Most senior leaders in the UK know they should be doing something about race equality. Far fewer have anyone in their professional life with whom they can think honestly about what that something might be.
This is the gap that executive coaching, when it is done well, is uniquely placed to fill.
The standard EDI offer to senior leaders, in most organisations, is a programme of training. There will be a session on unconscious bias, a session on inclusive leadership, perhaps a half-day workshop on the Equality Act 2010. The senior leader will attend, will take some notes, will say the right things in the feedback form, and will return to their week. The chance that any of that translates into a sustained change in how that leader makes decisions, holds difficult conversations, sponsors talent, or shifts the culture of their executive team is, in my experience, rare.
That is not because the training is poor – it is because training is not the right intervention for the problem. Senior leaders do not lack information. They have read the reports. They know the statistics. What they often lack is the trusted, sustained, confidential space in which to make sense of what they are reading, to test their own thinking against someone who will challenge it well, and to work through the specific decisions they are facing in real time. That space is what executive coaching offers. It is also, when the coaching is grounded in inclusion and race equality, where some of the most consequential leadership development is going to happen.
The gap that training cannot close
Let me be specific about the limitations of training as a vehicle for change at the executive level.
Training is built for a group. Coaching is built for a person. A workshop on inclusive leadership has to find an average altitude that works for the room, which means it will be too basic for some participants and too advanced for others. It is also, by design, observational rather than performative. The leader hears about inclusive leadership in a training session. They practice inclusive leadership in their actual role, often with very different stakes and very different audiences. The translation from one to the other is left to the individual, and the individual is usually too busy to manage it.
Training is also episodic. Most leadership development happens in discrete sessions, separated by weeks or months of normal working life. The forgetting curve is well documented. Without sustained reinforcement, the content of a one-day or three-day training event has limited shelf-life, and what survives tends to be the most palatable elements rather than the most challenging ones.
Coaching addresses both of these limitations directly. It is sustained, typically across six to twelve months or longer. It is bespoke to the individual leader, their context, the decisions they are currently weighing, and the situations they are walking back into the next morning. And it is held in a confidential relationship, which means the leader can bring the questions and the doubts they would not be willing to speak aloud in a training room or an executive team meeting.
The leaders I have coached over the years are not, on the whole, people who needed more information. They are people who needed a sustained relationship in which they could think out loud about race, about power, about their own role in patterns they had inherited rather than created, and about the courage that some of their next decisions would require.
What inclusion-focused executive coaching actually is
There is no single agreed definition of executive coaching, but the practice has matured significantly over the last two decades. The Association for Coaching, the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, and the International Coaching Federation have all developed professional standards, ethical codes, and accreditation routes. A well-trained executive coach in the UK today is a regulated professional with a recognised methodology, a continuing supervision relationship, and a duty of care to both the coachee and the sponsoring organisation.
Inclusion-focused executive coaching adds a further layer of specialism on top of that foundation. It brings together the established craft of executive coaching with a deep, lived, and evidence-based understanding of race, inclusion, structural inequality, and the legal frameworks that govern equality in UK workplaces. It is not a different coaching profession. It is the same profession, practised by coaches who have done the additional work to understand the specific dimensions of inclusion that most generic coaching does not engage with seriously.
Why does that distinction matter? Because race, in particular, is one of the most under-addressed topics in mainstream executive coaching practice. A leader can spend years in coaching relationships and never once have a coach who is willing or able to name a pattern of racial dynamics in their leadership behaviour. The coach is not necessarily avoiding the topic out of bad faith.
They are often avoiding it because they have not been trained to engage with it, and because their professional training did not require them to develop the cultural humility, the contextual knowledge, or the personal reflection on their own racial positioning that would equip them to bring it into the coaching relationship safely.
An inclusion-focused executive coach is, by contrast, someone who can hold the coaching relationship with all of its standard rigour, and can also notice and surface the dimensions of race and inclusion that are at play in the leader’s situation, the leader’s organisation, and sometimes the leader’s own self-awareness. That capacity does not come from a weekend course. It comes from years of practice in inclusion-related work, sustained reflection, and the kind of supervision that holds the coach themselves to a high standard.
What changes in the leader
A reasonable question, at this point, is what actually shifts for a senior leader who engages with this work seriously over time.
The first thing that tends to shift is self-awareness. A senior leader who has not been challenged to think about their own racial positioning, their own assumptions about merit, their own patterns of who they sponsor and who they overlook, will arrive at executive coaching with a mostly unexamined sense of themselves as a fair-minded professional. That self-perception is usually sincere.
It is also incomplete. Sustained coaching that includes a serious engagement with race makes the unexamined parts visible, in a way that allows the leader to choose differently going forward without being shamed into immobility.
The second thing that shifts is decision-making. Once a leader can see their own patterns more clearly, they can interrupt them. They can notice when they are about to default to the candidate who reminds them of themselves. They can notice when they are about to overlook the contribution of a quieter colleague. They can notice when a difficult conversation about race is being avoided in the executive team and choose to bring it into the room rather than to let it remain unspoken. Each of these moments, on its own, is small. Across a year of leadership, they compound.
The third thing that shifts is courage. Senior leaders carry a particular kind of risk when they speak up on race, because their position makes them visible, and because the consequences of getting it wrong in public can be significant.
