Executive coaching has become an important tool for developing effective leaders, improving workplace relationships, and helping organizations achieve their strategic objectives.
As businesses navigate digital transformation, changing employee expectations, artificial intelligence, and increasingly complex markets, leaders must continuously strengthen their decision-making, communication, adaptability, and people-management skills.
Executive coaching provides a structured way to develop these capabilities while helping senior professionals recognize their strengths, address weaknesses, and identify opportunities for improvement.
Unlike conventional training programs, executive coaching focuses on an individual's specific challenges and professional goals. It typically involves confidential, goal-oriented conversations between a coach and a leader, supported by reflection, practical exercises, feedback, and measurable action plans.
Depending on the circumstances, coaching can also support leadership teams, organizational change, succession planning, and employee engagement.
However, successful coaching requires more than asking thoughtful questions or sharing professional advice. Experienced coaches often use established coaching models to organize conversations, identify underlying challenges, explore solutions, and evaluate progress.
Frameworks such as GROW, STEPPA, OSKAR, CLEAR, and Action-Centered Leadership offer different approaches to these objectives.
Understanding these executive coaching models can help coaches choose suitable techniques for different leadership situations. It can also help organizations make better-informed decisions when investing in leadership development.
This guide explores five widely recognized models, explains how they work, and examines their practical applications, benefits, and limitations.
Executive coaching models provide a structured framework for conversations between coaches and senior professionals. Instead of relying entirely on intuition, coaches can use these frameworks to help clients define objectives, examine workplace challenges, explore possible solutions, and turn insights into measurable improvements.
The importance of structured coaching is also reflected in research. The International Coaching Federation's 2025 Global Coaching Study estimated that there were 122,974 coach practitioners worldwide, with the profession generating approximately $5.34 billion in annual revenue. These figures indicate the growing scale of professional coaching, although they do not measure executive coaching alone.
Research published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2023 also reviewed 20 studies using randomized controlled trials and pre- and post-intervention assessments. Its findings supported positive effects of executive coaching, particularly on behavioral outcomes. However, results can vary according to the coaching process, individual circumstances, and the outcomes being measured.
For organizations, the right coaching model can help leaders:
Improve decision-making and problem-solving abilities.
Develop emotional intelligence and self-awareness.
Communicate more effectively with employees and stakeholders.
Manage workplace conflict and organizational change.
Strengthen team performance and accountability.
Establish clear professional development goals.
It is important to understand that no single coaching model works equally well for every leader. The most effective approach depends on the client's objectives, experience, working environment, and willingness to change.
The GROW coaching model is one of the most widely recognized frameworks for goal-oriented coaching. It is commonly associated with Sir John Whitmore and other early contributors to the development of performance coaching. The model was popularized through Whitmore's book Coaching for Performance, first published in 1992.
GROW offers a straightforward structure that helps clients move from identifying a challenge to deciding what they will do about it. It can be used in formal executive coaching engagements, leadership development programs, and everyday managerial conversations.
Goal
The coach helps the client identify the outcome they want to achieve. The objective should be meaningful, realistic, and sufficiently specific to guide action. SMART goals—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—can help make the objective clearer.
Reality
The client examines their present circumstances, available resources, existing strengths, and obstacles. Questions such as "What is happening now?" and "What evidence supports your assessment?" help distinguish facts from assumptions.
Options
The coach encourages the client to explore alternative solutions. These might include delegating responsibilities, seeking feedback, improving team communication, or changing an existing process.
Will or Way Forward
The client selects a practical course of action, establishes deadlines, identifies necessary support, and decides how progress will be evaluated.
Consider a department head whose team repeatedly misses project deadlines. The coach first helps the executive define a goal, such as improving on-time project delivery over the next quarter.
During the Reality stage, they examine workload distribution, approval delays, unclear responsibilities, and communication gaps. In the Options stage, they consider revised workflows, more effective delegation, and weekly progress reviews.
Finally, the executive commits to specific actions and tracks delivery performance against an agreed baseline.
