Leadership Coaching Without Action Plans

Q: What if I'm the kind of person who needs an action list?

Fine — say so. It can be included between sessions if it demonstrably helps. What isn't done is making it the default format of the coaching.

Q: How will I know coaching is working without action items to track?

By how you feel mid-week. By decisions made without agonising. By the meeting you walked out of without spiralling. By realising you haven't reached for the familiar anxious thought pattern in a week. These are the markers; they don't fit on a checklist but they're much more visible than checklist items.

Q: Are you anti-action?

No. Actions matter. What the approach avoids is extracting actions at the end of every session as a ritual. Actions that emerge from clarity are more likely to be the right ones and more likely to actually happen.

Leadership coaching without action plans means no end-of-session list of commitments to execute before next time. The session produces clarity — an insight, a decision, a seeing — and any actions that follow come from that, not from a template requiring you to leave with three bullets. This is the leadership-coaching expression of the subtractive approach: fewer commitments, not more.

This is a child page of leadership coaching without frameworks. If you landed here directly, start with the pillar page for the broader stance.

Why action-plan coaching often backfires for senior leaders

The action-plan format comes from a sensible intuition: an accountability system keeps clients moving between sessions. For some clients, early in a change, that’s useful.

It backfires for senior leaders for four reasons:

They already have too many commitments. The leader arrives with a quarter’s worth of OKRs, a reorg in flight, a board prep, and something on fire. Another three items is not the intervention they need.
The actions often become performance. A committed action in front of the coach is a new thing to track, report on, explain if skipped, and feel guilty about if it’s not done — exactly the self-surveillance dynamic most exhausted leaders are trying to get out from under.
Actions-as-default trains the wrong reflex. It teaches the leader to reach for a task in response to every difficulty, including the difficulties where the right response is notice it and do less.
They’re usually the wrong actions. Actions chosen at the end of a session, in a state of insight-afterglow, are typically optimistic and slightly off. Real actions emerge the next day, or the next week, when the insight has settled and the situation has clarified.

What happens instead at the end of a session

In my sessions there’s no “so what are you going to do this week?” question. A session typically ends with:

A clearer statement of what was actually going on in the issue the leader brought.
A quieting of some thought that was adding pressure or complexity.
A direction — usually an implicit one, not a list.
Often, nothing to do. Sometimes the issue was that the leader was about to over-act and the session let them not.

If an action does come out of the session, it shows up naturally in the leader’s account of what they now see. I don’t need to extract it. I don’t schedule it. I don’t follow up on it. That’s not my job. It’s usually not needed.

When action plans do help

I’m not dogmatic about this. Action plans help when:

The leader is genuinely new to a capability and needs structure to practice it.
The problem is concretely a habit one (“I want to speak up in leadership meetings and I haven’t”), and external commitment adds value for that specific leader.
The client explicitly wants and works well with that format.

In those cases I flex — the leader and I might agree on something between sessions. What I don’t do is impose it as the default shape of the work.

How between-session learning happens without action items

The honest answer: the insight travels by itself. Leaders notice things differently during the week after a session — in meetings, in conversations, in their own stories. The learning happens in the noticing, not in a task list. When the leader returns, they usually have more to report than they would have had from executing a three-item plan.

Questions about coaching without action plans

Why don’t you give action plans at the end of sessions?

Because most senior leaders don’t need them, and for many they backfire. The leader already has too many commitments; adding more creates self-surveillance pressure that the coaching is meant to reduce. Real actions tend to emerge in the days after a session, after the insight has settled. Forcing them at the end usually produces the wrong actions.

Isn’t accountability important?

Yes, but not the transactional version. Internal accountability — the kind that comes from the leader seeing their situation clearly — is more durable than a list of items agreed in the room. When the seeing happens, the action usually follows without prompting.

What if I’m the kind of person who needs an action list?

Fine. Tell me. We can include one between sessions if it demonstrably helps. What I won’t do is make it the default.

How will I know coaching is working without action items to track?

By how you feel on Wednesday. By the decisions you make without agonising. By the meeting you walked out of before spiralling about it. By realising you haven’t reached for the familiar anxious thought pattern in a week. These are the markers; they don’t fit on a checklist but they’re much more visible than checklist items.

Are you anti-action?

No. Actions matter. What I’m against is extracting actions at the end of every session as a ritual. Actions that emerge from clarity are more likely to be the right ones and more likely to actually happen.

How do we start?

A free 45-minute Introductory Call. You can ask me to prove I won’t give you an action plan during it.