How Executive Coaching Drives Leadership Resilience in Uncertain Times

In an interaction with Asia Business Outlook, Charlie Lang, CEO Coach and a trailblazer in executive coaching, discusses transformative leadership and its role in shaping organizational success. He emphasizes his innovative coaching methodologies, such as proprietary team coaching tools and trust-building models, which enable leaders to embrace change and achieve long-term results. He emphasizes the importance of pushing boundaries to foster meaningful growth and discusses how a focus on self-esteem and trust can redefine leadership effectiveness. He also shares insights into advancing coaching excellence and creating impactful strategies for leaders to navigate complex challenges and drive organizational progress.

With leadership teams facing intensified disruption from market volatility, digital transformation, and workforce shifts, how is executive coaching adapting to build real-time resilience?

Let’s first explore briefly the term ‘resilience’: The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “…the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences..”. To effectively adapt, I found that the best way is not by trying to avoid, shape or influence these experiences, although this can be sometimes a good strategy, but to adjust our way of thinking, what I call ‘Mental Mastery’. Mental Mastery is the optimization of 3 factors: A) A healthy self-esteem, B) effective emotional self-management, and C) realistic optimism. All of these 3 factors have in common that they are determined by how we think about what happens. Optimizing our thinking will ultimately optimize our resilience. I frequently work with executives – be it 1:1 or in a team setting (i.e., team coaching) – on supporting them in optimizing their Mental Mastery, not only for higher resilience, but also for more inspiring yet pragmatic leadership.

How are executive leaders in high-growth sectors using coaching to navigate complexity in decision-making, stakeholder alignment, and rapid organizational scaling?

Indeed, complexity is also rapidly increasing as an organization grows at a fast pace and it’s easy to get lost in the complexity. Progressive leaders realize that engaging a professional and experienced coach can help them cut through the complexity and find orientation in their dynamic environment. Because if leadership gets lost, all is lost. For example, when it comes to decision-making, most top-level executives reach such senior levels because they’re analytically sharp. Not the only reason, but one of them. They’re used to base their decisions on facts and data. While this is frequently the best approach at more junior levels, it can become a limitation when complexity increases while available time decreases. Besides, in complex situations, either it takes too long to come to analytically conclusive answers, or they don’t even exist. Most top leaders I coached are not very comfortable to rely on their intuition, often for good reasons. As a coach, I can help them understand how intuition actually works and how they can assess for themselves on whether or not to rely on their intuition in a given situation and what to do if their intuition is unlikely to be reliable.

What core behavioral shifts or mindset changes are being prioritized in coaching programs to strengthen leaders’ ability to handle ambiguity and sustained pressure?

I often like to say: if you are in any leadership position, especially in a very senior one, you need to become strong like a rock in rough waters. In order to be strong like a rock, a leader needs to have very healthy self-esteem, one of the 3 factors of my Mental Mastery model. A healthy self-esteem is defined, according to Dr. Dan Harrison, as the combination of a high level of self-acceptance with a high level of self-improvement. I found that about 70% of the senior leaders I’ve been coaching during the past 20+ years had a self-critical tendency, meaning a high level of self-improvement and a low level of self-acceptance. While such leaders usually have a high drive, they also often become their own worst enemy as they put themselves under tremendous amounts of pressure, to which pressure and ambiguity from the outside world is piled on. Developing healthy self-esteem with the help of a coach helps such leaders to become strong like a rock, so that they can better deal with ambiguity and continuous pressure. In fact, since this is a challenge for so many leaders, I have developed a unique method to fast-track the development of healthy self-esteem. In the best case, it happens literally overnight; in the worst case, it may take a couple of months until it’s fully embedded.

How do organizations assess the effectiveness of executive coaching in improving leadership outcomes during critical periods like restructures, pivots, or crisis recovery?

Assessing the effectiveness of coaching is equally tricky as the assessment of leadership development programs. Kirkpatrick defined 4 levels of training evaluation which are: Level 1: What participants said, Level 2: What participants learned, Level 3: How participants changed their behavior, Level 4: The impact on business results. Jack Phillips added a 5th level, i.e, the ROI of training programs. The same levels could be applied to coaching, although the 2nd level is usually not done. The most difficult part is the 4th level because there are many other factors impacting the business results, besides the impact of coaching, and it’s rather difficult to filter out such factors like the impact of economic growth, actions of competitors, etc. If the 4th level could be done with meaningful resources (perhaps possible in the future with the help of AI), then the 5th level becomes rather easy, because you just need to factor in the cost in order to get the ROI. Since, as of today, the 4th level is still very difficult to assess, in most cases, organizations focus on the 3rd level, and that is usually done through a pre- and post-360 Degree Assessment. Since 360 Degree Assessments are relatively elaborate, it would often not be deployed if there is a larger group of coachees to assess. In such cases, a more simple survey may provide insights on the effectiveness of coaching.

What role does executive coaching play in addressing burnout, isolation, and emotional fatigue among leaders operating in demanding, high-stakes environments?

The previously mentioned Mental Mastery methodology addresses all these factors. While the concept is not very difficult to explain, to actually apply it is a lot harder and most people are not able to completely implement it by themselves. Executive coaching supports the implementation in numerous ways: a) Not all factors of the Mental Mastery model are equally relevant for any given leader. Some may need to enhance their optimism, others struggle with emotional self-management more than with self-esteem, for example. So the coach can help figure out the most relevant areas to develop and thus keep the focus on those. b) An important part of coaching is to keep the coachee accountable. Mental Mastery requires conscious changes in thinking applied to particular situations in daily life. There are certain tools that can be deployed to aid the development of more resourceful thinking. But it has to be done. If the coachee is not committed to doing what is necessary, coaching will not be successful. It’s the coach’s role to ensure accountability. c) Making the coachee self-sufficient: Excellent coaches avoid making the coachee dependent on the coach. They aim at helping the coachee become self-sufficient so that at least for any given topic, the coach won’t be needed anymore after a few months.

How will advancements like AI-driven coaching and personalized digital platforms shape the future of leadership resilience development across organizations?

In fact, I’m working with a partner on developing an app to aid the development of Mental Mastery which will also leverage numerous AI tools, such as sentiment checker, etc. The aim is not to replace the coach in this case, but to support the coachee in the application of the Mental Mastery principles, for which an App including AI can be very useful. I recently entered a prompt into DeepSeek, what they recommend for me to do to enhance my resilience as a senior leader. It came back with a long list of what could be done, most of which is probably useful in some way. The challenge (at least for now) is that it’s not really tailor-made for the coachee’s very unique situation and difficulties and the AI would need to learn to ask a lot of (coaching) questions to get more insights. Also, the goal is not for the coach to tell the coachee what to do, but to help the coachee figure out what to do. At least as of now, I haven’t seen any AI tool that would be effectively able to do that. Another thing AI will perhaps never have is intuition. As an advanced coach, you use your intuition a lot to sense things, especially if the context is very complex. More often than not, such intuitions are game changers for the coachee. Who knows, maybe one day in the future, AI robots will also have an intuition… I hope I can retire by then.