1. Sabina Nawaz

Based in the USA

 

The standout coaching voice of early 2025. Her book You're the Boss (Simon & Schuster, March 2025) won the Gold Medal at the 2025 Axiom Business Book Awards and was featured across Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fast Company. Drawing on 14 years at Microsoft — where she advised Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer directly on executive development for over 11,000 managers — Nawaz's framework for managing the corrupting effects of pressure and power struck a nerve across the global leadership community. Endorsed by Marshall Goldsmith, Adam Grant, and Kim Scott. Her keynote and seminar schedule throughout 2025 was extraordinary in volume, and she teaches faculty at Northeastern and Drexel University. A genuinely breakout year that cements her place among the most important coaching voices of this era.

 

2. Melody Wilding

Based in New York, USA

 

Published on the same day as Nawaz — March 4, 2025 — Managing Up (Penguin Random House) became the CNBC Make It Book Club pick for September 2025 and won the SABEW Best in Business Book Award for Career and Financial Development. A human behavior professor at Hunter College and award-winning executive coach to senior leaders at Google, JP Morgan, and Verizon, Wilding draws on her background as a therapist and emotions researcher to deliver uniquely evidence-based coaching. Her work on navigating power dynamics without playing politics resonated deeply with a workforce redefining its relationship with authority. One of the most active and engaged LinkedIn voices in the coaching space throughout 2025, with content consistently reaching senior professionals across industries.

 

3. Aiko Bethea

Based in Atlanta, USA

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Founder of RARE Coaching & Consulting and Senior Leadership Consultant for the Brené Brown Education and Research Group, Bethea spent 2025 building towards one of the most anticipated coaching book launches of 2026. Anchored, Aligned, Accountable (Penguin Random House, April 2026) — with a foreword by Brené Brown and endorsements from Kerry Washington, executives at Google, Adobe, and Lumen Technologies — generated extraordinary pre-publication momentum throughout the year. Recognised by Forbes and CultureAmp as a leading voice on equity-informed coaching, and a speaker at the ICF Atlantic ELEVATE 2025 conference. Her firm RARE works with Fortune 100 companies and global nonprofits, and over 85% of clients stay for multiple years — a client retention rate that speaks louder than any award.

 

4. Tasha Eurich

Based in Denver, CO, USA

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Organisational psychologist and one of the most consistently active executive coaches on the global speaking circuit throughout 2025. Author of the NYT bestselling Insight — which remains required reading in executive development programmes worldwide — and Shatterproof, which found a strong audience among senior leaders navigating complexity and identity pressure. Eurich spent 2025 advising CEOs and senior leadership teams across global organisations on self-awareness as a foundational performance driver. Her endorsements appear prominently across multiple major 2025 coaching books — including Melody Wilding's Managing Up — reflecting her standing as a trusted peer voice in the community, not just a practitioner.

 

5. Erica Dhawan

Based in Tampa, FL, USA

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One of the most in-demand keynote speakers of 2025, Dhawan's work on digital body language and connectional intelligence found renewed urgency as organisations continued navigating hybrid and AI-augmented workplaces. Author of Digital Body Language and Get Big Things Done, both widely adopted in corporate leadership programmes, her client roster includes Habitat for Humanity, World Bank, and Microsoft. Featured in Real Leaders' Top Executive Coaches list and maintaining a highly active LinkedIn presence throughout 2025, Dhawan brings a rare combination of academic rigour and practitioner relevance to the question of how leaders communicate — and connect — in an increasingly fragmented world.

 

6. Alisa Cohn

Based in New York, USA

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Named the #1 Startup Coach in the World by Marshall Goldsmith Coaches, Cohn had a particularly strong 2025 as the startup and scale-up coaching market continued its post-pandemic expansion. Her specialisation in founder-to-CEO transitions — coaching leaders from seed stage through IPO — puts her at the intersection of the most dynamic and high-stakes leadership development happening right now. Author of From Start-Up to Grown-Up, her frameworks are increasingly referenced across the VC and startup ecosystem. Consistently active on LinkedIn with highly engaged founder and operator audiences, and a regular presence at major startup and venture events throughout the year.

