Executive Coaching or Leadership Training: What Does Your Team Need?
Your managers are capable. Yet difficult conversations keep getting postponed, decisions come back to the same senior leader, and a workshop that generated enthusiasm hasn’t changed much in the workday.
Does your team need executive coaching, leadership training, or something else?
Start with the behavior you want to change. Choosing a format before understanding the problem can leave you with a good program that solves the wrong issue.
When leadership training is a useful starting point
Training is useful when several people need a shared skill, approach, or language. Perhaps new managers have never learned how to give specific feedback, delegate with clear expectations, or run a productive one-to-one meeting.
A practical workshop can introduce an approach, let participants rehearse it, and help them recognize what effective behavior looks like. It works best when people bring real situations and leave knowing where they will apply what they learned.
For example, imagine a group of newly promoted managers who equate delegation with handing off tasks. They may benefit from practicing how to explain the outcome, agree on decision authority, and establish check-in points. This is an illustrative situation, not a client case study.
When executive coaching may be the better fit
Coaching offers space to work with the individual thinking and behavior behind a leadership challenge. A leader may already understand delegation but keep taking work back because being indispensable feels safer than trusting someone else.
Another may know how to give feedback but avoid it because they assume honesty will damage the relationship. More information alone may not resolve that tension.
Individual coaching can help a leader examine those assumptions, test a different response, and reflect on what happens. It can also support a transition into greater responsibility, where the challenge is less about knowing a technique and more about exercising judgment in unfamiliar situations.
When the problem needs an organizational response
Before commissioning either service, check the conditions in which people are working. Conflicting priorities, unclear authority, unrealistic workloads, or incentives that reward the wrong behavior can undermine even committed leaders.
If managers are told to develop people but evaluated only on short-term output, the organization needs to address that contradiction. Coaching and training can support a change; they cannot substitute for clear expectations and workable conditions.
Four questions to ask before choosing
What would we see people doing differently? Replace “better leadership” with something observable: managers address missed commitments promptly, or team members make agreed decisions without seeking permission each time.
What is getting in the way? Is it a skill gap, an assumption, a relationship pattern, or an organizational constraint? Ask the people doing the work rather than deciding for them.
Who needs to participate? One leader may need confidential individual support. A management group may need shared practice. Sometimes their senior sponsors need to change their own behavior too.
How will we support application? Decide when participants will practice, who will provide feedback, and when you will review progress.
Sometimes the most useful answer is both
A workshop can establish a common approach. Coaching can help individual leaders apply it where they get stuck. For example, a team might learn a feedback framework together, then use coaching to work through the conversations each manager is avoiding.
If an organization sponsors coaching, agree in advance on goals, confidentiality, and what progress information will be shared. Leaders need clarity about the arrangement before the work begins.
Measure what happens after the session
Positive participant feedback is useful, but it is only one signal. Agree on a few behaviors and revisit them after people have had time to practice. Are expectations clearer? Are difficult issues addressed sooner? Are decisions being made at the appropriate level?
The goal is to help people think better, act with greater purpose, and relate more honestly in the situations their work actually presents.
What does your team need to do differently—and what is making that difficult?
Explore leadership development and executive coaching for organizations to discuss support that fits your leaders and their work.
Jo-Aynne Von Born, PCC, is a leadership and executive coach and president of READYSETMORE, based in South Florida and working with clients virtually and on-site.