By Tim Huff
President, TLG
Marcus came to coaching with a specific problem. As a VP of Operations at a regional manufacturing firm, he was struggling to delegate. His team was capable, and his instincts were solid, but every decision still somehow ended up back on his desk. His coach helped him understand his tendencies, introduced him to a few practical frameworks, and held him accountable over six months. By the end of the engagement, Marcus was delegating more consistently, his team had more autonomy, and his own calendar had finally started to breathe.
That’s a win. A real one.
Now meet Diane.
Diane was a Senior Director at a technology organization; smart, driven, respected by her peers, and quietly exhausting to work for. Not because she was unkind, but because her identity was so tightly fused to being the smartest person in the room that she unconsciously stifled the people around her. She came to coaching after a 360 that was harder to read than she expected.
What followed was more of a genuine reckoning than a skills tune-up. Over the course of her engagement, Diane began to examine the beliefs underneath her behavior; where her need for control came from, what she was afraid would happen if she wasn’t the authority in the room, and what kind of leader she wanted to be. It was uncomfortable, and it was non-linear. But it thoroughly changed her.
Two Kinds of Coaching. One Clear Distinction.
Transactional coaching addresses a present problem. It’s targeted, efficient, and genuinely useful. Think of it as fixing a specific leak in the roof… the house is better for it, but the foundation hasn’t changed.
Transformational coaching works at a different level. It asks who a leader is, not just what they do. It challenges assumptions and surfaces blind spots that have been in the leader’s peripheral vision for years; tolerated, rationalized, or simply never named. The result is a meaningfully different way of showing up.
For Diane, that shift showed up in places she didn’t expect. Her team noticed it first; she was asking more questions and making fewer declarations. She was sitting with uncertainty rather than racing past it. She was genuinely curious about her direct reports’ perspectives instead of waiting for her turn to talk. Her husband noticed it too. He told her, with some wonder in his voice, that she had stopped trying to win their conversations.
The Ripple Effect Is Real and Measurable
Here’s something organizations often miss when they evaluate the ROI of coaching: the beneficiary isn’t just the person in the chair.
When a leader undergoes a genuine transformation, their team feels it. The culture of the team changes. Psychological safety increases because people no longer have to manage around their leader’s ego or unpredictability, ideas flow more freely, and conflict becomes more productive. People stop hoarding information and start sharing it, and talented employees (the ones with options) choose to stay.
Diane’s team didn’t just perform better on their metrics. They started operating like a team. Things like finishing each other’s thinking, surfacing problems earlier, and bringing solutions instead of just complaints. One of her direct reports, who had been quietly job-searching for months, told HR she was taking herself off the market. She explained, “My boss changed. This is a place I actually want to be now.”
That’s not soft ROI, that’s retention, engagement, productivity, and innovation… all moved by one coaching engagement.
Now Multiply That Across Your Entire Leadership Team
One transformed leader creates a better team, but a cohort of transformed leaders creates a different organization.
When senior leaders across a company have done the inner work, when they share a common language for leadership character, when they’ve each confronted their own limitations with honesty rather than defensiveness, something remarkable happens at the organizational level. Silos erode, political maneuvering loses its appeal, and accountability becomes a norm rather than a threat. The space between strategy and execution narrows.
Organizations that make this investment, consistently, intentionally, and over time, build cultures that are genuinely hard to replicate. That’s a competitive advantage with staying power. No initiative, restructuring, or technology platform can manufacture what a room full of truly self-aware, character-grounded leaders produces.
So Which Kind of Coaching Is Best For Your Leaders?
Both, at different times. Transactional coaching has real value. If you need to build a specific skill or work through a defined challenge, targeted coaching is efficient and appropriate. Don’t overcomplicate it.
But if a leader has plateaued, if their team is quietly suffering under patterns the leader can’t see, if the 360 feedback reads like a broken record year after year, that’s not a skills gap… that’s a call for transformation.
Marcus got better at his job. That’s valuable. But Diane became a better leader, and in doing so, became a better colleague, a better spouse, and a better version of herself. Her team didn’t just reach their goals. They started exceeding them, together, in ways that surprised even her.
The difference between those two outcomes is the depth of the work in the coaching engagement. That depth is worth every bit of the discomfort it takes to get there.
Thanks,