 

7. Joshua Miller

Based in Austin, TX, USA

 

LinkedIn Top Voice and Forbes Coaches Council member with one of the most active content presences in the executive coaching space throughout 2025. A Master Certified Executive Coach working with Fortune 500 emerging and senior leaders at Google, Deloitte, Cisco, PayPal, and the US Navy, Miller's focus on AI-ready leadership — helping executives develop the mindset and skillset to lead in an AI-augmented environment — gave him a distinctive and timely positioning throughout the year. TEDx speaker, LinkedIn Learning author, and contributor to Forbes, Miller's content on leadership, emotional intelligence, and future-ready performance regularly achieves significant reach across LinkedIn and beyond.

 

8. Ramona Shaw

Based in San Francisco, CA, USA

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One of the most consistently active and high-output leadership coaches on LinkedIn in 2025, Shaw's Manager Track podcast hit 300 episodes — a milestone that reflects five years of weekly publishing without pause. Founder of Archova, a boutique leadership development company working with startups and companies including Google, Dropbox, and UBS, Shaw has built a highly engaged global community around her work helping new and mid-level managers transition into confident, effective leaders. Best-selling author of The Confident & Competent New Manager, her proprietary APS Method — Awareness, Principles, Systems — is increasingly adopted in corporate management development programmes.

 

9. Keren Eldad

Based in Austin, TX, USA

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Her book GILDED: Breaking Free from the Cage of Ambition, Perfectionism, and the Relentless Pursuit of More was published in January 2025 and found a significant and loyal audience among C-suite executives navigating burnout, purpose crises, and the cost of relentless achievement. Featured in Real Leaders' Top Executive Coaches list with strong coaching engagements at J.P. Morgan, Louis Vuitton, and other Fortune 500 organisations. A distinctive and courageous voice addressing the shadow side of high performance — the part that most coaching frameworks politely ignore — Eldad's willingness to name what others won't makes her content uniquely shareable and her coaching uniquely effective.

 

10. Liz Fosslien

Based in San Francisco, CA, USA

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Co-author of the Wall Street Journal bestsellers No Hard Feelings and Big Feelings, Fosslien spent 2025 as one of the most sought-after voices on emotional intelligence in leadership. Her endorsements appear across multiple major 2025 coaching and leadership books, reflecting her standing as a trusted peer voice in the community. Head of Content at Humu, her visual, accessible approach to workplace emotions — delivered through a highly distinctive illustration style — gives her unusual reach across LinkedIn and beyond. Her work addresses something most leadership programmes skip entirely: what to actually do with the feelings that show up at work, and how to use them as information rather than suppress them as liabilities.

 

11. Dan Martell

Based in Kelowna, BC, Canada

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Founder of SaaS Academy and author of Buy Back Your Time, Martell remained one of the most active and influential coaches for SaaS founders and operators throughout 2025. His framework around time management, delegation, and building systems that free up founder bandwidth resonated strongly with a market of scaling entrepreneurs increasingly aware that founder bottlenecks kill growth. Extremely active on LinkedIn and YouTube with exceptional content engagement throughout the year, his SaaS Academy community represents one of the most tangible ongoing coaching ecosystems in the entrepreneurial space — not just content consumption but genuine peer accountability at scale.

 

12. Suzy Welch

Based in New York, USA

 

Former editor of Harvard Business Review, bestselling author of 10-10-10: A Life-Transforming Idea — the decision-making framework built around evaluating choices across ten minutes, ten months, and ten years — and one of the most widely respected voices on personal leadership, career reinvention, and values-driven decision-making. Active throughout 2025-2026 as a speaker, media contributor, and LinkedIn voice, Welch's framework for making decisions that align with long-term values rather than short-term pressure has been adopted by executive coaches globally as a practical coaching tool. Her combination of editorial credibility, academic rigour, and genuine warmth in delivery makes her one of the most trusted voices for professionals navigating significant personal and professional transitions.

 

13. Michael Bungay Stanier

Based in Toronto, ON, Canada

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Author of The Coaching Habit — which crossed 1 million copies sold — and How to Begin, MBS maintained high visibility throughout 2025 through speaking, podcasting, and community engagement. His mission to make coaching skills accessible to everyday managers rather than just elite executives gives him unusual breadth of reach and impact that most coaching authors never achieve. Active and highly engaged LinkedIn following with consistent high-quality content, he continued to champion the idea that the single most impactful thing a manager can do is stay curious and ask better questions — a deceptively simple message that his 2025 community work brought to life at scale.

