Leadership coaching is a series of structured conversations with someone whose job is to help you think more clearly about how you lead. It isn't training, it isn't advice, and it's one of the more misunderstood forms of professional support — partly because the word gets used for several different things.
What it isn't
It isn't training. Training transfers content someone else has decided you need. Coaching starts from what you bring, and the agenda is yours.
It isn't consulting. A consultant assesses your situation and tells you what to do. A coach mostly asks, and the conclusions are yours — which is slower and tends to produce decisions you actually act on.
It isn't mentoring. A mentor is usually someone further along the same path, offering their experience. A coach doesn't need to have done your job and often hasn't; what they bring is a process rather than a precedent.
It isn't therapy. Coaching is forward-looking and concerned with how you work. If something belongs in therapy — depression, anxiety, trauma, a crisis — that's a licensed professional's work, and a good coach will say so rather than take it on.
What a session actually involves
Mostly talking, and mostly you.
You bring a situation — a decision you're circling, a person you can't manage, a role you've just stepped into, a pattern you keep repeating. The coach asks questions about it, and the questions are usually not the ones you've been asking yourself.
A session is typically an hour. Engagements often run over several months, because the useful part is the sequence rather than any one conversation: you leave with something to try, and the next session starts with what happened.
What people bring to it
A new role. First time managing, first time managing managers, first time running a function. The step up is the single most common reason people start.
A person. One relationship that isn't working — a direct report, a peer, a boss — that's consuming a disproportionate amount of attention.
A decision. Something they've been unable to resolve alone, often because the real obstacle isn't the decision itself.
A pattern. Avoiding conflict. Taking on everything. Being in every meeting. Things they can see and haven't been able to change.
No one to talk to. More common than it sounds. Senior roles are isolating, and there's frequently nobody who is neither your boss nor your report.
Why the questions work
The mechanism is unremarkable: having to explain a situation out loud to someone who isn't inside it exposes assumptions you'd stopped noticing.
Most people have no setting in which to do this. Colleagues have stakes, friends lack context, and your own thinking runs in the same loop it's been running in. An hour with someone whose only interest is your clarity is a genuinely rare thing, and most of the value is in that rather than in anything the coach knows.
An honest note on the industry
Coaching is unregulated. Anyone can use the title, there's no licence, and credentials range from serious qualifications and supervised practice to a weekend certificate.
So: ask what training they have, ask how they work, and ask what they do when something comes up that isn't coaching. Be wary of anyone promising specific outcomes, anyone who talks mainly about themselves, and anyone unwilling to say what a session looks like before you book.
A first conversation should tell you most of what you need. If it feels like being sold to rather than being listened to, that's information.
When it's worth it
When you have something specific to work on and the capacity to act on it. Coaching works on how you operate, which means it needs room to change something.
When it isn't
If the actual problem is structural — an impossible workload, a role with no authority, an organisation that won't move — coaching makes it clearer without making it better. That's worth knowing before you spend the money, and an honest coach will name it.
Does it work online?
Yes, and most coaching now happens this way. The work is conversation, and it travels well. It also removes the main practical obstacle, which is finding someone good who happens to be nearby.