Does Executive Coaching Actually Work? What the Research Says

You have probably seen a few posts about coaching, or a claim on LinkedIn about what it did for someone. Whether that left you curious or sceptical, the same question sits underneath: does it actually do anything?

The short answer is yes, it does. Thirty-seven controlled studies covering around 2,500 people show a clear, measurable effect.

The strongest study we have

Most coaching research has a hole in it: no comparison group. If you coach thirty people and they improve, you cannot tell how many would have improved anyway, through time, effort, or simply being the kind of person who signs up for coaching.

In 2023, Erik de Haan and Viktor Nilsson published a review that only counted studies with a proper comparison group. Thirty-seven of them, run between 1994 and 2021, covering around 2,500 people. Coaching came out ahead.

Here is the clearest way I can put it: take a hundred people who went through coaching and a hundred comparable people who did not. Around seventy of the coached group end up doing better than the average person in the untouched group. That is a real push in the right direction.

Two questions follow from that: what coaching actually moves, and what predicts whether it works for you rather than for people in general. The research has good answers to both, and that is most of what follows.

What coaching moves, and what it doesn't

Three separate research teams, working with different studies across three decades, land in the same moderate range. They also broadly agree on where the effect concentrates.

The strongest and most consistent finding is that coaching helps people set a direction and keep acting on it. Deciding what matters, then actually doing it, week after week, when nobody is checking. In the research this outranks everything else measured.

After that, in rough order: how people perform and what they can do, how they feel about their work, general wellbeing, and how they handle pressure.

One 2023 review looking only at executive coaching found the largest changes in what people did, with smaller changes in what they thought and felt. It also found movement in self-efficacy and resilience, which is interesting because those are usually treated as fixed parts of a personality rather than things that shift in a few months.

What comes through across all of it: coaching is an instrument for direction and follow-through. If your problem is that the role you are in is badly designed, or the company is running out of money, coaching will help you see that clearly. It will not fix the company or the role for you, but it can help you find ways to change course or cope better.

The thing that actually predicts whether it works for you

This is the most useful finding in the whole literature.

The quality of the working relationship between you and your coach predicts your outcome more strongly than the coach's method, their training, or how many sessions you buy. It is the single most reliable finding in the research, drawn from twenty-seven samples covering more than three and a half thousand coaching relationships.

The same analysis found the reverse holds too. Where the relationship was poor, coaching was more likely to produce negative effects.

That relationship is a specific thing in the studies, and chemistry is only part of it. It is agreement on what you are actually working on, agreement on how you are going to work on it, and enough trust to say the real version out loud. Two of those three are the coach's job.

So is it for you?

Coaching does its best work when you can more or less see what needs to happen and it keeps not happening. When a decision has been sitting open for months. When you are still delivering and it is costing you more than it used to.

Before you speak to anyone, it is worth naming what you would want to be different in six months, in whatever rough form it arrives.

Then have the conversation, and preferably with more than one person. You should not be sold to in that call. What you are listening for is whether the problem gets sharper while you talk. You go in saying the whole thing has become too much, and you come out able to say which part of it is actually the problem. A coach who can do that in the first conversation can usually do it in the tenth.

Most people who end up in coaching did not arrive convinced it would work. They arrived with something that had been going on too long, and enough patience to describe it out loud to someone. That is enough to start with.

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The studies behind this

For anyone who wants to check the numbers rather than take my summary of them.

de Haan, E. and Nilsson, V. O. (2023). "What Can We Know about the Effectiveness of Coaching? A Meta-Analysis Based Only on Randomized Controlled Trials." Academy of Management Learning and Education, 22(4). Thirty-seven randomised controlled trials, 39 samples, 2,528 participants, 1994 to 2021. Overall effect g = 0.59. Reports significant publication bias and larger effects for self-reported than observed outcomes. https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amle.2022.0107

Theeboom, T., Beersma, B. and van Vianen, A. E. M. (2014). "Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context." The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 1-18. Eighteen studies, 2,090 participants. Overall g = 0.66. By outcome: goal-directed self-regulation 0.74, performance and skills 0.60, work attitudes 0.54, wellbeing 0.46, coping 0.43. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17439760.2013.837499

Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A. and Guillaume, Y. R. F. (2016). "The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta-analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching." Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(2). Seventeen studies, overall effect 0.36. https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joop.12119

Nicolau, A., Candel, O. S., Constantin, T. and Kleingeld, A. (2023). "The effects of executive coaching on behaviors, attitudes, and personal characteristics: a meta-analysis of randomized control trial studies." Frontiers in Psychology, 14. Twenty randomised controlled trials. Largest effects on behaviours; significant effects on self-efficacy, psychological capital and resilience. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1089797

Graßmann, C., Schölmerich, F. and Schermuly, C. C. (2020). "The relationship between working alliance and client outcomes in coaching: A meta-analysis." Human Relations, 73(1). Twenty-seven samples, 3,563 coaching processes. Working alliance correlated with outcomes at r = 0.41, and negatively with unintended negative effects at r = -0.29. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0018726718819725