This approach keeps coaching focused on practical results rather than general discussions about leadership.
Easy to understand: Its four stages are straightforward to learn and apply.
Goal-oriented: It connects coaching conversations to defined outcomes.
Flexible: It works for individual sessions, team discussions, and recurring performance conversations.
Action-focused: It encourages clients to take responsibility for implementation.
GROW can become overly mechanical if coaches move through its stages without allowing sufficient reflection. Some leadership challenges involve difficult emotions, conflicting values, or complex organizational relationships that cannot be resolved through goal-setting alone.
Best suited for: Leaders who need to improve performance, prioritize objectives, solve business problems, or develop actionable leadership plans.
Also Read: 10 Ways Mentorship Accelerates Career Success
The STEPPA model offers a more emotion-focused approach to executive coaching. Developed by Angus McLeod and described in his coaching work, STEPPA recognizes that emotions can influence how people interpret situations, make decisions, communicate, and respond to pressure.
Unlike frameworks that concentrate primarily on goals and actions, STEPPA encourages clients to explore their emotional responses before deciding how to proceed. This can be particularly useful when a leadership challenge involves uncertainty, resistance, frustration, anxiety, or strained workplace relationships.
Subject
Identify the issue that needs attention. The subject might involve difficulty delegating, managing a team through restructuring, handling criticism, or preparing for a senior leadership role.
Target
Define the desired outcome. The client might want to communicate calmly during disagreements or become more confident when presenting strategic decisions.
Emotion
Explore the feelings associated with the issue. The coach helps the client identify emotional triggers and consider how those feelings influence behavior.
Perception
Examine how the client understands the situation. Alternative viewpoints can reveal assumptions, overlooked information, or different ways to interpret another person's behavior.
Plan
Develop a practical plan with milestones, responsibilities, deadlines, and appropriate support.
Act
Put the plan into practice, observe the results, and adjust actions when necessary.
Imagine a senior manager who becomes defensive whenever colleagues question a decision. This reaction may discourage constructive feedback and make team members reluctant to raise concerns.
A STEPPA-based coaching conversation would examine the issue, establish a target behavior, and explore the emotions associated with being challenged. The manager might discover that criticism feels like a threat to professional credibility.
The coach could then help the client consider alternative interpretations of feedback and create a plan for responding with curiosity rather than defensiveness. Practical actions might include asking clarifying questions, acknowledging valid concerns, and requesting specific suggestions.
Over time, the executive can review which responses improve conversations and which situations remain difficult.
Emotional awareness: Helps leaders recognize how emotions affect behavior.
Improved relationships: Encourages thoughtful responses to disagreement and criticism.
Perspective-taking: Helps clients consider viewpoints beyond their initial interpretation.
Personalized development: Connects emotional insight to a specific leadership objective.
Emotion-focused coaching requires sensitivity and trust. Coaches should not assume that every workplace problem originates in an individual's emotions; organizational structures, unrealistic workloads, and poor management practices may also be responsible. Coaches must also recognize when psychological concerns require support from an appropriately qualified mental health professional.
Best suited for: Leaders seeking to improve emotional intelligence, manage conflict, respond constructively to feedback, or navigate emotionally demanding workplace situations.
The OSKAR coaching model is a solution-focused framework developed by Mark McKergow and Paul Z. Jackson. It is designed to shift attention away from repeatedly analyzing problems and toward identifying useful outcomes, existing strengths, and practical ways forward.
The approach is particularly relevant when executives feel stuck in recurring workplace challenges. Instead of focusing exclusively on what has gone wrong, the coach helps the client recognize what is already working and determine how to build on it.
OSKAR is useful for leadership development because it emphasizes progress, personal resources, and achievable improvements rather than expecting a leader to solve every organizational problem immediately.
Outcome
Establish what the client wants to achieve. The coach helps translate a broad ambition, such as becoming a better communicator, into an observable outcome, such as conducting more productive team meetings.
