Counseling to Coaching:
How a 360° View Accelerates Leadership Development
What Is Leadership Development?
Leadership can be understood as the ability to guide, influence, and inspire others toward a shared goal.
It shows up not just in vision or intention, but in daily behavior—how decisions are made, how people are treated, and how pressure is handled when stakes are high.
Leadership development is the intentional process of expanding a person’s capacity to do that well.
It’s not about learning a new management technique or adopting a different personality style. It’s about increasing awareness, flexibility, and effectiveness—so a leader can respond thoughtfully instead of reactively, align intention with impact, and lead in ways that build trust and momentum over time.
And because leadership is inherently relational, leadership development cannot happen in isolation.
The Limits of a First-Person View
As a licensed psychotherapist with over 20 years of clinical experience, I’ve spent countless hours behind closed doors—listening carefully, helping clients untangle their stories, and witnessing the healing and transformation that can germinate in private, intimate spaces and flourish out in the world.
That work matters. Deeply.
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And sometimes, it also takes time—especially when clients have blind spots that are old, entrenched, and largely invisible to them. Let’s be honest: we all do.
When people aren’t equipped to shift perspective—to see themselves as others actually experience them—it can take a long time for a counselor to fully grasp what’s really happening in their day-to-day world.
Therapy relies, appropriately, on first-person narrative. But first-person narrative has limits.
Why Insight Alone Isn’t Always Enough
In counseling, I rarely get to see the moment someone swings and misses—or freezes under pressure. I don’t see how they lead a meeting, how their tone shifts when challenged by a coworker, how they respond to authority, or how their stress ripples through a room. I hear about those moments, but only through the client’s own lens.
That lens is important. It’s foundational. But it’s still partial.
When blind spots persist—especially in leadership roles—they don’t just slow personal growth. They affect trust, decision-making, team engagement, and results. Leaders can be well-intentioned, insightful, and hardworking—and still unknowingly create friction or disengagement around them.
Why Coaching Requires
a Different Vantage Point
Athletic coaches have a fundamentally different advantage: they watch the players play.
They don’t rely solely on post-game reflections. They witness technique, timing, teamwork, and impact in real time. They see how an athlete performs under pressure, how they adjust, and how their behavior affects the whole system.
Therapy rarely offers that vantage point. Coaching does.
How Executive Coaching Expands the Frame
Unlike therapy, executive coaching steps out of the private and personal to include public behavior and interpersonal impact—how a leader shows up in meetings, conversations, decisions, and moments of stress.
This is what excites me about bringing decades of counseling experience into executive coaching.
I no longer have to rely solely on what a client reports is happening. Their internal experience still matters—it always will—but now it’s paired with real-world data about how they’re experienced by others in positions that matter: peers, direct reports, and supervisors.
That expanded frame changes everything.
Why 360° Feedback Changes
the Speed of Growth
We begin with a 360° view—rich, specific feedback from the people a leader works with most closely. This creates a clear map of impact: not just what the leader intends or imagines, but how others actually experience them.
Patterns emerge across perspectives:
Where leadership strengths are landing well
Where good intentions are missing the mark
Where stress, pressure, or blind spots show up consistently
This shared data ground allows coaching to move faster and go deeper—without guesswork or defensiveness.
From Insight to Visible Change
Coaching lets us work with actual behavior, full context, and real-time learning. It’s not just about insight. It’s about visible growth—in meetings, in conversations, in hallway moments, and in the outcomes that matter most.
A 360° view leads to 360° growth.
As leaders shift how they show up at work, those changes often ripple outward—into their teams, their organizations, their families, and their communities. That’s the power of real leadership development: grounded self-awareness paired with practical, observable change.