What services does Thoroughgood Development offer?

We provide three core services: personalised 1:1 executive coaching, evidence-based training solutions for teams and leaders, and business psychology consultancy covering areas like employee engagement, culture, wellbeing, and organisational development.

Who is Thoroughgood Development for?

We work with growing organisations, senior leaders, HR teams, and individuals who want to develop their people. Our clients range from SMEs to large international organisations across all sectors.

Where is Thoroughgood Development based?

We are based in London (Covent Garden) and deliver services across the UK and internationally. Executive coaching and training are available both in-person and virtually.

How do I book a consultation?

Contact us through our website to schedule a free initial consultation. We will discuss your needs and recommend the most appropriate service, whether that is coaching, training, or psychology consultancy.

What makes your approach different?

Our founder Dale Thoroughgood is a qualified occupational psychologist (MSc, BPS member) with 20+ years of experience. Every solution is evidence-based, personalised, and designed to create measurable, lasting change — nothing is off the shelf.

Executive Coaching & Psychology London

Executive coaching is not one thing. It is at least five distinct interventions, each designed for a different business problem, each supported by a different evidence base, and each requiring a different kind of coach. Yet most HR teams commission coaching as a single product, then wonder why the results are uneven across a portfolio of assignments. The variation is rarely about the individual coaches. It is about the fit between the type of coaching commissioned and the outcome the business actually wanted.

The coaching industry has grown into a $5.34 billion global profession, according to the 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study, with more than half of practitioners working in leadership or executive coaching. The choice facing HR and business leaders is therefore not whether to invest in coaching, but which type of coaching to commission for which purpose. This article sets out the five main types, what the evidence says each is used for, and how to match the type to the need.

Start with the purpose, not the practitioner

Research from Harvard Business Review’s survey of 140 leading coaches gives a useful starting point. Coaches reported that 48 per cent of assignments focus on developing high potentials or facilitating transitions, 26 per cent involve acting as a sounding board for senior decision makers, and 12 per cent are commissioned to address derailing behaviour. Just three per cent relate to issues outside work. A decade earlier, the remedial category had been the majority. The field has shifted from fixing problem executives to growing high performers, and the type of engagement has shifted with it.

That shift matters because the assumptions baked into each type are different. A developmental coach works with someone who is already succeeding and wants to extend their range. A transition coach works with someone whose context has just changed. A remedial coach works with someone whose behaviour is costing the organisation. Treating these as interchangeable produces polite conversations and thin outcomes. Treating them as distinct commissions produces measurable change.

1. Developmental or leadership coaching

Developmental coaching, often branded as executive or leadership coaching, is the dominant form of the work today. The engagement is built around extending capability in a leader who is already performing. Typical goals include building strategic range, handling ambiguity, influencing across the enterprise, and preparing for a larger role. The 2016 meta-analysis by Jones, Woods and Guillaume in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology found that workplace coaching produced positive effects across outcome types, with an overall effect size of δ = 0.36 and a particularly strong effect (δ = 1.24) on individual-level results. These effects were most pronounced when coaching was tied to clear development goals rather than a general sense that somebody should be coached.

This is the type to commission when you are investing in someone with upward trajectory and want to accelerate their readiness. It is not the type to commission when the problem is a struggling manager, a new hire settling in, or a team that cannot agree on priorities. A developmental coach working with a derailing leader will either end up reframing the engagement or delivering polite conversation. Both waste money.

2. Transition and onboarding coaching

Transition coaching is the unsung workhorse of executive coaching. Ninety-six per cent of coaches in the HBR study reported having facilitated a transition at some point, making it almost universal in practice, even when it is not what the engagement was called at the outset. The business case is straightforward. Leadership transitions are the single period in which performance and risk are most concentrated. A new CEO, a newly promoted functional head, or an executive joining from outside the organisation is making hundreds of consequential decisions against limited context in the first ninety days. The cost of a bad transition, measured in hiring replacement costs, stalled strategy, and team disengagement, is significant and rarely recovered.

Transition coaching is designed to compress the learning curve. The coach supports the leader in reading the political landscape, sequencing their early decisions, building their initial team relationships, and avoiding the predictable first-hundred-days traps. For HR, the practical implication is that transition coaching should be a standard part of senior onboarding, not an occasional favour. If you are promoting or hiring a senior leader, the coaching decision is not whether, it is how early.