Scaling
Ask the client to rate their current position on a scale, commonly from 1 to 10. The rating provides a starting point for discussing progress, confidence, and the next achievable improvement.
Know-how and Resources
Identify the knowledge, strengths, experiences, relationships, and resources the client can use to achieve the desired outcome.
Affirm and Action
Recognize the client's existing capabilities and identify actions that can build on them. Some explanations of OSKAR emphasize affirming strengths, while others explicitly incorporate action planning.
Review
Evaluate what has changed, what the client has learned, and which steps should follow. The coach and client can revisit the scaling question to assess perceived progress.
Consider a business leader who believes their department is struggling with employee engagement. Rather than beginning with an extensive list of failures, the coach asks the executive to describe what an effective, engaged team would look like.
The leader then rates the team's current position and identifies occasions when collaboration has worked well. These examples may reveal that employees respond positively to clear communication, recognition, and opportunities to contribute ideas.
The coach helps the executive build on these strengths through practical actions, such as introducing regular feedback sessions, recognizing achievements, and involving employees in appropriate decisions.
At subsequent meetings, the leader reviews the results and identifies further improvements.
Strength-based development: Builds on existing abilities rather than treating the client as someone who must be fixed.
Visible progress: Scaling questions provide a simple way to discuss changes over time.
Positive engagement: Encourages clients to recognize their achievements and maintain motivation.
Practical problem-solving: Keeps attention on achievable improvements and useful resources.
A solution-focused approach should not prevent leaders from investigating serious underlying problems. For example, persistent employee dissatisfaction may require a review of compensation, workload, workplace policies, or management practices. Celebrating small improvements is valuable, but it should not replace a necessary examination of root causes.
Best suited for: Executives who need to rebuild confidence, strengthen existing capabilities, improve team engagement, or make steady progress toward a defined business objective.
The CLEAR coaching model was developed by leadership and coaching expert Peter Hawkins in the 1980s. It is commonly associated with coaching conversations that require careful listening, exploration, agreed commitments, and ongoing review.
CLEAR is particularly useful for multi-session executive coaching because it emphasizes the quality of the coaching relationship alongside the actions and outcomes being pursued.
While GROW provides a straightforward route from goals to action, CLEAR gives greater prominence to establishing expectations, understanding the client's situation, and reviewing the effectiveness of changes over time.
Contracting
Establish the purpose of coaching, the desired outcomes, responsibilities, confidentiality expectations, and boundaries. In organizational coaching, this may also involve clarifying what the sponsoring organization expects and what information can be shared.
Listening
Give the executive space to explain their concerns, experiences, and aspirations. Active listening helps the coach understand the issue without prematurely imposing an interpretation.
Exploring
Examine the beliefs, relationships, organizational conditions, and assumptions influencing the situation. Thoughtful questions help the client recognize patterns and consider alternative approaches.
Action
Convert insights into specific commitments. The client identifies what to change, when to begin, and how to determine whether the action is useful.
Review
Revisit commitments, discuss progress, and examine what the client has learned. The coach and client may revise their approach as new information emerges.
Suppose a newly appointed chief executive is struggling to establish credibility with an experienced leadership team. The difficulty may involve competing priorities, uncertainty about the new executive's expectations, and established organizational habits.
Through Contracting, the coach and executive agree on the development objectives and boundaries of the engagement. Listening allows the executive to explain the situation, while Exploring examines communication patterns, leadership assumptions, and relationships within the organization.
The Action stage may involve individual conversations with team members, clearer decision-making responsibilities, and more transparent communication about strategic priorities. Review sessions then examine whether these changes are improving trust and collaboration.
Because CLEAR places emphasis on reflection and review, the executive has opportunities to learn from both successful and unsuccessful actions throughout the engagement.
Builds trust: Establishes clear expectations and encourages open conversations.
Encourages deeper reflection: Gives clients space to explore the context behind leadership challenges.
Supports sustained development: Works well across multiple coaching sessions.
Promotes accountability: Connects reflection with action and subsequent review.
