The Ultimate Guide to Leadership Coaching

What is Leadership Coaching?

Leadership coaching is a form of coaching that focuses on unlocking your potential as a leader. While many of us have qualities that make us good leaders, exceptional leadership doesn’t just happen—it requires intentional effort. This is where coaching becomes invaluable.

Leadership coaching gives you invaluable time and space to explore who you are as a leader, covering areas like communication style, executive presence, team influence, and self-awareness. It’s about uncovering your strengths and figuring out how to become the best leader you can be. Through a process of deep questions, coaching helps you tap into your own beliefs, opinions, and insights, guiding you towards clarity and confidence.

How Much Does Leadership Coaching Cost?

Leadership coaching can range from £75 to £2000 per hour—a broad spectrum that can be confusing. The price of a session isn’t always an indicator of quality either, though it often feels that way. Even my 7-year-old believes that more expensive things are better quality!

I believe in making coaching accessible, which is why I offer sessions from £90. This allows more people to access impactful coaching that can elevate their leadership success and expand their professional potential. Despite being on the lower end of the pricing scale, I guarantee high-quality coaching with exceptional results.

How Does Leadership Coaching Improve Leadership Skills?

Coaching hones essential leadership skills, focusing on the areas you want to develop, like strategic thinking, motivating others, or decision-making. It’s a fast-track approach to growth because it is tailored to your specific skills and unique situation. With a structured process and dedicated time for reflection, coaching allows you to evaluate your effectiveness and continually refine your abilities for greater impact.

A coach helps you gain new perspectives, which can be incredibly helpful when you feel stuck or want to enhance your professional relationships. By challenging unhelpful thought patterns and encouraging self-reflection, coaching opens the door to fresh insights on how you lead and communicate. This shift in perspective not only improves your relationships with colleagues and team members but also empowers you to handle challenges with a renewed sense of confidence. Over time, these deeper insights become a foundation for lasting growth and resilience in your leadership.

Why Do Leaders Need Coaching?

The biggest gift coaching offers leaders is heightened self-awareness, which helps you to gain a clearer understanding of your actions, behaviors, and the way you’re perceived at work. This kind of reflection is invaluable to your personal and professional growth as a leader.

One of the main reasons people come to me for coaching is to build confidence. Coaching instills self-belief that extends far beyond the workplace. With this newfound confidence, you can more effectively inspire, influence, and instill confidence in others. Increased self-belief, self-awareness, and perspective lead to greater personal and professional satisfaction, which translates into higher performance both for you and your team.

You can read more about how leadership coaching supported Sophie to build her leadership confidence here.

What Does Leadership Coaching Include?

Each leadership coaching program is unique, focusing on you as an individual. Typically, we start by exploring your core values, strengths, and professional goals. This journey then evolves into sessions that include reflecting on recent leadership experiences, identifying challenges, creating actionable solutions, and establishing a plan for growth between sessions.

What Leadership Coaching Isn’t

Coaching isn’t directive, it, I will never tell you what to do, but there may be times when it’s useful to share strategies or tools that have helped others. With your permission, I may introduce these, leaving it up to you to decide what fits into your unique path.

Leadership Coaching for Women

Research shows that "good leadership" is often associated with traditionally masculine traits like assertiveness, decisiveness, and strength. This creates a challenge for leaders who don’t naturally embody these traits or who don’t align with the stereotypical image of a leader. The double bind bias places these individuals in a difficult position: if they lead assertively, they may be judged as overly aggressive or unlikable, yet if they lead with warmth or collaboration, they may be seen as lacking authority. This double standard unfairly penalises leaders who don’t fit the traditional mould, holding them to conflicting expectations that make it difficult to succeed without facing criticism from both ends.

This double bind bias highlights why leadership coaching for women remains crucial; however, these same challenges often affect anyone who doesn’t fit the “traditional leadership mould.” This is why I’ve expanded my focus beyond women’s leadership coaching to work with anyone who feels they don’t align with conventional expectations, regardless of gender. I believe in creating an inclusive space where effective leadership coaching is available to all leaders committed to leading with authenticity and building unshakeable confidence.

Leadership Coaching vs. Mentoring

While both coaching and mentoring can help leaders reach their full potential, they do so in different ways. Coaching is about guiding you to find your own answers through questions that dig deep into your beliefs, values, and experience. A coach is trained to ask the right questions but isn’t the expert on your life and work - you are.

Mentoring, on the other hand, involves guidance and advice from someone who has walked a similar path and can share what worked for them. Mentors offer perspectives based on their experience. Ultimately, both coaching and mentoring empower you to grow in confidence and effectiveness. Some people benefit from both, using coaching as a space to reflect on advice received from mentors.

Tangible Benefits of Leadership Coaching

Leadership coaching strengthens skills like self-awareness, communication, perspective-taking, and work-life balance. These developments improve your effectiveness, personal well-being, and the well-being of your team. Higher well-being within a team is linked to greater engagement, enhanced performance, and an increase in overall satisfaction for everyone involved.

How to Find the Right Leadership Coach for You

Finding the right coach is essential, as a strong coach-coachee relationship forms the backbone of effective coaching. You need to feel that your coach is rooting for you, with zero judgment, so that you can speak openly and show up as your true self.

That’s why I offer an initial call for free. This gives us a chance to see if we’re a good fit—trust your gut, you’ll know right away if it feels right. I also recommend speaking with several coaches and choosing the one who feels both supportive and challenging, helping you grow at the level that’s best for you.

If you’d like to talk to me about how I can support you book a free no obligation connection session here - I look forward to supporting you on your journey,