Coaching Power: Transforming Leadership Through Coaching Excellence

Transformational Coaching

Coaching isn’t merely a leadership trend—it’s a transformative tool. This is the central message in my recent conversation with Tom Preston and Luciana Núñez, partners at The Preston Associates and co-authors of Coaching Power: Leading With Coaching to Create Individual, Team, and Organizational Outperformance. With extensive experience coaching senior leaders globally, they offer practical advice that every leader can apply.

In our discussion, we talked about why the best leaders don’t just give answers—they ask better questions. Tom and Luciana shared how coaching helps teams perform at their best, how to run truly empowering conversations, and why presence, trust, and clear communication matter more than ever in today’s fast-changing workplace. Their ideas aren’t just theory—they’re grounded in real-world leadership, and I think you’ll find them as inspiring and useful as I did.

 

Reading your introduction and bios, I am curious. How did the two of you team up? How do you find your different backgrounds contributed to this book on coaching?

Tom: Luciana and I got to know each other initially because she was a client of The Preston Associates. Having used coaching in her corporate roles, and being a great coach herself, we were quick to court her at the point she decided to leave corporate life. And when we were approached by and editor at Wiley to write it, we knew that our complimentary differences would work well together in written form.

Luciana and I come from very different backgrounds, hers being more South America, North America and Europe, and mine being more European and Asian centric. Yet we share something critical to the book —  that we are both global citizens. So that allowed us to write the book for any leader, from anywhere in the world in a way that we think crosses cultural barriers.

We also had a lot of fun writing it together.

 

 

How can effective coaching help people become better leaders?

Tom: Nobody would ever think of putting a world class athlete onto the field without a coach, yet we do it every day in business.  Almost always, the difference between a gold medal and a bronze medal is not physical, it is mental. It is about attitude, confidence, determination, ownership, and mindset.  This is equally true in business. A skilled executive coach can nurture these attributes, helping individuals and teams alike to visualize success and determine what it takes to get there.

Luciana: In terms of how coaching can build better leaders, I think of it as being an objective thinking partner to a leader. As a coach we have permission to challenge, to probe, to encourage and to explore how someone can be the best possible leader they can be. For really senior leaders, that role usually can only be by an external coach. I would argue that the more complex the world becomes, the more need there is to create the time and space to step back and think in order to lead.

 

 

Talk about the power of great questions and how you use them as a coaching technique.

 Tom: I think it very challenging to achieve anything significant in life if you are unclear as to what you want. So perhaps the most fundamental coaching question is to ask someone WHAT they want. What they want to achieve, what they want to do, what they want others to understand or to experience and a whole host of other “wants”. It might seem somewhat obvious but it is always very striking how many people struggle to articulate their WHAT until they really think it through.

Once the success statement is clear, then asking how it can be achieved and building a solid plan around the process of execution is a natural second step – the HOW.  And the final question to drive accountability is to ask by WHEN (and by Whom) each step will be completed. We call this coaching framework the Trilogy Questions which we explain in depth in COACHING POWER. While coaching is all about smart questions, this framework is a good place from which any leader can start a coaching conversation.

Luciana: in addition to that, there’s a very important coaching principle, which is to avoid questions that start with ‘WHY’, because it creates defensiveness in the person you are coaching. There are many neuroscience studies that show that when asked “why”, the reptilian or less evolved part of the brain gets activated in preparation for a fight, flight or freeze response, and therefore the quality of the thinking diminishes. It’s OK to want to know the why or reason behind something, but the trick is to ask a better question that starts with ‘what’. For example, what is the history behind this decision’, versus ‘why did you do that’?

 

 

What are some of the common traits of high-performing teams and how to you help teams develop these characteristics?

Tom: The most important commonality of any high-performing team is that they have a shared definition of collective success. This is then supported by the team agreeing on what the desired behaviors are that will enable them to succeed. These two factors are then supported by a team’s ability to develop high trust levels; have courageous conversations; debate but then speak with one voice; and the ability to hold each other to account. Through this behavioral and commitment discipline, they are then able to create and implement the strategies needed to drive success. When we are coaching teams, we take them through this process step by step.

Luciana: We have been coaching teams for over twenty years, and have been able to observe first-hand the difference between the best and the rest.

A few years ago, we did a retrospective analysis to find the key characteristics that separated truly high performing teams from the average ones, based on the business results that they achieved. We discovered that high-performing teams almost always share these ten common traits:

1. They always put collective success above individual success.
2. They respect and value difference.
3. They have documented their shared values, attitudes and behaviors.
4. They trust each other and show positive intent at all times.
5. They regularly have courageous conversations in order to make the best decisions.
6. They give each other helpful feedback.
7. They act as each other’s thinking partners.
8. They hold each other to account.
9. They role model desired behaviors and endeavor to give others clarity.
10. And super important (and backed by data), they have fun working together!