3. Performance or behavioural coaching

Performance coaching, sometimes called remedial or behavioural coaching, addresses a specific gap between a leader’s current behaviour and the behaviour the role requires. The twelve per cent of engagements focused on addressing derailing behaviour in the HBR study fall into this category. A technically outstanding leader who alienates colleagues, a senior manager whose temper undermines psychological safety, a director whose communication style collapses under pressure. These are solvable problems, but only with the right type of coaching and a clear organisational contract.

This is the type of coaching most likely to fail when confused with developmental work. The British Psychological Society’s guidance on executive coaching emphasises that coaches working at this level need diagnostic skill, the confidence to challenge, and a precise understanding of the business context. A coach whose natural style is exploratory will struggle to hold the line when the leader resists feedback. Commissioning performance coaching without a clear, evidence-based behavioural brief, often underpinned by 360-degree feedback, tends to produce goodwill without change. When it is commissioned well, with a defined behavioural target and active sponsor involvement, the evidence on behaviour change through coaching is robust.

4. Team coaching

Team coaching is a categorically different intervention from any form of one-to-one coaching. It treats the team, not the individual, as the unit of change. Peter Hawkins’s systemic team coaching model, adopted by the Academy of Executive Coaching (AoEC) and widely used across the UK and Europe, works across five disciplines: commissioning, clarifying, co-creating, connecting, and core learning. The focus is on how the team works together, how it engages its wider stakeholders, and how it learns.

This is the type to commission when a leadership team keeps producing individual excellence and collective mediocrity. When decisions are agreed in the room and reversed in the car park. When strategy is clear in slides and fragmented in execution. Individual coaching for each team member will not solve these problems. It will improve each person’s self-awareness without addressing the pattern of interaction that the team produces. Team coaching is the intervention when the problem lives between people rather than within them.

Evidence for team coaching outcomes remains less developed than for one-to-one coaching. A 2024 integration of research called for more rigorous longitudinal studies. The practical implication for HR is not that the evidence is weak, but that the commissioning discipline needs to be higher. A clear stakeholder brief, a defined duration, and explicit outcome criteria are essential.

5. Group coaching

Group coaching is frequently confused with team coaching, and the confusion is costly. Group coaching brings together individuals who do not work together day to day but share a developmental theme. Cohorts of new managers, returners from parental leave, senior specialists making the shift into leadership, or high potentials being prepared for executive roles. The AoEC draws the distinction sharply. Group coaching is the right choice when the goal is shared learning around a common challenge. It is the wrong choice when the issue is how a real team functions.

For HR leaders, group coaching is often the most efficient intervention for population-level development problems. It spreads cost across participants, creates peer accountability, and produces a cohort effect that individual coaching cannot. It is less effective when the individuals in the group have widely different developmental needs or when the group is treated as a substitute for team coaching in an intact team.

Matching the type to the need

The practical decision facing HR and business leaders is rarely which coach to hire. It is which type of engagement to commission. A useful diagnostic sequence is to ask, before any name is shortlisted, what the business outcome is, who owns it, and what the evidence says about the type of intervention most likely to deliver it.

If the outcome is extended capability in a leader on an upward trajectory, commission developmental coaching and require clear goals. If the outcome is a successful transition into a new role, commission transition coaching before the role starts, not six months into it. If the outcome is change in a specific behaviour that is limiting a leader’s impact, commission performance coaching with a defined behavioural brief and a visible sponsor. If the outcome is that a leadership team delivers more together than its members do apart, commission team coaching and resist the temptation to substitute six individual engagements. If the outcome is a shift in a cohort of people facing a common challenge, commission group coaching and protect the cohort container.

The other decision is internal or external. The Jones, Woods and Guillaume meta-analysis found stronger effects for internal coaches than external ones. This is a useful finding, often at odds with the assumption that external is always better. Internal coaches know the business context, can follow up informally, and are less expensive at scale. External coaches bring independence and confidentiality, which matter more in senior and sensitive engagements. Most organisations benefit from both, deployed deliberately rather than by default.

The coaching decision is a strategic decision

Most of the variation in coaching outcomes comes from the commissioning end, not the delivery end. A well-trained coach working on the wrong brief will produce a well-run engagement with weak results. A well-commissioned brief, with the right type of coaching matched to a clear business outcome, tends to produce the outcomes the evidence predicts.

The question for HR and business leaders is not whether coaching works. The evidence is clear that it does, when it is the right type, commissioned for the right reason, at the right moment. The question is whether your organisation is commissioning coaching as a category or as a specific intervention. Those are two very different disciplines, and they produce two very different returns.

Five Types of Executive Coaching, and What Each One Is For