What Impact Looks Like: Lessons From the 2025 ICF Coaching Impact Award Winners

Part one of a five-part series on the 2025 ICF Coaching Impact Award winners. This series takes a closer look at how coaching drives lasting change, particularly within organizations and communities.

Key Takeaways

• The most effective coaching programs start with something real: a challenge people are ready to solve and a future they want to build.
• When leaders actively participate, coaching becomes more than a program. It becomes part of how people grow, lead, and support one another.
• The strongest results come from looking at both measurable progress and the personal shifts that make growth possible.
• Coaching creates lasting value when it builds confidence, capability, and momentum that continue well beyond the formal engagement.

Impact is an easy word to use and a harder one to defend. In coaching, it can describe anything from a better one-to-one conversation to a full culture shift that changes how an organization leads, learns, and grows. The real question for leaders is more demanding: What does meaningful coaching impact actually look like once the launch energy wears off?

That question matters now because coaching is no longer sitting at the edge of organizational life. The 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study describes a profession at record scale, with 122,974 coach practitioners worldwide, $5.34 billion USD in annual global revenue, and nearly 60% of coaching clients sponsored by their organizations. Once organizations invest at that level, they want more than good intentions. They want to know what coaching changes, why it works, and whether the benefits last.

The 2025 ICF Coaching Impact Award winners offer clear answers. Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS), Saudi Electricity Company, Mission Possible, and the UK Armed Forces Spouse Personal Development Programme work in very different environments. One is a global technology division. Another is a national power provider. Two sit in social impact settings where the stakes are deeply personal. Still, their strongest results point in the same direction.

Here’s what stands out.

Start With a Clear Purpose

High-impact coaching doesn’t begin with coaching for coaching’s sake. It begins with a meaningful opportunity for growth, development, or change.

At MCAPS, a deeper review of employees’ career experiences showed that coaching was reaching only a narrow group of senior leaders and high-potential employees. That discovery pushed the organization to broaden access and redesign the portfolio. At Saudi Electricity Company, coaching was tied to leadership development, succession, onboarding, and broader business priorities from the outset. Mission Possible built coaching into reintegration work for people facing overlapping barriers to employment. The UK Armed Forces ProgramME responded to a quieter but equally serious challenge: spouses whose confidence, identity, and career direction had been repeatedly disrupted by military life.

Different settings. Same discipline. The best programs know exactly why they are there.

That clarity matters because it shapes every choice that follows. It affects who coaching is for, how it is delivered, what outcomes matter most, and why leaders keep investing in it. Without that clarity, coaching can start to sound optional. With it, coaching becomes impactful.

Make Leadership Participation Visible

Programs can be approved from the top. Cultures have to be modeled.

This is one of the clearest lessons across the winners. At MCAPS, leadership engagement helped move coaching from a professional development offering to an expected leadership behavior. Coaching is now recognized as one of the top three behaviors expected of all MCAPS leaders. At Saudi Electricity Company, executive sponsorship helped scale coaching after leaders experienced its value firsthand and saw its relevance to business transformation.

Visibility matters because employees read leadership behavior faster than they read policy. They notice whether reflection is welcomed, whether development is taken seriously, and whether coaching is treated as a credible way to lead or a side initiative for spare moments. When leaders model curiosity, ask better questions, and reinforce coaching in the flow of work, coaching gains legitimacy.

That does not mean every leader needs to become a coach. It means leaders need to make coaching visible enough that other people know it belongs.

Measure What Actually Changes

A spreadsheet can count sessions. It cannot, by itself, explain why a person started leading differently or why a participant began to believe a different future was possible.

The most effective programs do both. They measure visible outcomes and the human shifts that make those outcomes possible.

These examples illustrate how thoughtful measurement aligns with the purpose of the work:

• MCAPS tracked career behaviors, engagement, internal mobility, and promotion readiness.
• Saudi Electricity Company measured cost reduction, time savings, employee engagement, psychological safety, retention, and promotion outcomes.
• Mission Possible tracked employment sustainment and employment transitions, but its story only becomes fully clear when those numbers are read alongside the agency and confidence participants rebuilt.
• The UK Armed Forces Programme captured gains in confidence, support, personal growth, career development, and broader well-being, then paired those measures with clear post-program outcomes across work, entrepreneurship, education, and family life.

The point is not to force every program into the same dashboard. The point is to measure what matches the purpose of the work. Strong evidence makes coaching easier to defend, easier to improve, and easier to sustain.

Build Capability That Outlasts the Program

The strongest coaching cultures do not create dependence. They create momentum.

You can see that in how these winners built beyond the individual coaching engagement. Mission Possible trained staff, developed certified internal coaches, and created a pathway through which former participants can now coach others with similar lived experience. The UK Armed Forces Programme sustained connection through follow-up meetups and a “pay-it-forward” dynamic in which graduates stayed involved as mentors and community builders. Saudi Electricity Company invested in internal coach development and coaching skills for leaders. MCAPS built pathways for employees to develop as coaches and embedded coaching into ordinary talent conversations.

That is where lasting value begins to show itself. Coaching becomes more durable when people carry the thinking, behaviors, and confidence forward after the formal engagement ends. Better conversations continue. Stronger judgment continues. More reflective leadership continues. In the most mature coaching cultures, the effects do not disappear when the calendar invite does.

1 Pattern, 4 Different Stories

High-impact coaching doesn’t look identical across sectors, populations, or goals. It shouldn’t.

What the award winners share is not uniform design. It is intentional design.

They begin with something real. They make leadership participation visible. They measure what changes. They build capability that lasts.

That is what impact looks like in practice.

In the rest of this series, we will look more closely at each of those dimensions, from leadership engagement to program design, measurement, social impact, and the future these winners are signaling for the profession. If you want the bigger picture now, start with the full case studies of these award-winning organizations. The proof is there, and it is far more useful than theory alone.
And if you are interested in nominating an organization for the ICF Coaching Impact Awards, you can sign up to be notified when the nomination period opens.