There is a persistent illusion in higher education professional development: that a well-designed coaching program, once launched after a standard RFP process and the selection of vendors, simply runs by itself: coaches get paired with participants; assessments get administered, sessions get scheduled and held… and somewhere along the way, leaders are expected to emerge, transformed and ready to carry the institution forward.
One conversation in the 2025 season of Coaching in Higher Education quietly but completely dismantled this illusion of standing up effective run-of-the-mill coaching programs when I spoke with Stéfane Cahill Farella, Senior Associate Director of Organizational Effectiveness at Boston College (BC).
What Stéf has helped build with BC’s Ignatian Leadership Development Program is not a coaching program that checks boxes and sits alongside institutional strategy. As it turns out, it IS the institutional strategy, made tangible through structured human development deeply embedded in the values that drive the institution.
That distinction matters enormously for those of us who serve higher education institutions as external coaches and organizational development consultants. It reframes how we think about our role, our value, and our accountability to the organizations we support.
That illusion collapses the moment you see coaching treated as institutional strategy rather than a checkbox.
The Foundational Document That Changes Everything
One of the most striking elements of our conversation was the written foundational document that anchored the entire program. Before selecting any coach, before nominating any participant, BC wrestled with a deceptively profound question: How is leadership development at Boston College distinctly different from what any other institution might offer?
That question produced a living document organizing the program around three interlocking principles: Ignatian leadership rooted in a 500-year Jesuit tradition, inclusive leadership grounded in equity and human dignity, and leadership science drawn from contemporary research. These were not decorative statements but became the “institutional dialect” through which every coaching session, every module, and every participant expectation was interpreted.
I’d like to stress how, for coaches working at colleges and universities without this level of clarity, this is a significant insight. Institutions that cannot articulate what kind of leaders they are trying to develop will struggle to evaluate whether their coaching investment is working. As external providers, we can help clients build that awareness and create the clarity their programs need to move from good intentions to genuine organizational impact. Sometimes the most valuable work we do begins not with the coaching itself, but with the questions that precede it.
Coaching Integration as Institutional Strategy, Not Individual Intervention
Organizational and not individual, mind you. I always shy away from coaching engagements that aim to “fix” an individual’s performance and make it conform to whatever standards the sponsor – often the supervisor – set for the employee.
That’s not what coaching should be doing; or at least it’s not the kind of work where coaching can truly show its full potential.
A year-long coaching program, designed as an organizational intervention, however, affects more than the people enrolled. It sends ripples outward into the organization through supervisors completing 360 assessments, through peers in the cohort reflecting on their own leadership as they observe colleagues grow, and through senior leaders who are woven into the delivery of the program itself, even including the university president.
On the flip side, coaching in the way practiced at BC is also not a benefit extended only to a select group of high-potential employees identified by a standard 9-box grid approach. And this has direct implications for how we position our services to prospective institutional clients.
When a department or unit invests in coaching for a cohort of mid-level managers, the return on that investment is not measured only in the individual growth of participants. It is measured in how well the surrounding ecosystem – supervisors, peers, and senior leaders – is prepared to receive and reinforce that growth.
But herein lies a challenge: without active supervisor involvement and support, as well as structured three-way conversations between the coach, the participant, and their manager, even the most motivated client is bound to return to an environment that does not know what to do with who they have become.
For those of us assisting institutions in designing or scaling their coaching programs, this is the structural and systemic piece most often missing and most costly when absent.
Ensuring Motivated Clients
Another lesson I learned from discussing the BC program is that a significant investment in coaching can, indeed, be justified when we put systems in place to ensure a high level of client motivation. When BC conducts pre-selection conversations with every potential participant, it’s not to screen them out, but to help them genuinely understand what they are committing to and to assess whether that commitment is real.
Additionally, when participants enter a coaching engagement without understanding the modality and without distinguishing it from consulting or advising, the early sessions are spent doing orientation work that consumes time and delays building trust – a waste of time, energy, and resources that diminishes the ROI for the client institution and undermines the immense value of the work.
Helping institutional clients communicate the nature of coaching to their employees before the engagement begins accelerates the work and protects the investment. I would urge external coaches to encourage and help their client institutions adopt this practice.
Iteration as an Institutional Virtue
Perhaps the most quietly radical point Stéf made was this: over time, the program has changed – HAD to change – significantly: offerings have been added or discontinued; policies have been revised; and new components have been introduced based on feedback and lived experience.
In a sector where programs are often launched with fanfare and then left to calcify, this commitment to iteration is genuinely distinctive. It mirrors the kind of continuous feedback loop central to Agile thinking: design, deploy, learn, and adapt. What the program looks like on paper in the design phase and at inception cannot be what it looks like after a year of real participants, real coaches, and real organizational friction.
For those of us supporting institutions as external advisors, this matters because our clients often want certainty before they begin. They want the complete program architecture, guaranteed outcomes, and a finished product. If given the chance, part of our role should also be helping them get comfortable with iteration and building that expectation into their program design from the start.
The RFP Process and What Institutions Are Really Looking For
Finally, our conversation surfaced something practical and often misunderstood by coaches entering the higher education marketplace. When institutions issue requests for proposals for coaching services, they aren’t simply shopping for credentials. They’re translating organizational needs into a document for the first time — often discovering what they actually want through the act of writing itself.
For coaches positioning themselves for institutional work, this is a reminder that the strongest submissions respond to what is written and what is implied: an understanding of the culture, an ability to learn the institutional context quickly, and a coaching approach flexible enough to meet participants where they are while still delivering the structured outcomes the program requires.
What This Means for Our Practice
The Ignatian Leadership Development Program at Boston College is a compelling exemplar not because it is a Jesuit institution with a clear mission, but because it demonstrates what becomes possible when coaching is treated as a strategic, organizationally embedded, and continuously evolving investment rather than a periodic intervention.
For coaches and organizational development advisors like myself, the lesson is both practical and philosophical. The institutions that will benefit most from our work are those ready to think of coaching not as a line item, but as a lens through which leadership, culture, and mission become integrated.
Our job is to help our clients build that awareness, articulate that vision, and create the structures that allow coaching to do what it does best: generate ripples of impact that move far beyond the individual and into the organization itself.
If you are a leadership or organizational development coach in higher education, or a campus administrator seeking more impactful and sustainable professional development for your employees, I would love to connect. Check out my professional coaching and advisory services to explore how we can work together to build coaching cultures that genuinely serve your institution’s mission and your people’s growth.
You can find this and all other Coaching in Higher Education podcast episodes on:
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Frequently Asked Questions About Coaching as Institutional Strategy
What made Boston College’s coaching program different from a typical institutional program?
Instead of running as a standalone benefit alongside institutional strategy, BC’s program was built to be the institutional strategy itself, anchored in a written foundational document that defined what leadership development uniquely meant for that campus.
Why does organizational buy-in matter more than individual coaching outcomes?
When coaching is delivered as an organizational intervention rather than an individual solution, the impact goes far beyond the individual participants of the program to include supervisors, peers, and senior leaders.
What role did the foundational document play in the program’s success?
Before selecting coaches or nominating participants, BC answered a core question: what makes their leadership development distinctly their own. That document became the shared “institutional dialect” every coaching session was built around.
How did Boston College ensure participants were genuinely motivated?
Through pre-selection conversations with every candidate, the program made sure participants understood exactly what they were committing to, rather than screening people in or out based on potential alone.
Why is iteration considered essential for institutional coaching programs?
A program’s design on paper rarely survives contact with real participants and real organizational friction. Treating change as expected, not exceptional, keeps a coaching program relevant year over year.