In the world of senior executive development, methodologies come and go. Most arrive with a launch event, peak in citation count for a few years, and quietly fade as the next framework arrives. A small number, however, prove durable. They do so not because they are louder than the alternatives, but because they continue to produce outcomes long after the marketing cycle has moved on.
One such methodology has, over the past two decades, quietly become the working standard for serious executive coaching at the top of large organisations: stakeholder-centred coaching, developed by Marshall Goldsmith. Its rise has been less visible than the more fashionable leadership trends of the same period, but its influence on how chief executives, board chairs and founders are now developed is difficult to overstate.
The Insight That Changed the Field
Goldsmith’s central insight is deceptively simple. Most senior leaders are not promoted because of their weaknesses. They are promoted because of their strengths. The behaviours that limit them at the top — listening selectively, dominating discussion, withholding recognition, avoiding difficult conversations — are not character flaws so much as patterns that did not matter at earlier stages of their career. The leader’s job, as they ascend, is not to acquire new capability. It is to subtract specific behaviours that are now actively costing them.
This reframing has practical consequences. It moves the focus of executive coaching away from skill development and toward behavioural change. It treats the leader’s stakeholders — direct reports, peers, board, key clients — as the most accurate source of feedback about what is actually working. And it makes change verifiable: the same stakeholders who identified the problematic behaviours are asked, periodically, whether the leader has improved.
Why It Works at the Top
Stakeholder-centred coaching works at senior levels for reasons that other methodologies often miss. Senior leaders rarely change because they read a book or attend a workshop. They change when the people whose opinions they care about can verify that change is occurring. The Marshall Goldsmith approach to executive coaching makes this verification structural rather than incidental. The stakeholders are involved at the start, throughout, and at the end. The leader is held accountable by the people whose perception actually matters.
Practitioners like Arvid Buit, the Dutch master coach behind TRUE Leadership and one of the few European coaches simultaneously accredited by ICF, NOBCO, EMCC, APECS and Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching, integrate this methodology with deeper psychological work. Buit’s argument is that stakeholder-centred behavioural change becomes durable when it is anchored in the leader’s underlying narrative — the often unexamined story about authority, safety, and identity that drives the behaviour in the first place. Adjust the behaviour without addressing the narrative and the change tends to revert under pressure. Address both, and the change tends to hold.
What the Methodology Actually Looks Like in Practice
In a typical engagement, the leader and coach begin by identifying one or two specific behaviours that, if changed, would meaningfully increase the leader’s effectiveness. The selection is informed by stakeholder input — usually a structured 360-degree feedforward process — rather than the leader’s own self-assessment.
The leader then commits, publicly to their stakeholders, to working on the identified behaviours. They follow up with those stakeholders at regular intervals, asking specifically whether they have noticed improvement, and what suggestions the stakeholders have for further progress. The follow-up itself is the mechanism. Stakeholders who see the leader genuinely working on change tend to recalibrate their perception of the leader, and the leader, in turn, internalises the behavioural shift through the act of repeatedly asking and listening.
This sounds simple. In practice it requires considerable psychological work on the leader’s part. Asking stakeholders for feedback on one’s own behaviour is uncomfortable. Doing it repeatedly, over months, while genuinely listening rather than defending, is genuinely difficult. The methodology works because it builds in this discomfort as a feature, not a bug.
The Evidence Base
The empirical case for stakeholder-centred coaching is unusually strong for the executive development field. Goldsmith’s own published research, replicated across thousands of leaders in eight major corporations, found that leaders who engaged in regular stakeholder follow-up were perceived as having improved by their colleagues at substantially higher rates than those who did not. Independent reviews of executive coaching effectiveness, including the International Coaching Federation’s Global Coaching Study, consistently identify stakeholder involvement as one of the variables most associated with measurable behavioural change in senior leaders.
Why Boards Should Care
For board chairs and remuneration committees evaluating how their senior leadership development is being funded, the implications are practical. A coach who works without stakeholder involvement is, in effect, working on the leader’s self-perception rather than on the leader’s actual impact. The two are often very different. A coach trained in stakeholder-centred methodology, particularly one who integrates it with deeper psychological work, is in a position to produce change that the wider organisation can verify.
This is the standard the most thoughtful boards are now applying. It is also the standard that the most effective executive coaching practices, in Europe and elsewhere, have quietly adopted as a baseline. The methodology may not be the loudest in the leadership development field. It is, increasingly, the one that does the actual work.
