Why Executives Can Benefit from Both University Learning and Coaching
Senior executives are rarely short of information. The harder challenge is finding enough distance from daily business pressure to question assumptions, encounter different perspectives and consider what may need to change. University executive education can provide that environment.
Executive education can create opportunities for leaders to encounter research, faculty and peers from outside their own organisation. In 2026, executive education representatives from 45 schools across 14 countries met at MIT Sloan to explore how leaders learn, work and adapt in a world increasingly shaped by AI (Report, 27th July 2026). The report highlighted social connection, challenging assumptions and opportunities to experiment as important parts of executive learning.
But learning something new and changing how you lead are different things.
An executive can return from a university programme with strong ideas and quickly find themselves back in the same meetings, relationships and pressures. Coaching offers a different type of conversation. Instead of asking only, "What have I learned?", it can ask, "What does this mean for my decisions, my behaviour and the way I lead?"
Recent New Zealand research offers a useful insight here. A 2026 study of 395 formally coached New Zealand employees found that coaching expertise was a much stronger predictor of perceived coaching relationship quality than coaching frequency, while relationship quality was positively associated with job satisfaction and negatively associated with turnover intentions.
A second 2026 New Zealand study surveyed 187 formally coached employees twice, roughly one month apart, and found that changes in perceived coaching relationship quality corresponded with changes in job satisfaction and turnover intentions. These studies examined supervisor-employee coaching rather than independent executive coaching. They do, however, point to the importance of coaching expertise and the quality of the coaching relationship. The research cited here does not test university executive education and independent executive coaching as a combined approach.
My view that they can serve complementary purposes comes from practice. For more than 25 years, I have worked with executives across business, executive education and consulting. Today, I also bring that experience into executive coaching, helping leaders turn insight into practical changes in how they think, decide and lead.
In my experience, university learning can broaden the perspectives an executive considers, while coaching provides a dedicated conversation to work through how those ideas apply to current decisions and leadership behaviour.
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