 

14. Carey Nieuwhof

Based in Ontario, Canada

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One of the most prolific leadership content producers in the world, Nieuwhof's podcast crossed 100 million downloads in 2025 — a milestone achieved through extraordinary consistency and genuine editorial quality over many years. Focused on leadership health, communication, and organisational sustainability, his community spans faith-based and secular leadership audiences globally in a way few coaches achieve. His philanthropic work through community development and church planting initiatives is genuine, longstanding, and reflects a values commitment that runs through his coaching work. For leaders who want both practical frameworks and a deeper sense of why leadership matters, Nieuwhof is one of the most trusted voices available.

 

15. Elaine Lou Cartas

Based in Los Angeles, CA, USA

 

MSN recognised Elaine as a top Leadership & Executive Coach in 2024, and she has built a practice serving over 11,000 clients across 58 countries — a reach that reflects genuinely strong word-of-mouth and referral dynamics rather than passive content consumption. With 30+ LinkedIn Learning courses spanning universities including Penn, Duke, Johns Hopkins, and USC, her educational footprint is substantial. Host of the WOC & Allies: Business and Career Realtalk podcast, Elaine brings a distinctive and underrepresented perspective to executive coaching — trauma-informed, community-grounded, and firmly focused on helping women of colour and their allies build authority on their own terms rather than by mimicking existing leadership models.

 

16. Whitney Johnson

Based in Lexington, VA, USA

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CEO of Disruption Advisors and author of Smart Growth, Johnson maintained her position as one of the most respected voices on personal disruption theory throughout 2025. Named a Top 10 Business Thinker by Thinkers50, her framework for applying S-curve thinking to individual career and leadership development has been adopted by organisations including Cisco, IBM, and LinkedIn. Her Disrupt Yourself podcast sustained strong performance and her community work supporting women in leadership is longstanding and genuine. Johnson's enduring contribution is making disruption theory — typically applied to markets and industries — actionable at the individual human level, where it arguably matters most.

 

17. Jennifer Garvey Berger

Based in France

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Founder of Cultivating Leadership and one of the world's foremost thinkers on complexity leadership, Garvey Berger's work with senior teams at the UN, Google, Microsoft, and Novartis continued at pace throughout 2025. Author of Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps — one of the most intellectually rigorous and practically useful books in the coaching literature — her approach is grounded in adult development theory and the honest acknowledgement that most leadership problems are not skill gaps but mindset traps. Her community of coaches and practitioners spans 40+ countries and her influence on how the world's most sophisticated leadership development programmes are designed is substantial and growing.

 

18. Marcia Reynolds

Based in Phoenix, AZ, USA

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Past president of the International Coaching Federation and author of Coach the Person, Not the Problem — one of the most widely used coaching methodology texts in ICF accreditation programmes globally — Reynolds maintained an active 2025 presence through international training, writing, and community contribution. A foundational figure in the professionalisation of coaching, her influence runs deep through the profession itself rather than just its public face. In an industry where celebrity coaches attract attention, Reynolds represents something rarer: the person whose work shapes how every other coach on this list was trained. That kind of foundational influence is worth recognising explicitly.

 

19. Kathy Caprino

Based in Stamford, CT, USA

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LinkedIn Top Voice, Senior Forbes contributor, and internationally recognised women's career and leadership coach, Caprino maintained consistent high-output thought leadership throughout 2025 with particular resonance among senior professional women navigating career pivots, leadership transitions, and the specific challenges of building authority in male-dominated industries. Host of the Finding Brave podcast — one of the most consistently produced leadership coaching podcasts in the space — and author of The Most Powerful You, her 5-Step Career Success Model is widely referenced by coaches and HR professionals as a practical framework for helping leaders move from stuck to strategic.

