Tom Kolditz: Coaching improves not only business, but also the lives of those being led

Inducted into the Thinkers50 Coaching Legends in 2025, Tom Kolditz is founding director of the Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University. A retired Brigadier General, he led the department of behavioural sciences and leadership at West Point (US Military Academy) for 12 years. Tom describes himself as a highly selective coach, focusing only on leaders in companies that he feels are making the world a better place (75% of which are start-ups). He also consults with universities that are committed to developing students’ capacities to lead.

Tom’s biggest achievement thus far has been establishing the concepts of interaction effects – leadership improvements interacting with one another so the whole is greater than the sum of the parts – and the time value of coaching leaders: interactions improving leadership many years after the initial coaching experience.

He founded a program at Rice University which has now coached more than 7,000 undergraduate and graduate students and he also helped to build a leader development classification with the Carnegie Foundation, which is offered to all 5,200 colleges and universities in the US.

Thinkers50 asked Tom Kolditz to give his insights into current executive coaching trends and future challenges.

“The best coaches make major differences in the performance of leaders, improving not only business, but the lives of those being led,” he said.

His biggest fear is that coaching continues to expand with very little measurement of effectiveness and few performance standards.

“Currently about 60-70% of coaches know little about leadership, have never led themselves, certainly not as executives, but market themselves extensively, put leadership memes on Tik Tok, and are kept engaged by coaching companies and groups,” he says. “Many perform ‘leader-tainment.’ Coaching is more difficult than people think, and measured standards are almost nonexistent.”

He believes that using AI to support coaching can deliver the benefits of coaching to people who could otherwise not afford it, and that the industry should have some level of continuous coaching for leaders at all levels.

“Universities should have coaching available to all students – only about 30-40% will participate, even if it is free,” he says. “At the executive level, AI can be used for a continuance of development following one-on-one coaching.”

Tom is keen to see AI help scale leader development as well as the certification of ‘triple competence’ executive coaches with 1) professional coach training; 2) graduate-level education in a particular field such as psychology or business; and 3) experience as an executive level leader.