Coaching Success Stories in the Media

Executive Coaching :: Leadership Coaching

Respected magazines such as Fortune, The Princeton Business Journal and Business Week have run stories about the effectiveness of executive coaching. Here are a few excerpts from those articles.

Business Week – CEO Coaches
November 11, 2002

Coaches are distinct from management consultants, who specialize in the operational and strategic realm. The coach’s arena is one of interpersonal relations, office politics and corporate culture. Relying on their backgrounds of both business and psychology, they perform interventions on dysfunctional teams, confront bullies who hijack meetings, and counsel CEO’s on wielding their power more effectively-teaching them to inspire and influence rather than command and control. The reigning alternative (to CEO coaches) is the $10 billion a year Corporate America lavishes on leadership training. Studies show that the benefits of this seminar-heavy schooling usually vanish within a few months. But Research from Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management shows that the impact of coaching-like training can last seven years. The emotional-intelligence skills coaches specialize in help CEOs create more productive cultures, which in turn drive up profits, according to Daniel Goleman, Annie McKee, and Richard Boyatzis in their recent book, Primal Leadership.

Fortune Magazine
May 13, 2002

Metropolitan Life Financial Services…put part of its retail sales force through an intensive coaching program, and afterward found that productivity among those salespeople increased by an average of 35%… and 50% identified new markets to develop. Perhaps most important, Metropolitan has retained all of the salespeople who had the coaching… in all, the program, which cost about $620,000, delivered $3.2 million in measurable gains. Done right, coaching clearly works.

Fortune Magazine
July 23, 2001

"I went into the coaching experience kicking and screaming, at the insistence of my then-boss," recalls a reader named Steve. "And what an eye-opener it turned out to be. I won't even go into the grim details of bad management habits I had unthinkingly developed in my 14-year career up to that point--but I will say that since I was 'cured' by 12 weeks of pretty intensive coaching, I've been promoted three times."

Princeton Business Journal
April 24, 2001

Executive Coaching is a weapon for individual executives and business, because it enables companies and individuals to move at warp speed and make strategic changes that outmaneuver the competition.

Fortune Magazine
February 19, 2001
"Executive Coaching – With Returns A CFO Could Love"

The respondents were executives from large companies who had participated in either "change oriented" coaching, aimed at improving certain behaviors or skills, or "growth oriented" coaching, designed to sharpen overall job performance. The programs lasted from six months to a year. About 60% of the executives were ages 40 to 49--a prime age bracket for career retooling. Half held positions of vice president or higher, and a third earned $200,000 or more per year. Asked for a conservative estimate of the monetary payoff from the coaching they got, these managers described an average return of more than $100,000, or about six times what the coaching had cost their companies. Almost three in ten (28%) claimed they had learned enough to boost quantifiable job performance--whether in sales, productivity, or profits--by $500,000 to $1 million since they took the training. They also reported better relationships with direct reports (77%), bosses (71%), peers (63%), and clients (37%), and cited a marked increase in job satisfaction (61%) and "organizational commitment" (44%), meaning they are less likely to quit than they were before.