CLEAR can require substantial time and commitment, particularly when clients have complex challenges or several competing priorities. Coaches also need to manage organizational expectations carefully, especially when the employer sponsors the engagement but the executive is the coaching client.
Best suited for: Senior executives navigating organizational change, leadership transitions, relationship challenges, and long-term professional development.
The Action-Centered Leadership (ACL) model is a leadership framework developed by John Adair in the 1970s. Rather than focusing exclusively on an individual's personal development, it considers three interconnected responsibilities: achieving tasks, building and maintaining teams, and developing individuals.
This framework is useful in executive coaching because senior leaders must balance business objectives with the needs of their teams and employees. A leader may deliver short-term results while neglecting employee development, or maintain positive team relationships without establishing clear performance expectations. ACL encourages leaders to consider these responsibilities together.
1. Task Achievement
This element focuses on defining objectives, allocating resources, establishing priorities, managing risks, and monitoring results. Coaches help executives determine whether responsibilities are clear and whether their plans support the organization's wider strategy.
2. Team Building and Management
Leaders must create conditions in which employees can work together effectively. This includes setting shared expectations, encouraging communication, addressing conflict, building trust, and helping teams coordinate their efforts.
3. Individual Development
Every employee brings different strengths, motivations, and development needs. Leaders should provide appropriate feedback, delegate meaningful responsibilities, identify learning opportunities, and support employees in building the skills needed for their roles.
Imagine a sales director whose department consistently achieves revenue targets but experiences high employee turnover. A task-focused assessment might show that the sales process is effective, but it would not necessarily explain why employees are leaving.
Using ACL, the coach helps the director examine all three areas.
First, task achievement is reviewed to determine whether targets and workloads are reasonable. Second, team management is examined to identify communication problems, unhealthy competition, or a lack of cooperation. Third, individual development is considered to determine whether employees receive meaningful feedback, career opportunities, and adequate support.
The director can then create a balanced improvement plan that maintains commercial performance while addressing employee needs.
Balanced leadership: Encourages leaders to consider performance, teamwork, and individual growth.
Practical application: Connects leadership principles to everyday management responsibilities.
Better delegation: Helps executives distribute work according to capability and development needs.
Organizational alignment: Encourages individual and team objectives to support broader business goals.
ACL is a leadership framework rather than a complete coaching conversation structure. Coaches may need to combine it with GROW, CLEAR, or another coaching model to structure individual sessions. Its application also requires judgment: the relative attention given to tasks, teams, and individuals will vary depending on the situation.
Best suited for: CEOs, department heads, directors, and managers who need to balance organizational performance with team effectiveness and employee development.
|
Coaching model |
Primary focus |
Most useful application |
|---|---|---|
|
GROW |
Goals and action |
Solving problems and achieving defined objectives |
|
STEPPA |
Emotions and perception |
Managing reactions, conflict, and interpersonal challenges |
|
OSKAR |
Solutions and strengths |
Building confidence and making incremental progress |
|
CLEAR |
Listening and reflection |
Long-term development and organizational transitions |
|
Action-Centered Leadership |
Tasks, teams, and individuals |
Balancing business performance with people management |
These frameworks serve different purposes, and their names should not be treated as a ranking of coaching quality. An experienced coach may select one model for a particular engagement and use techniques from another when the client's needs change.
Selecting an appropriate executive coaching model requires an understanding of the client's objectives, professional responsibilities, and current challenges. Rather than choosing a framework simply because it is popular, coaches should consider which approach is most likely to support the desired outcome.
The first step is to understand what the executive wants to change. A leader who struggles with strategic planning may benefit from GROW, while someone who reacts defensively to feedback may benefit from the emotion-focused approach of STEPPA.
Similarly, OSKAR can help clients identify existing strengths, CLEAR can support deeper reflection, and Action-Centered Leadership can help executives examine their responsibilities toward tasks, teams, and individuals.
The challenges facing a first-time manager may differ considerably from those confronting a chief executive. New managers may need support with delegation and communication, whereas senior executives may be dealing with organizational restructuring, succession planning, or competing stakeholder expectations.
