Coaching is a relationship frequently leveraged in the business sector but is not a well-established paradigm in higher education. Academics, however, can benefit just as much from a coaching approach, and the field is beginning to gain traction for training academic leaders (Robison & Gray, 2017). This article defines coaching, elucidates the benefits, outlines two basic competencies, and provides a few examples of how to coach in the context of a typical conversation.
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