 

20. Dan Sullivan

Based in Toronto, ON, Canada

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Founder of Strategic Coach — one of the longest-running and most successful coaching programmes for entrepreneurs in the world, now spanning 35+ years — Sullivan's influence on how a generation of growth-minded founders thinks about scaling is foundational. Creator of frameworks including Who Not How and The Gap and the Gain — both of which have been co-written into bestselling books and embedded in the operating vocabulary of the entrepreneurial community globally. His active community of thousands of entrepreneurs gives him ongoing real-world impact throughout 2025 that far exceeds what any public social media presence could measure. For entrepreneurs building serious businesses, Strategic Coach remains a rite of passage.

 

21. Jim Dethmer

Based in Chicago, IL, USA

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Co-author of The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership and coach to founders and executives who want to reduce reactivity, increase accountability, and lead with genuine intention rather than fear. Dethmer's frameworks are widely embedded in startup cultures globally — particularly in Silicon Valley — and his influence on how technology leaders approach self-awareness, responsibility, and psychological safety continued to grow throughout 2025. His work occupies a distinctive space between executive coaching and leadership philosophy, helping leaders examine not just what they do but who they are being when they do it. The kind of coaching that changes careers rather than just quarterly results.

 

22. Dr Stacey Ashley

Based in Sydney, Australia

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LinkedIn Top Voice, Thinkers360 Global Top Voice 2025, and recipient of 14 international Stevie Awards — including the Gold Award for Thought Leader of the Year. A six-time Amazon #1 bestselling author, Ashley's 2025 output included new content on psychosocial safety in leadership environments — a topic that grew rapidly in relevance as organisations grappled with workplace wellbeing legislation and the human cost of poor leadership. Working primarily with CEOs and C-suite teams across Australia and internationally, her "future-proofing" positioning — helping leaders build the capability to lead in environments that don't yet exist — gives her a genuinely distinctive voice in a crowded market. One of the most decorated coaches on this list and one of the most active in 2025-2026.

 

23. Scott Jeffrey Miller

Based in Salt Lake City, UT, USA

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Wall Street Journal bestselling author, seven-time overall bestseller, and host of FranklinCovey's On Leadership — one of the world's largest weekly leadership interview series, approaching 500 episodes. After nearly 25 years at FranklinCovey including as Chief Marketing Officer and EVP of Thought Leadership, Miller launched his own literary agency in 2025 and continued building his personal platform with strong engagement across LinkedIn, podcasting, and the speaking circuit. His Ultimate Guide to Great Mentorship and Master Mentors series have found large audiences among both aspiring coaches and senior professionals, and his access to the world's top leadership thinkers through his podcast gives him an unusual depth of network and insight.

 

24. Liz Wiseman

Based in Menlo Park, CA, USA

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Thinkers50 ranked in 2025, NYT bestselling author of Multipliers and WSJ bestselling author of Impact Players, and CEO of The Wiseman Group — a leadership research and development firm whose client roster includes Apple, Google, Disney, Netflix, Tesla, and Nike. Wiseman ran an active Leadership Matters live series throughout 2025-2026, bringing monthly real-world coaching conversations to a global audience of executives and leadership practitioners. Her research-driven approach — grounded in two decades of studying what separates leaders who amplify those around them from those who diminish them — continues to shape how organisations think about talent, contribution, and leadership effectiveness at every level.

 

25. Muriel Wilkins

Based in Washington, D.C., USA

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One of the most active and credible coaching voices of the past 12 months, capping a standout year on multiple fronts. Her book Leadership Unblocked launched October 2025 to strong reception, laying out the seven most common blockers leaders face with the same unfiltered candour that characterises her work. Season 10 of her HBR Coaching Real Leaders podcast — one of the only shows that takes listeners inside real, unscripted executive coaching conversations — completed its run in December 2025, and she launched a 10-week Leadership Unblocked group coaching intensive in January 2026. Founder of Paravis Partners and a trusted CEO advisor for over 20 years, Wilkins brings the unique credibility of the Harvard Business Review platform to coaching work that is deeply human and rigorously practical.

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Congratulations to All 25 Honourees

 

Think a coach belongs on next year's list?

 

Nominations for the 2027 Industry Leaders Top 25 can be made here https://www.theindustryleaders.org/nominate

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Selections are made at the sole editorial discretion of The Industry Leaders based on publicly available information. Inclusion or exclusion does not constitute an endorsement, and positions within the list do not reflect a definitive ranking of merit.