Coaches should adapt their approach to the client's authority, experience, organizational culture, and available resources.
Coaching should have a clear purpose. Depending on the engagement, useful indicators might include:
Improvement in employee feedback or leadership assessments.
More effective delegation and decision-making.
Progress toward agreed strategic milestones.
Better team communication and collaboration.
Increased consistency in performance reviews.
Improvements in employee engagement or retention, where coaching is a relevant contributing factor.
These measures should be selected before the engagement begins and reviewed periodically. Not every outcome can be attributed to coaching alone, particularly when wider organizational changes are taking place.
A coaching model should provide structure without restricting the conversation. If a leader discovers that a performance problem is connected to an unresolved relationship issue, the coach may need to explore emotions and perceptions before returning to action planning.
Regular reviews help determine whether the selected approach remains appropriate. Coaches should be prepared to adjust their questions, exercises, and priorities as the client develops.
The value of an executive coaching model depends substantially on how it is implemented. Even a well-established framework may produce limited results if the coach and client lack trust, objectives are unclear, or agreed actions are never implemented.
The following practices can help improve the coaching experience.
Executives need an environment where they can discuss difficult decisions, professional uncertainties, and leadership weaknesses honestly. Coaches should establish confidentiality expectations at the beginning, including any agreed exceptions and the limits of information shared with an employer or sponsor.
Clear boundaries are especially important when organizations pay for coaching but expect updates about progress.
An effective coach helps clients develop their own judgment instead of providing instructions for every situation. Open-ended questions, reflective exercises, and structured feedback can help executives recognize patterns and make independent decisions.
The long-term objective is to strengthen the leader's ability to handle future challenges without relying continuously on the coach.
Coaching becomes more useful when insights are tested in everyday situations. An executive might practise giving constructive feedback, delegating a project, or facilitating a difficult meeting between sessions.
Where appropriate, 360-degree feedback, leadership assessments, and input from relevant stakeholders can provide additional information. Such methods should be used transparently and with suitable confidentiality safeguards.
Virtual coaching platforms, digital scheduling systems, and secure assessment tools can make coaching more accessible and easier to manage. Artificial intelligence may also assist with administrative tasks or reflection exercises.
However, sensitive leadership discussions should not be entered into AI tools without appropriate authorization and privacy protections. Technology should support professional judgment rather than replace the trust, context, and interpersonal understanding required for effective coaching.
The number of sessions completed does not necessarily demonstrate that coaching has been successful. Organizations should evaluate whether the engagement has contributed to observable behavioral improvements and progress toward agreed objectives.
A 2023 meta-analysis of executive coaching studies found that behavioral outcomes showed stronger effects than attitudes and personal characteristics in the studies reviewed. This reinforces the importance of assessing actual changes in leadership behavior rather than relying exclusively on participants' satisfaction with coaching sessions.
Executive coaching models give coaches and business leaders a practical foundation for developing leadership capabilities, addressing workplace challenges, and improving professional effectiveness. However, the best model is not necessarily the most complicated or the most widely recognized. It is the one that fits the client's objectives and helps translate reflection into meaningful action.
GROW is a strong starting point for goal-setting and problem-solving. STEPPA provides a framework for understanding the relationship between emotions, perceptions, and behavior. OSKAR emphasizes solutions and existing strengths, while CLEAR supports listening, reflection, and sustained development. Action-Centered Leadership helps executives balance task achievement, team effectiveness, and individual growth.
These approaches can also complement one another. A coach might use CLEAR to establish a productive coaching relationship, GROW to structure a specific development goal, and Action-Centered Leadership to examine the wider impact of a leader's decisions on employees and business performance.
Ultimately, effective executive coaching depends on a combination of appropriate frameworks, professional competence, mutual trust, thoughtful questioning, and consistent follow-through. Coaches who understand multiple models are better positioned to adapt their approach to different leadership situations and help clients build capabilities that extend beyond individual coaching sessions.