Being a great business leader requires much more than good mental well-being; it demands extraordinary emotional and relational skills, as well as tools to cope with challenging emotional experiences. But do you have any training courses to address that?
No—because leadership development remains one of the most complex and evolving challenges in HR and learning and development.
At General Electric, CEO Jack Welch built a system of internal contenders developed over years of service and rotation, aiming to turn leadership success into a continuous production line. IBM’s legendary Tom Watson Sr. sought to build deep, end-to-end organizational understanding by exposing his son to every part of the business.
While both approaches worked in their respective contexts, it is fair to say we have not yet succeeded in turning leadership development into a consistently repeatable model.
One factor is that many traditional leadership development approaches were designed for a time when employees joined a firm and stayed for most of their careers. Today’s workforce is more dynamic, and for many Gen Z and Gen Alpha workers, the goal is to move across organizations or build something of their own.
Executive L&D with richer bandwidth
An increasingly popular leadership development option among entrepreneurs and some forward-thinking chief learning officers is executive coaching. Its adoption has more than doubled since 2016, and it is an estimated $16 billion industry in the U.S. alone.
A coaching approach is valuable, but it tends to focus primarily on coaching for business execution and operational decision-making. But when dealing with larger challenges than, for example, how to run a quarterly performance review, other leadership development approaches need to come into play.
Because, at some stage, to remain effective, leadership development must move beyond discussions of business mechanics and into more reflective questions for the individual: How do I stay present as a leader, and what do I want my broader impact to be? As Steve Jobs said, if today were my last day, would I be doing what I would be happy to spend it on?
Executives who perceive a gap in traditional leadership development are increasingly drawn toward coaching approaches that sit closer to the boundary of clinical psychotherapy. Think of it as a new frontier between traditional post-MBA in-house executive mentoring and something far richer. Stanford Business School even has a course in emotional awareness called “touchy-feely.”
People often equate therapy with addressing physical recovery or managing mental health conditions such as depression or anxiety. But it’s also capable of developing a foundational awareness of how our relational patterns are shaped and giving us more freedom to expand the repertoire of our behaviors. In private equity, for example, completing a deep inventory of the company is a necessary step before closing any deal. We should be ready to complete a similar inventory of our own past and how that has shaped our personality.
What does that look like in practice? It is often a revelation to founders and executives how emotionally enmeshed they are with their work. Many innovators do not experience a clear boundary between themselves and their companies, so that any failures can feel psychologically destabilizing.
Why emotional resilience may help more than a great eye for talent
A conventional business coach might offer reassurance in response, or feel out of their depth, while a psychologically informed leadership coach feels comfortable inviting clients to explore what failure might feel like, and then begin helping them build the emotional resilience required to hold and move beyond any worst-case outcomes. This work is uncomfortable, challenging and demanding, but that is often the nature of therapy-informed approaches.
That circles back to a recurring theme in therapeutic coaching: engaging with deeper, more fundamental questions about life and work. A good—meaning not only experienced and empathetic, but also clinically trained—coach will support executives in building sources of resilience and fulfilment beyond work, through the conscious cultivation of non-work meaning: relationships, hobbies, creativity, spirituality, family and community, among others.
A key part of this is recognizing that life is finite and not a rehearsal. Without some willingness to engage with that reality and integrate it into how we live and lead, it becomes difficult to describe the result as authentic living, or indeed, authentic leadership.
Executives often find themselves in unproductive conflict. In many cases, this is driven less by strategy than by unexamined shifts in interpersonal dynamics. Time spent helping both sides step back and recognize how they have become caught in cycles of resentment and misunderstanding can help all parties make progress here.
Executive coaching can offer a structured way to explore emotional patterns and earlier formative experiences that executive leadership has not had the time or space to engage with. In my work, I try to help executives learn subtle affective-relational skills: The ability to integrate firmness with compassion, to be aware of competitive dynamics on a team and how to channel this energy into progress rather than undermining.
Working through business crises
Many high-performing CEOs and leaders seek help from coaches during periods of restructuring, crisis or major transformation. In the case of a major restructuring, it involves significant change to something a leadership team has invested a large part of their careers in building. In reality, this is about emotional impact as much as it is about profit and loss.
A layoff is a kind of organizational death experience. The reality is that managers cannot make it painless for their teams. What a leader can do, however, is choose whether they meet it with defensiveness or numbness or with honest, open-hearted presence. Without therapeutic coaching work, far too much layoff communication can degenerate into euphemisms, avoidance and legalese (anxious self-protection), instead of human contact.
The point I want to stress is that coaching for top executives is a performance and risk-support mechanism that can improve the quality and clarity of their decision-making, communication and organizational fate under high emotional load.
Coaching does this by providing a confidential space to process the emotional load, pressure-test messaging and rehearse difficult conversations so executives can remain clear, calm and direct rather than reactive or avoidant.
A path for those on the way up, or stuck
CLOs get the best results from therapeutic coaching when they frame it as a performance maximizer and not as “therapy.” It is very much both: A unique third place where business training and personal growth can sit alongside each other, and something good can emerge.
For a CLO considering what new tools might help unlock the potential of a promising candidate, refresh or reset a senior manager who feels unable to get to the next level, or help address situations of conflict or navigate major organisational change or crisis, this more psychologically literate approach to leadership development may be worth exploring.
