Many coaches in higher education know this moment all too well: A staff administrator, exhausted and overextended, managing the same institutional dysfunction for the fifth year in a row, finally walks into a coaching engagement—not because their institution values their growth, but because a budget line item is expiring or the employee is seen as under-performing.
That is the state of professional development at far too many colleges and universities: reactive, episodic, and designed around the institution’s administrative convenience rather than the human beings doing the work.
What’s emerging now is something more promising. Not just an expanded menu of professional development offerings, but a fundamentally different philosophy about how people grow, how institutions change, and who gets included in that work in the first place.
Earlier this year, I had an insightful conversation with Dr. Karen Gonzalez-Rice, faculty coach with the Center for Teaching and Learning at Connecticut College, and Dr. Susan Hrach, professor of English at Columbus State University, about their 2025 edited volume, Transformative Coaching for Faculty and Staff in Higher Education: Powerful Tools to Address Institutional Challenges.
What crystallized was something I’ve been observing in my own practice for years: professional coaching in higher education is quietly rewriting what institutional development can mean, if we’re willing to follow where that conversation leads.
Staff as Hidden Lever of Institutional Transformation
Here is a hard truth most professional development programming sidesteps: when we design growth experiences primarily for faculty and academic leaders, we reinforce the very hierarchies that make our institutions resistant to change.
As I have been saying for a while, staff, including middle managers, student affairs professionals, IT personnel, and administrative coordinators, are the connective tissue of any college or university. They shape the student experience in ways that are often more immediate and tangible than what happens in the classroom. And yet, professional staff remain a dramatically under-served coaching population.
In my work as an external coach and organizational development consultant, I see this pattern constantly. Institutions invest significant resources in faculty development and senior leadership pipelines, while the middle layers of the organization, those closest to daily operational culture, are left to navigate increasingly complex environments with minimal support.
Ignoring the very employees who serve in vital roles that hold the institution together is not just inequitable. It is strategically shortsighted.
As Susan and Karen observed in our conversation, coaching staff can be even more transformational for an institution than working with other populations. That is a striking claim, and it holds up. Staff retention, morale, and adaptive capacity are central to whether institutional strategies succeed or quietly collapse during implementation.
This, however, requires skilled coaches who can work authentically across the faculty-staff divide and hold space for both populations without defaulting to one group’s cultural frame. Such competent outsiders are uniquely positioned to unlock a level of organizational impact that traditional professional development programs rarely reach.
Productivity Coaching Is Not About Time Management
One of the most intellectually honest reframings in Karen and Susan’s book involves productivity coaching, a concept that far too many institutions reduce to calendar strategies and workflow optimization.
Karen’s perspective resonated deeply with my practice, as we both view productivity challenges merely as a door: When a faculty member seeks coaching because they cannot finish a manuscript, or a staff administrator is drowning in competing demands, the presenting issue is rarely the real problem. Beneath the surface is typically a tangle of values, identity, unexplored expectations, and often a profound misalignment between how someone spends their time and what they truly care about.
This is precisely where coaches bring irreplaceable value. We rarely help clients build better systems; instead, we support them in developing the self-awareness of which systems serve them and which ones quietly consume them. When a mid-career professional staff member begins working with a coach around productivity and surfaces the realization that her exhaustion is a signal about belonging, not inefficiency, that is not a detour from the work. That is the work.
For coaches positioning their services to colleges and universities, this reframing carries practical weight and offers a workaround when pitching one’s services. Institutions are far more likely to fund a “productivity coaching” initiative than a “values and identity exploration” engagement, even when the latter is exactly what they end up investing in. Understanding that layer and being able to speak both “languages” is part of what makes a coach an effective institutional partner, since they can serve as bridges between different stakeholders, their needs, and priorities.
Cultural Competence as a Professional Imperative
One of the most compelling arguments in Karen and Susan’s volume comes from contributor Anne Marie Edwards, who asserts that developing cultural competence in coaching is a “professional imperative.” This is not a statement about diversity programming, mind you, but about genuinely appreciating how faculty and staff operate and communicate in various social, institutional, and national contexts.
Consider what that looks like in practice. A first-generation scholar from a non-Western academic tradition, now navigating the politics of a department chair role at a predominantly white research university, experiences coaching through a fundamentally different cultural lens than the assumptions embedded in most coach training programs. The presenting issue might be “conflict with my dean,” but the underlying landscape includes institutional dialect, cultural norms around hierarchy and deference, and a professional identity built under conditions most coaching models were not designed to address.