The coaching relationship is the place where a leader can rehearse difficult conversations before they have them, can debrief difficult conversations after they have had them, and can sustain the kind of courage that one-off training cannot produce. Courage is not a personality trait — it is a practice. Coaching is one of the few professional contexts in which that practice is actively supported.
The fourth thing that shifts, and perhaps the most under-discussed, is the relationship between the leader and their own discomfort. Inclusion work is uncomfortable. Race-equity work is more uncomfortable still. A senior leader who has been taught to manage their own discomfort by avoiding it will struggle to sustain inclusion work over time, because the work itself will keep bringing the discomfort back.
A leader who has learned, in coaching, to sit with discomfort, to learn from it, and to keep moving through it, is a leader who can stay in the work for the long haul. That is the difference between performative inclusion and sustained inclusion. It is mostly built in coaching rooms.
What changes in the organisation
The shifts in the individual leader are necessary, but they are not the point. The point is what happens in the organisation as a result.
A senior leader who has done sustained inclusion-focused coaching tends to make different decisions across four areas in particular. They make different appointment decisions, because they have learned to challenge their own pattern-matching at the point of hire. They make different sponsorship decisions, because they have noticed who they have been mentoring and who they have been merely mentoring at arm’s length.
They make different cultural decisions, because they have understood that the executive team’s behaviour, more than any policy document, is what sets the tone of the wider organisation. And they make different accountability decisions, because they have understood that inclusion is not advanced by avoiding difficult conversations but by holding them well.
Multiply those four shifts across a leadership team, across two or three years, and the cumulative effect on the organisation is significant. The organisation retains racially minoritised talent that it would previously have lost. It develops a leadership pipeline that more accurately reflects its workforce and its communities. It performs better on the EDI metrics it has been struggling to move. And it builds the kind of reputation, in its sector and in its labour market, that attracts the next generation of talent without the constant work of persuading them that the organisation has actually changed.
This is what thriving looks like. It is not a single flagship initiative. It is the slow, sustained, person-by-person change that adds up to a different organisation over time. I want to be honest about the timescales here. Coaching is not fast work. The shifts I have described above are typically observable within six to twelve months and become embedded across two to three years.
Organisations that expect to see transformational change from a single quarter of coaching engagement will be disappointed. Organisations that commit to a sustained investment in their senior leaders’ development on inclusion, and treat coaching as a long-term part of how they grow their executive team, are the ones that see the returns.
What good practice looks like
If you are a chief executive, a board chair, or a senior HR director thinking about whether executive coaching in inclusion and race equality could support your organisation, here are some of the questions I would encourage you to take into your next conversation.
The first is about the coach. Is the coach you are considering qualified in the established professional sense, with accreditation, supervision, and continuing professional development? And is the coach also someone who has done their own sustained work on race and inclusion, not as a weekend specialism but as a practice that is woven through their professional history? A coach who can offer one without the other will deliver a partial service.
The second is about the contracting. Executive coaching is most effective when there is a clear three-way contract between the coachee, the coach, and the sponsoring organisation. What are the objectives? What is the confidentiality boundary? How will progress be reviewed, by whom, and against what evidence? Loose contracting at the start of an engagement leads to disappointing outcomes at the end of it.
The third is about who is being coached. Is the offer of coaching being made only to racially minoritised colleagues, as part of a development programme, or is it also being made to the white senior leaders whose decisions disproportionately shape the experience of those colleagues? Both groups need it, for different reasons.
An organisation that offers inclusion-focused coaching only to racially minoritised staff is, in effect, asking the people most affected by the problem to do the work of fixing it, whilst leaving the most powerful people in the organisation untouched. That is not equity. That is delegation.
The fourth is about integration. Coaching, like any single intervention, is most effective when it sits inside a wider strategy. How does the coaching relate to your organisation’s EDI strategy, your leadership development framework, your talent management processes, and your accountability structures? If the answer is that coaching is a free-floating offer with no connection to anything else, the impact will be limited regardless of how good the coach is.
The fifth is about sustainment. Is this a one-off response to a particular moment, or is it part of a sustained commitment to growing the inclusion capability of your senior leadership over the long term? Both have their place. The second produces noticeably greater organisational change.
A closing thought
I have been doing this work for over twenty years, and I have come to believe that the senior leaders who change the cultures of UK organisations on race are, almost without exception, leaders who have had access to sustained, confidential, intellectually serious support in their own development. They are leaders who were given the conditions in which their best thinking on this could grow, and who used those conditions well.
Executive coaching is one of the most reliable ways of creating those conditions. It is not the only one. It is, however, one of the most under-used relative to its potential impact, particularly in the public sector and the VCSE sector where coaching budgets are often the first thing to be cut when finances tighten.
If your organisation is serious about thriving on race and inclusion over the next five to ten years, the question is not whether your senior leaders need this kind of support. They do. The question is whether you are willing to invest in it with the seriousness it deserves, and whether you are willing to choose coaches who will hold your leaders to the standard the work requires.
At Bakare Barley, we offer executive coaching in inclusion and race equality to senior leaders across the public, voluntary, and education sectors. Our coaching is grounded in over two decades of practice, and in a clear-eyed understanding of what UK organisations actually need to shift. If any of this has resonated, I would welcome a conversation about what executive coaching could look like for the leaders in your organisation.
