Part 3 - What the Evidence Opens

Dwelling at the Intersections: The Art and Science of Coaching - Part Three

A note on language and positionality

This essay uses qualitative and interpretive traditions to refer collectively to humanistic, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and action research approaches that understand knowledge as situated, relational, and co-constructed rather than objectively measurable. What follows is one practitioner’s account of the epistemological ground her practice stands on, shaped by the traditions that have informed my own formation over years of practice.

Meteorologists cannot tell you exactly what tomorrow will bring. But they can tell you, with considerable accuracy, what tends to happen when particular conditions converge, which informs how you prepare. You still have to step outside and read the sky yourself.

Research on human change and development works similarly. It cannot tell a leader exactly what is needed in a particular moment. It can show conditions that tend to support development and how others in comparable situations have navigated similar terrain.

This essay attends to what evidence-based research specifically contributes to the practice of leadership development and where its findings meet insights long held within qualitative and interpretive traditions.

My own exposure spans longitudinal studies, organisational frameworks grounded in practice, and reflective inquiry. Evidence-based is more accurate than science-based here because it honours that range without requiring all approaches to meet the same methodological standard. It is also worth acknowledging that cognitive behavioural coaching, solution-focused approaches, and competency-based models have substantial research bases of their own. What follows reflects the traditions I have been most immersed in.

Situating Coaching Within the OD Landscape

Leadership coaching rarely exists in isolation. In organisational settings it usually sits within broader questions of capability, culture, succession, performance, and system-wide change.

My years in Organisation Development and Learning exposed me early to Edgar Schein’s (1999) process consultation and Eric Neilsen’s (1984) work on becoming an OD practitioner. Both position the practitioner as a collaborative inquirer rather than an expert, attending to meaning and system dynamics rather than prescribing solutions. This sits closer to qualitative and interpretive traditions than to positivist science. At the time I did not fully have the language for why this mattered to me, though I can now see how formative it became.

Scale, Strategy, and the Organisation as a System

Qualitative and interpretive traditions attend closely to the relational encounter and the unconscious life of groups and systems. The Tavistock tradition and Bion's work extend this into organisational life through collective dynamics operating across teams and institutions. Evidence-based frameworks offer something different - replicability, consistency, and shared developmental language that can travel across large organisational populations.

My early experience scaling change management at Merck Sharp and Dohme through the Asia Strategy Group was formative. The group sat outside HR, OD, and Learning, placing me directly alongside senior business leaders navigating restructuring across diverse markets, cultures, and regulatory environments. It was an early encounter with what interdisciplinary integration actually required - holding the interior life of leaders alongside the structural realities of organisational change.

Boyatzis's (2006) Intentional Change Theory matters here because of its fractal structure — the same developmental frame applying across individual, team, organisational, and societal levels simultaneously. Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider and Whitney, 2005) extends this to whole-system inquiry. Process consultation (Schein, 1999) grounds it further by attending to how work actually unfolds rather than how it is formally described. Together these illuminate something individual coaching alone cannot fully hold, the conditions under which development takes root within organisational systems and culture.

What Research Gives

Evidence-based research gives leaders and practitioners generalisable findings, accountability to research, and shared language for recognising patterns across people and systems. It also gives the field a form of visibility that individual practice cannot, aggregated across thousands of engagements, it offers organisations confidence beyond anecdote or self-report.

I refer to several evidence-based influences in my practice - Boyatzis’s research on emotional and social intelligence competencies, his later work on the emotional connection to a desired future as the mechanism of sustained change (Boyatzis, 2024), Kegan and Lahey’s immunity to change framework, and de Haan’s finding that the working alliance is the strongest predictor of coaching outcomes regardless of theoretical orientation. They also converge, from different directions, on insights the qualitative and interpretive traditions have long held - that authentic aspiration moves people, that the practitioner herself is the primary instrument of the work, and that the individual cannot be separated from the systems they inhabit.

Evidence-based approaches do not fully account for the messiness of transformation as it is lived as change is rarely linear or predictable. At both individual and systemic levels, it is uneven, relational, and shaped by forces that exceed conscious intention. Coaching research also struggles to isolate the coaching relationship as the variable producing change. Leaders’ lives are complex, many influences unfold simultaneously, including on-the-job development and attributing development specifically to a coaching intervention is inherently difficult. Positivist research seeks neutrality and controllable variables while interpretive approaches treat the practitioner’s subjectivity as part of the field rather than bias to eliminate. Both have limitations and each highlights different aspects of human development.

The Whole Person in the Whole System

Holding both evidence-based and interpretive approaches also respects where the leader is situated - in their role, their function, and how they make sense of their experience. In working with CFOs, risk leaders, or those in scientific and quantitative industries, the engagement often begins with the concrete and measurable before moving toward the more elusive and subjective dimensions of leadership. For others, particularly those who are highly psychologically minded or accustomed to working in ambiguity, the movement may be in the opposite direction, toward structure, data, and the grounding that evidence provides. The capacity to read a room cannot be captured in numbers alone, and arriving with only numbers, absent that quality of attention, will not land as credible either. Holding both is a practical response to the irreducible variety of the leaders and contexts the practitioner encounters and a fundamental respect for where the leader is situated.

There is also a more personal dimension to holding both. This is the backstage work of practice - the ongoing inner inquiry that keeps me close to what I actually know and attentive to what this particular leader, in this particular moment, needs. It is a small way to honour the trust that leaders place in me when they bring their complexity into the room.

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com. Photo from Unsplash.

Further Reading

Boyatzis, R. E. and McKee, A. (2005). Resonant Leadership. Harvard Business School Press.

Boyatzis, R. E. and Akrivou, K. (2006). The ideal self as the driver of intentional change. Journal of Management Development, 25(7), 624–642.

Boyatzis, R., Liu, H., Smith, A., Zwygart, K. and Quinn, J. (2023). Competencies of coaches that predict client behaviour change. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 0(0).

Boyatzis, R. E. (2024). The Science of Change: Discovering Sustained, Desired Change from Individuals to Organizations and Communities. Oxford University Press.

Bollas, C. (1992). Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. Hill and Wang.

Cooperrider, D. L. and Whitney, D. (2005). Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. Berrett-Koehler.

de Haan, E. (2008). Relational Coaching. Wiley.

Kegan, R. and Lahey, L. L. (2009). Immunity to Change. Harvard Business Press.

Neilsen, E. H. (1984). Becoming an OD Practitioner. Prentice Hall.

Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95–103.

Rogers, C. R. (1961). On Becoming a Person. Houghton Mifflin.

Schein, E. H. (1999). Process Consultation Revisited: Building the Helping Relationship. Addison-Wesley.