This paper explores how an emotionally informed executive coaching intervention can support leadership development and retention by strengthening relationships and bridge leadership divides across age cohorts, career stages, and professional backgrounds in a civil engineering firm.
This study adopted a qualitative case-study design informed by participatory action research. The coaching intervention was implemented over six months within an age diverse engineering leadership team, allowing continuous reflection, learning and adaptation throughout the process.
This paper identified how the coaching intervention enhanced leaders’ self-awareness, empathy, and relational effectiveness across an age diverse workforce. These shifts supported more reflective leadership practices and contributed to improved leadership continuity and retention-relevant behaviors.
This paper focused on a specific case study; therefore, for a more generalizable result, extending the scope and perhaps a mixed study could enhance the study.
The paper provides guidance for organizations on using emotionally informed coaching to strengthen leadership development and improve retention.
This paper suggests that emotionally adaptive leadership coaching can contribute to organizational resilience, ethical leadership practice, and sustainable workforce development.
This paper offers busy practitioners a clear, practical coaching framework that combines emotional awareness, reflection and leadership development into one easy-to-apply model, while supporting more meaningful leadership growth.
1. Introduction: Why emotionally informed leadership matters in engineering
Engineering companies operate in environments characterized by increasing complexity, age diverse workforces, and heightened expectations of leadership adaptability. Engineering firms, in particular, face the dual challenge of retaining critical technical expertise while developing leaders capable of navigating relational, emotional, and age diversity dynamics.
Within coaching practice, emotional awareness is frequently identified as a key enabler of effective leadership behaviour, particularly in relation to trust, communication, and decision-making. However, the construct of emotional intelligence (EI) has also been subject to sustained academic critique, particularly regarding its measurement and psychometric validity.
This paper does not position EI as a psychometric outcome to be measured or compared across individuals. Instead, EI is treated as a developmental and behavioral capability enacted through reflective practice, leadership sense-making, and relational engagement during coaching. This positioning aligns with an action research perspective and allows exploration of how emotionally informed coaching supports leadership development and retention in real organizational contexts.
The primary aim explored the impact of an emotional-intelligence-based coaching intervention on leadership development and integration across age-diverse leadership teams.
2. Leadership development in an age diverse workforce
The literature review is structured to contextualize the coaching intervention within a framework that addresses leadership development, EI, coaching methodologies, and age diversity workforce dynamics. Leadership is understood not as a title or role but as a dynamic process of influence (Renjin, 2020), often distinguished from management. During times of disruption, leadership is defined by the ability to adapt, communicate, and inspire trust (Al Saidi et al., 2020).
Modern engineering organizations increasingly include leaders at different career stages, ages, and socio-professional backgrounds. Effective leadership therefore requires the ability to navigate diverse perspectives, communication styles, and expectations across age-diverse teams. Effective leadership in this context demands a shared-leadership approach that highlights collective responsibility and mutual empowerment (Martins and Martins, 2019). EI, conceptualized by Salovey and Mayer (1990) and later popularized by Goleman, comprises skills like self-awareness, empathy, emotional regulation, and social influence.
The present study integrates multiple complementary theoretical perspectives. Social Exchange Theory foregrounds the importance of reciprocal trust and perceived fairness in leader–follower relationships. Self-Determination Theory highlights autonomy, competence, and relatedness as foundational drivers of motivation and engagement. Goleman’s emotional intelligence framework provides a developmental vocabulary for emotional awareness and regulation, while existential coaching emphasizes meaning-making, authenticity, and reflective depth. These perspectives are operationalized through action research that enables iterative learning and refinement of practice.
Table 1 summarizes how these frameworks collectively informed the design and implementation of the coaching intervention, ensuring that no single theory dominated the study’s explanatory logic.
Theoretical framework alignment
| Framework | Relevance to study aim | Application in coaching model |
|---|---|---|
| Social exchange theory | Emphasizes reciprocal relationships between leader and employee | Used to assess trust-building and perceived value among coaches |
| Self-Determination Theory (Ryan and Deci, 2024) | Focuses on autonomy, competence, and relatedness as motivational drivers | Informed the design of personalized coaching plans and self-directed growth strategies |
| Goleman’s emotional intelligence model | Identifies core competencies for effective leadership in dynamic environments | Used to assess and develop leaders’ emotional competencies through GENOS assessments |
| Existential coaching (Spinelli, van Deurzen) | Encourages self-awareness, meaning-making, and authenticity | Applied to deepen reflection during one-on-one coaching sessions |
| Action research methodology | Supports iterative model development through reflection and feedback loops | Enabled continuous refinement of coaching practices and tools based on real-time insights |
3. The coaching journey: how the intervention unfolded
The coaching intervention unfolded over six months and combined individual coaching, group reflection sessions and supported self-reflection between engagements.
Data was generated from coaching observations, reflective notes, and focus group discussions. Data was thematically analyzed using Nvivo, following iterative cycles of coding, triangulation, and reflection consistent with action research principles.
4. What changed: leadership insights from the coaching process
During the coaching process, three leadership shifts became visible across the leadership group. These shifts did not occur in isolation; instead, they reinforced one another and gradually reshaped how leaders viewed themselves, their teams and their leadership responsibility.
4.1 Leaders became more aware of their emotional impact
Leaders began to recognize how their emotional reactions influenced decision-making, communication and trust. Rather than viewing emotions as personal or irrelevant to work, they increasingly acknowledged them as part of leadership presence.
This awareness helped leaders pause before reacting, reflect on underlying assumptions and respond more deliberately. Several leaders described feeling more in control of difficult conversations and more confident in navigating tension without avoiding or escalating it.
4.2 Communication across age diverse employees became more empathetic
Leaders reported a shift in how they interpreted age diverse differences. Instead of viewing employee behaviour as resistance, entitlement or rigidity, leaders began to understand it as shaped by different experiences, expectations and communication styles.
This reframing improved listening behaviour, reduced defensiveness and encouraged curiosity.
4.3 Leadership maturity shifted from control to reflection
A noticeable leadership shift was the move away from control-based leadership towards reflective leadership. Leaders became less focused on authority and more focused on influence, meaning and responsibility.
5. The SUMUP coaching model: a practical coaching framework for leadership development
The SUMUP coaching model emerged from iterative action research cycles. The model comprised five interconnected components:
S – Self-awareness: Initiated through GENOS assessments and PDA behavioral profiling.
U – Understanding others: Built through coaching conversations focused on empathy and social awareness.
M – Meaning-making: Driven by existential coaching reflections and personal values alignment.
U – Unlocking potential: Enabled by development planning and AI-assisted self-coaching modules.
P – Purposeful leadership: Through proactively re-routing by applying emotionally intelligent leadership practices.
SUMUP represents a process-oriented coaching architecture that emphasizes reflective depth, relational trust, and leadership accountability.
Supplementary Figure 1 presents the SUMUP model as a simplified visual representation suitable for practitioner application.
6. What organizations can learn from this approach
The findings suggest effective leadership development supported by the SUMUP coaching model can provide a practical, replicable structure for organizations seeking to build future-ready leadership pipelines.
For training and development professionals, this research highlights the intersection of personalized coaching, age diverse employee understanding, and EI as critical levers for workplace transformation.
References
Further reading
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found online.