What this demands of both the coach and the client is to embrace deep humility as essential to facilitating cross-cultural understanding. Ironically, many would view this ability to approach situations and contexts unencumbered and aware of one’s biases and assumptions as “only a soft skill.”
Well, call it what you wish, but the ability to operate across various internal and external cultural settings is a core professional competency in the 21st-century workplace – and especially in higher education, both for coaches and their clients.
I can’t stress enough how important it is for clients to trust that their coach isn’t projecting a single cultural frame onto complex human situations. Institutions need to trust that the coaches they bring in have done their own interior work, not just completed a cultural awareness module.
Coaching as an Institutional Invitation
As a final note, I must share what I found most compelling about Karen and Susan’s project: the design philosophy behind the book itself. They structured it as what Karen calls a “coach-like experience,” with reflection questions, multiple entry pathways, and an orientation toward the reader as the expert in their own learning. In that regard, the form mirrors its philosophy that coherence is not incidental but a demonstration of what coaching actually is.
And this points toward something important for how we, as external coaches and organizational development advisors, engage with higher education institutions.
The most impactful work I’ve been part of never began with a prescribed program and a predetermined outcome. It began with an invitation: an invitation to help clients reflect, question inherited assumptions, and explore what an institution and its people already know but haven’t had the space or permission to articulate.
This is the direction professional coaching in higher education is heading, and Transformative Coaching for Faculty and Staff in Higher Education demonstrates this shift beautifully: not toward more content-heavy professional development with a coaching veneer, but toward relational, human-centered, culturally aware partnerships that trust the individual and the institution to find their own path forward.
The coaches who will have the deepest impact in this space are not those who arrive with the best frameworks. They are those who can listen deeply across chasms of opinion, perspectives, assumptions, and cultural idiosyncrasies, ask questions that open possibility, and hold steady in the complexity that defines academic life.
The Ripple Effect of Coaching Done Well
In higher education, there is always a temptation to focus on the most visible and structurally powerful stakeholders. Middle management and leadership, such as department chairs, assistant or associate deans, mid-level non-academic administrators — these are equally important coaching populations.
When we support a mid-level financial aid coordinator in finding sustainable footing in a demanding role, we are not just serving one person. We are contributing to the institutional health of a place that thousands of students depend on every year. Those ripples of impact rarely show up in annual reports or strategic plan dashboards. But they are real, and they compound over time.
The next chapter of professional coaching in higher education, the one that Karen, Susan, and our colleagues and practitioners across the field are actively writing, will be defined by our willingness to broaden the circle.
That is the professional development model higher education actually needs: not one more workshop, but a deeper investment in the human beings who make these institutions work.
my professional coaching and advisory services. Together, we can imagine a future for your campus that is grounded in trust and driven by agile leadership.
If you are a professional coach working with higher education clients, or an administrator exploring what sustainable, human-centered professional development could look like at your institution, I would welcome a conversation.
I offer executive coaching, organizational development consulting, and advisory services designed specifically for the complexity of college and university environments. Whether you are building a campus coaching program, supporting your own leadership development, or looking for a thought partner in navigating institutional change, I am here to help.
I invite you to explore this to learn more or to schedule a discovery conversation. And if this topic resonates, tune in to the Coaching in Higher Education podcast and check out these ideas and much more.
You can find this and all other Coaching in Higher Education podcast episodes on:
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Frequently Asked Questions About Professional Development in Higher Education
What is the new paradigm for professional development in higher education?
Traditional professional development is often reactive and episodic, driven by administrative convenience, not by the people who do the work. The new paradigm is human-centered, viewing growth as a continuous investment rather than a one-time event.
Why are staff often left out of professional development in higher education?
Most programming is designed primarily for faculty and senior academic leaders, which reinforces existing hierarchies. Staff, including middle managers and student affairs professionals, remain a dramatically under-served coaching population despite shaping the student experience directly.
What does productivity coaching actually address?
Productivity coaching often gets boiled down to calendar strategies and workflow optimisation. But the real work usually involves values, identity, and misalignment between how someone spends their time and what they truly care about.
Why does cultural competence matter for coaches in higher education?
Coaches need to trust that they aren’t projecting a single cultural frame onto complex human situations. Institutions need to trust that the coaches they bring in have done their own interior work, not just completed a training module.
What does effective professional development in higher education look like going forward?
It looks like a deeper investment in the human beings who make institutions work, not one more workshop. That means broadening who gets access to coaching and treating it as an invitation to reflect, not a prescribed program with a fixed outcome.