 

 

“Great leaders never use a conventional communication structure or presentation structure.” Tell us how great leaders communicate.

Tom: The Preston Associates did a seven-year study exploring how great leaders communicate.  What we found is that these leaders start at the end, by first laying out clearly and simply what success looks like. This helps keep the audience focused on the end goal, and makes the rest of the content and flow logical and relevant as to how it supports the success statement given up front.

Great leaders understand that they must focus on the attitude or the behaviors needed to achieve success. They know that the way people think and work together is one of the most important factors for driving successful outcomes. Only when these have been established do they talk about the relevant context, such as the competitive environment or the case for change.

Luciana: Effective leaders also recognize that nobody champions change unless they fully understand the benefit of that change to them personally, and the benefit of that change to the community or team to which they belong.

The final piece of the puzzle great leaders understand is that what gets measured gets made, so they describe how they will measure success.

We call this communication structure the emotional leadership flow  It makes it easy for the audience to grasp what is being suggested from a logical point of view—it makes sense—as well as from an emotional point of view, because it is accessible from a deeply personally motivating perspective. We explore this concept further in COACHING POWER.

 

 

You link coaching and visualization together. Tell us how these two are related and how great coaches use visualization.

Tom: It works the same way in business as it does in sport. For anyone who snow skis, for example, you will know that at the top of each slope, you stop and picture how you are going to ski down the slope. Now imagine that the slope is actually your work day, week or month. How are you going to “ski” these? How will it feel when you are doing really well and what signs might you want to be aware of that could warn you when things are not going to plan? Have you set up your internal voice to help you or have you set it up to sabotage you? What would your internal voice be saying to build on your strengths and the confidence you will need to achieve success? A coach helps a client to visualize success before moving into the actual doing, mostly through asking the right questions to trigger the imagination.

 

Tell us more about “empowerment conversations” and how we can use them.

Luciana: Based on our years of experience coaching senior leaders, we have come to realize that the most successful ones are those who genuinely empower their people, moving beyond simple delegation to instill true ownership and decision-making authority. When team members feel not just responsible but genuinely empowered through skillful coaching conversations, they bring their full creativity, commitment, and capabilities to their work.

Effective empowerment relies on taking a well-structured, consistent approach. We have delineated five steps for effective empowerment conversations. They are:

 

Step 1: Define the WHAT – What Does Success Look Like?

This sets the expectations and standards you want to establish, ensuring that you and your team have a shared definition of what good looks like. All too often, leaders don’t give concrete references of the standard that is expected. Then, if delivery falls short, it creates frustrations and speedbumps that could have been prevented.

 

Step 2: What Does the Employee Need From the Company, and Vice Versa?

By setting the scene for how you will operate together, you are defining where you are passing the baton. This helps people gain confidence, broaden their perspectives, and develop a more robust sense of autonomy.

 

Step 3:  What and who does the employee need to know to be successful?

Leaders often forget that a key asset they have is their organizational knowledge of who is who, and how things get done, formally and informally. Often, your team will need you to give them access to stakeholders and organizational knowledge, so they are set up for success.

 

Step 4: What’s in it for both the company and the employee?

To make sure that employees are onboard, motivated, and set-up for success, they need to understand how their work benefits the organization as well as how it will benefit them professionally and even personally. Leaders must be clear in explaining this.

 

Step 5: How Will We Measure Success?

Leaders must clarify how success will be measured. This is a crucial step to make sure that you and your team’s expectations are aligned. This allows you to create true accountability and foresight of early yellow flags, so that employees raise them before it’s too late.

 

What do leaders need to do to become “future-fit”?

Luciana: In the face of accelerating change and disruption, the need to upskill and reskill teams has become an imperative.  As a result, the leader as a manager is becoming increasingly obsolete. In the age of AI, most management tasks (from planning to forecasting and reporting) will either be automated by systems or will become entry-level assignments.

Tom: We believe that leaders need to pivot to what we consider to be the future-fit way of leading: through coaching. The leader as a coach is one who, instead of having all the answers, asks the right questions. Instead of directing, they are co-creating the way with their team. Instead of being quick to judge and label, they stay in a curious mode to explore alternative ideas and possibilities. Instead of deciding alone, they collaborate with teams and even peers and stakeholders in reaching a better outcome that is more sustainable as it will have broader buy-in. Instead of holding their position rigidly, they are agile to pivot and find new paths.

 

For more info see Coaching Power: Leading With Coaching to Create Individual, Team, and Organizational Outperformance.

 

Image credit kobu agency