ATD Blog
From Coach to Catalyst: Expanding Your Impact
Here's a step-by-step way to spark change and make it happen faster.
Mon Nov 03 2025
If you’ve ever thought, “If I advise, am I still coaching?” or “If I share a framework, am I still facilitating?”—you’re not alone. Coaches, consultants, and facilitators often feel the tension of crossing role boundaries. They often experience a kind of professional identity crisis when they cross role boundaries. But today’s challenges may require more than staying in one lane. They require a new integrated identity: the catalyst.
What Does It Mean to Catalyze?
A catalyst sparks change and makes it happen faster. In our work, it means:
People don’t just reflect—they act.
Teams don’t just talk—they align and move forward.
Organizations don’t just plan—they transform.
When you flex your approach, you shorten the distance between insight and impact.
A Story From Practice
I once worked with a new executive team just weeks after a significant restructure. The leader struggled to build trust, and the team lacked clarity on direction. Coaching helped the leader reflect on their style. Facilitation gave the team space to co-create new norms. Consulting tied it all back to the business strategy.
Within weeks, trust was rebuilt, priorities were clear, and productivity accelerated—months ahead of schedule. That’s the power of catalytic integration.
The Data Behind the Impact
Executive Coaching ROI – Executives recently reported an average return of nearly 6× their investment in coaching (FMI, 2024). The International Coaching Federation (ICF) found
87 percent of organizations, with many estimating returns around 7× the cost (ICF, 2024).
Effectiveness Confirmed by Meta-Analysis – A 2023 meta-analysis reaffirmed that workplace coaching improves performance, well-being, goal attainment, and coping abilities.
Coaching Culture Correlates with Business Results – Organizations with strong coaching cultures reported 27 percent higher year-over-year revenue growth, an 80 percent increase in belonging, and a 30 percent uplift in authenticity among employees.
Together, these findings reinforce the catalytic power of integrating coaching with consulting and facilitation—especially when bridging the gap between insight and execution.
What We’re Solving For
Catalytic work addresses the real challenges organizations face:
Leader Transitions → Faster time-to-productivity and team trust.
Change Announcements → Greater psychological safety during restructures.
Team Misalignment → Stronger collaboration and reduced silos.
Stalled Projects → Clearer roles, accountability, and delivery.
Culture & Engagement → Higher engagement and retention scores.
Talent Strategy Execution → Fewer delays, stronger alignment, and measurable impact.
At its core, we’re resolving for clarity, trust, and execution.
How It Effects Business Strategy
When professionals flex between roles, they move beyond conversations and directly impact strategy and performance:
Aligning teams to organizational priorities
Building accountability that drives execution
Creating agility during change
Connecting engagement to measurable outcomes
McKinsey reports that 70 percent of strategies fail due to poor execution. Catalysts close that gap.
In short, coaches guide people. Catalysts move organizations.
The Catalyst Model
Imagine a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles:
Coaching → Awareness and Growth
Consulting → Expertise and Strategy
Facilitation → Alignment and Dialogue
At the center is the Catalyst Zone, where clarity, trust, and execution converge.
In Practice: SIT’s Integrated Approach
Forbes has profiled Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), which partners with Bayer, Nestlé, and Philips. Their model combines consulting (expertise), facilitation (guided workshops), and training (skill development) to accelerate innovation.
It’s proof that integration works. The Catalyst Model goes further by adding coaching—the self-awareness and ownership that sustain change long after a workshop ends.
Over the past 20 years working in organization development with Fortune 100 companies, I’ve often been brought in for what seemed like a single purpose: to coach a leader, support a team, or facilitate a workshop.
But rarely did it stay that simple.
Inevitably, the scope expanded. A coaching conversation surfaced systemic issues that required consulting. A facilitation session revealed leadership or team dynamics that needed coaching. A consulting engagement opened the door to a facilitated program, with coaching as a by-product.
In those moments, I realized I wasn’t just coaching, consulting, or facilitating. I was doing all three—sometimes in the same meeting.
It felt a little like what functional integrative medicine practitioners experience: they’re called in for a symptom, but to truly help, they need to understand the whole system. Similarly, in organizations, real transformation requires us to look holistically at leaders, teams, and strategy.
That’s when I began to see my work differently — not just as a coach, consultant, or facilitator, but as a catalyst.
The C.A.T.A.L.Y.S.T. Framework
C — Clarify the Role
A — Assess the Need
T — Tailor the Approach
A — Align to Strategy
L — Leverage Evidence
Y — Yield Action
S — Strengthen Trust and Safety
T — Track Impact
This is the step-by-step way to practice catalytic integration.
The Coach to Catalyst Framework helps practitioners assess, align, and activate the right combination of insight, clarity, and collaboration. It’s not just about the hat you wear—it’s about the posture you bring and the system you support.
The Tension: Identity and Resistance
Coaches worry: “If I advise, am I still coaching and encouraging for discovery?”
Facilitators think: “If I guide content, I’ve broken neutrality.”
Consultants assume: “I’m hired for expertise, not only for questions.”
These boundaries protect the profession, but they can also limit impact. The opportunity isn’t to abandon what makes each role unique. It’s to integrate them into a new professional identity: the catalyst.
A catalyst isn’t bound by the question, “What am I allowed to do?” but instead asks, “What does this moment call for?”
Three Integrative Moves You Can Try Tomorrow
Shift Roles in Real Time → Blend coaching, consulting, and facilitation as the moment demands.
Translate Insight Into Strategy → Turn “aha” moments into dialogue and frameworks that align with goals.
End with Shared Ownership → Move from individual next steps to collective accountability.
Final Thought and Call to Action
The most valuable professionals today are those who set people and organizations up to win. Sometimes that means asking the right question. Sometimes it means offering the right framework. And sometimes, it means holding the space for a team to create something new together.
The art is knowing when to do which—and the courage to flex. That’s what it means to go from coach to catalyst. And we understand that there is purpose in it all!
Which role do you lean on most—coaching, consulting, or facilitation? What would it look like for you to step fully into the Catalyst Zone?
