves to be taken seriously. Lecatsas-Lyus describes a recent session with a senior woman in her late fifties who voiced what she wanted to do next so tentatively that it sounded like a child asking for extra candy. By taking the question seriously, Lecatsas-Lyus says, you allow the person to take herself seriously, often for the first time in years.

That stance is also the marker of the leaders who will continue to rise. Across more than a decade of coaching at Booth, Lecatsas-Lyus says she has met no leader she considered truly impressive who had not internalized these lessons. “It can be extremely tough to be a leader,” she says, “but I don’t think the best leaders are simply tough. The best leaders are self-aware.” The Executive Coaching for Leaders program is designed to show more leaders the way there through the high-caliber online course and the individual executive coaching packages available for more focused work on needs and growth.