Most executive coaching follows a familiar shape: a coach and a leader meet regularly, talk through challenges, and work toward goals the leader sets for themselves. It's useful. It's also, on its own, limited — because the leader's self-perception is exactly what's often distorted in the areas that matter most.
Marshall Goldsmith's Stakeholder Centred Coaching takes a different approach, and the difference explains why it consistently produces measurable behaviour change where traditional coaching often produces pleasant conversations and little else.
The Core Idea: You Can't See Your Own Blind Spots
The entire premise of Stakeholder Centred Coaching rests on a simple truth: the people most affected by a leader's behaviour are not the leader themselves. They're the colleagues, direct reports, and managers who experience that behaviour daily — and who are usually the last people consulted about whether it's actually changing.
So instead of relying solely on the coach-client relationship, this method actively involves stakeholders throughout the process:
- Stakeholders are interviewed early to surface what behaviour change would actually matter to them
- The leader commits publicly to specific, observable changes — not vague aspirations
- Stakeholders are asked periodically — not just once — whether they're noticing real change
- Progress is measured by stakeholder perception, not the leader's self-report
Why This Changes the Outcome
This structure solves two problems that quietly undermine most coaching engagements.
Problem One: Self-Reported Progress Is Unreliable
Leaders almost always believe they've improved more than they actually have. This isn't dishonesty — it's a basic feature of how self-perception works. Stakeholder involvement provides an external, less biased signal.
Problem Two: Change That Happens Only in the Coaching Room Doesn't Transfer
A leader can have a wonderful insight in a one-on-one coaching session and still behave exactly the same way in the next team meeting. By keeping stakeholders engaged throughout, the accountability lives in the leader's actual working relationships — not in a private conversation with a coach.
"The question we ask isn't 'Do you feel like you've grown?' It's 'Has your team noticed?' Those are very different questions, and only one of them matters."
What This Looks Like in Practice
A typical engagement might involve: an initial round of confidential stakeholder interviews, a feedback session where the leader hears (anonymized) themes, agreement on two or three specific behaviours to work on, and then regular brief "feedforward" check-ins — not retrospective feedback, but forward-looking suggestions — gathered from the same stakeholders every few months.
The leader isn't graded. They're simply asked: based on what you're hearing, are you getting better at the things that matter? Over time, this consistently produces change that traditional coaching often promises but rarely delivers.
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