Professional coaching has become one of the fastest growing and impactful approaches to leader development, yet surprisingly little is known about what makes coaching truly effective. Is it primarily the relationship between coach and client? The coach’s ability to challenge people? Or something else?
In an article published in Consulting Psychology Journal, Brown and Reitmeier (2026) suggest that one of the most important ingredients in a successful coaching engagement is surprisingly mundane. More than perhaps anything else, successful coaching outcomes depend on helping clients leave each session with a concrete plan for what they will do next.
In the study, 182 university students (“clients”) worked one-on-one with professional, credentialed leadership coaches over one semester, and, at the end, both clients and coaches evaluated the coaching process and rated how much progress the clients had made toward their leadership goals. The study examined four features of the coaching relationship: coach supportiveness, coach challenge, client engagement, and the extent to which coaching helped clients clarify the kind of leader they aspired to become. The researchers tested whether these factors influenced goal progress by promoting actionable planning, defined as specific, concrete plans for moving forward.
Several findings stood out. First, clients reported making the greatest progress toward their goals when coaches helped them develop a clear vision of the type of leader they wanted to become (aspirational clarity) and when they worked with their coach to co-create specific, actionable plans to pursue that vision. Furthermore, actionable planning explained a substantial portion of why supportive coaching, aspirational clarity, coach challenge, and client engagement were associated with client-reported goal progress. Thus, a primary reason that each factor facilitated goal progress for clients was that each led to actionable planning. Apart from this mundane mechanism, these factors were much less important.
Second, coaches viewed goal progress differently than clients did. Coaches appeared to rely much more heavily on how engaged clients appeared to be during coaching sessions, whereas clients placed greater importance on the clarity they gained and the concrete action plans they developed. Indeed, when predicting how much goal progress coaches thought their clients had made, client engagement was by far the most significant predictor of progress. However, client engagement was relatively unimportant when it came to predicting how much goal progress the clients themselves thought they had made. This contrast suggests that coaches might tend to overindex on subjective judgments of client engagement levels and might underestimate (and underreport) their clients’ goal progress as a result.
These findings also indicate that effective coaching involves more than just building a strong relationship or having insightful conversations. Coaches can facilitate better outcomes when they help clients translate insights into specific actions that can be carried out between sessions. Thus, if coaches focus too much on rapport and chemistry-building with their clients, they can risk overlooking the mundane mechanics of actionable planning that make goal progress possible.
For leadership coaches, executive coaches, and leaders invested in developing their followers, the message is straightforward: Meaningful change is most likely to occur when coaching conversations end with a clear vision of success and a concrete, practical plan for achieving it.