Dr Carol Kauffman
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Founder, Institute of Coaching, McLean Hospital; Senior Leadership Advisor, Egon Zehnder
Board-certified psychologist, on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for roughly 25 years, Senior Leadership Advisor at Egon Zehnder and Visiting Professor at Henley Business School.
Why this placement
In 2009 she received a $2,000,000 award to establish the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, and she was founding Editor-in-Chief of Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice. Founding the field's peer-reviewed journal is a different order of contribution from being ranked in it — it is infrastructure that outlives the person who built it, and it is the clearest single act of generosity on this list.
Real-Time Leadership (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023, with David Noble) is a serious trade book on a serious publisher. Inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame (2025), listed on Coaches50 (2024), and shortlisted for the 2019 coaching award.
Editorial notes and exclusions
- Her most-quoted accolade — "#1 leadership coach in the world" — is a personal opinion offered by Marshall Goldsmith, who is not included in this edition, and she is a founding member of his network. It is excluded from her score.
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