What's the ROI on coaching?
From the lens of purely financial gain, the ICF 2009 Global Coaching Client Study showed that companies see an average return on investment of 7x the cost of coaching, where financial impact can be attributed to coaching, and is sufficiently measurable.
Coaching isn't a luxury. It's a high-leverage tool backed by data —
and it's most effective where leadership has the biggest impact.
Studies show a measurable ROI when leaders invest in targeted,
high-quality
coaching.
There’s no question that your leadership matters. Your team and your organisation rely on your performance. You could keep learning through doing, letting experience be your teacher. This carries risk, and the cost can be high, in time, mental health, and even burnout. An alternative is coaching: very low risk, and has a proven positive impact on you and outwards to your teams.
Four leadership skills that are hard to learn
There are several aspects of leadership which are difficult to formally teach, and slow to be unearthed through life experience. But coaching is shown to have a huge impact on these particular traits:
- Authentic leadership
- Leadership self-efficacy
- Change-oriented leadership
- Improvement through self-reflection
How coaching helps improve key leadership traits
Authentic leadership
As an authentic leader, you possess a clear sense of purpose and demonstrate integrity in all your actions. You lead with the heart, building respectful connections with those around you and demonstrating self-discipline in your daily work. Coaching helps you further develop the required skills such as self-awareness, self-confidence, emotional competencies, and clarity of objectives and purpose. These skills will make you a more respected, trusted leader who empowers and motivates teams to achieve their goals.
Leadership self-efficacy
As a leader, your leadership self-efficacy is the belief in your ability to perform all your duties effectively and successfully lead. This extends beyond just confidence, but also includes a measure of effectiveness. Coaching helps you identify your strengths and how to use them to achieve your goals, build a range of strategies, and increase your confidence. A coach can support you through challenges and improve your resilience.
Confident leaders are more open to diverse views, more likely to motivate others, and comfortable challenging the status quo. Knowing that you are effective often supports your ability to explain your position and bring clarity to decision-making conversations. By focusing on improving your leadership self-efficacy, you become a more successful and effective leader.
Change-oriented leadership
As a leader, being change-oriented means encouraging innovative thinking and perseverance to overcome obstacles. This type of leadership underpins charismatic and transformational leadership styles. Your self-efficacy and authenticity are closely correlated with this trait. Coaching helps you elevate your knowledge of your skills, understand the nuances around their use, and lead with integrity, purpose, and confidence.
Being a change-oriented leader can drive competitive advantage and adaptability, enabling you to adjust to changes in both internal and external contexts. By embracing change, you can empower your team to innovate, take calculated risks, and achieve success.
Self-reflection
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
George Santayana
As a leader, self-reflection is the ability to examine past actions and beliefs in order to build additional understanding and personal growth. By reflecting on your actions and outcomes, you can identify what factors contributed to your success (or otherwise!). Coaching provides a non-judgmental environment where you can examine your behaviours and outcomes without fear of judgement or criticism. It can be challenging to find an impartial counterpart who will help you see your blind spots, but with coaching, someone shines a light on what is holding you back.
Self-reflection is valued because it is a crucial part of self-development, which is essential for improvement and growth. It supports emotional intelligence and self-discipline. By being able to model how to learn from mistakes, you can build a safer team environment where failure can be admitted (instead of covered up), people can ask for support and help one another. You can lead by example and show that perfection is not the way to succeed.
Measuring coaching effectiveness on leadership performance
We turned to research to understand how improvements in these areas impacts on someone’s leadership. They found that leadership effectiveness is:
- directly correlated with change-oriented leadership,
- directly correlated with authentic leadership,
- indirectly correlated with leadership self-efficacy and self-reflection, both of which impact change-oriented leadership.
Interestingly, self-efficacy without contributing to change-oriented leadership negatively impacts leadership performance. Wield your confidence wisely!
Measurements were taken by surveying the leader, their team, and their manager before and after coaching, as to how they perceived their leader across a number of factors. The results showed that these behaviours were most improved from coaching and were correlated with overall effectiveness.
Making the most out of coaching
These outcomes are only possible when you have the right foundations laid:
- You must be open to change, committed to trying new things, and reflecting on them to learn.
- You need to have a good relationship with your coach: one of rapport, trust, accountability, and support.
Is coaching right for you?
If you're looking to be a more dynamic, resilient leader who motivates teams, drives performance, and leads with integrity, then contact us for a free, no obligation, chat.
We’d love to hear about what challenges you have ahead of you, what outcomes you're looking for, and see which of our coaches might be a good fit for you.
You can check out our leadership coaching information, schedule a call to chat online or drop us a line to tell us about your challenges
What other people have said about coaching with us
Elle and Lachlan’s feedback and advice have been instrumental in navigating my director role and helping us shape our engineering culture. They carry their values of empathy and continuous growth close to their hearts and apply them conscientiously to their work. Their experienced insights have helped me take my work and responsibilities to the next level. If you need help in fostering a growth mindset and healthy culture for your engineering team(s), you’re in great hands.
Antoine Macia, Technical Director, PHORIA
I find my ongoing coaching sessions with Elle to be the most beneficial engagement with Blackmill. Elle draws on her years of experience to offer appropriate guidance and support when facing difficult situations like handling rapid growth, interpersonal conflicts and dealing with dysfunctional team culture.
My critical thinking and ability to consider alternative solutions have improved drastically since engaging with Elle as a coach. Beyond the practicalities of 'how to be effective in the workplace', Elle demonstrates genuine compassion and care for me as a person offering practical support.
I truly feel as though my capabilities are not only improving but also expanding as a result of my coaching sessions with Elle and I am excited about the future because of it!
Lily, Head of Customer Experience
Elle’s coaching has helped me to work through challenges comprehensively and with confidence. This coaching approach helps me go back to first principles, challenge my assumptions and ensure I've considered situations from multiple perspectives.
Elle also knows when to use her own experience to step into "advice mode" and does so sparingly and with explicit permission.
A coaching partnership with Elle is an easy recommendation to make.
Stu Liston, Engineering Operations Lead
References
There are numerous studies put out by organisations with vested interests, but we turned to scientific research to understand where and why coaching works, and how its impact can be measured.
Halliwell, P., Mitchell R., Boyle, B. (2023) Leadership effectiveness through coaching: Authentic and change-oriented leadership Public Library of Science, PLOS One
Passmore, J. & Fillery-Travis, A. (2011) A critical review of executive coaching research: a decade of progress and what’s to come. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory Research and Practice