Where Yale Leadership Meets Coaching Excellence
For the first time, a top tier business school brings its full intellectual weight to professional coaching.
Yale SOM's Certificate in Professional Coaching program is more than just another path to International Coaching Federation (ICF) certification, but a fundamental reimagining of what coaching education can be when professional mastery meets academic rigor.
What makes it unprecedented?
Most coaching programs are designed by coaches, for coaches. This program is directed by Yale SOM’s Dr. Heidi Brooks — whose research has redefined how we understand leadership development. Her groundbreaking work on everyday leadership proves that organizational transformation doesn't happen in boardrooms. It happens in the micro-moments of daily interaction where culture is actually built.
You'll learn to coach at that intersection—where individual development meets organizational change, where small moments create big movements, where humanity becomes a strategic advantage.
The result? You become a different kind of coach.
One who understands that coaching is fundamentally based on relationships—it’s work grounded in relationships with self, with others one-on-one, and with teams and organizations. You'll develop foundational skills that respond to the unique dynamics each client brings with sensitivity to context, power, role, and system. The program develops your ability to create conditions in which your client’s capacity can expand. You'll learn to recognize what a client is experiencing in real time, to sit with complexity without forcing quick answers, and to offer honest, aspirational reflection that opens new possibilities. You'll help clients see that their greatest impact happens not only in their biggest decisions, but in their everyday choices.
Yale's reputation. ICF's standards. Six months that transform your practice.
This blended program takes place over six months in a classroom setting at the Yale School of Management. You'll engage in robust academic learning, experiential coaching practice, and application to real organizational challenges—emerging with the required education hours to apply for ICF Level 1 or Level 2 certification.
More importantly, you'll emerge with a distinctive approach to coaching that only Yale can teach: one grounded in leadership science, focused on the relationships you build with yourself, others, and organizations, and designed to create ripples of transformation throughout entire organizations.
