Elevating the Virtual Coaching Experience - Leadership Resilience Group

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For greater impact on leaders and organisations

by Sophia Zhao & Vandana Vishnu

Virtual coaching is not new. Even in the pre-covid era, some coaches and their coachees chose to conduct the process virtually. And the pandemic has made virtual coaching shift from “optional” to “default.” For some coaches, virtual coaching may be just more of what they already do; for others, there has been a steep learning curve.

As virtual coaching continues to be the primary choice, it brings both opportunities and challenges. On one hand, since many people are more tech savvy than they used to be, the acceptance level of virtual coaching is much higher. Also, when people are just a mouse click away, we see more cross-time-zone requests, and this means more opportunities for coaches. But on the other hand, we also notice that after almost a year’s work from home, both coaches and coachees have a certain level of fatigue about “just another virtual meeting.”

Like it or not, virtual coaching is here to stay. The question is:

“How do we elevate the virtual coaching experience so that we create greater impact on leaders as well as the organizations?”

Create impact through virtual presence during coaching

To answer the question, we reached out to our community of coaches, who are dedicated to providing a transformative experience to clients and have gained experience in virtual coaching. Three focus group sessions were held to collect the wisdom from the CCL coach community.

Our learning can be summarized in the framework. While we acknowledge that virtual coaching is challenging, we also realize that the medium has its own benefits. Used smartly, virtual coaching can create even greater impact than face-to-face coaching.