Facing a crisis or an opportunity, leaders often fall back on the leadership style that has worked for them in the past. But to be effective, they need to rise above their default reactions and generate more options for how to respond in real time. In this article two leadership coaches offer an approach, called the "four stances," to help leaders improve their interpersonal communication: Lean In. Take an active stance on resolving an issue. Actions in this stance include deciding, directing, guiding, challenging, and confronting. Lean Back. Take an analytical stance to observe, collect, and understand data. Actions include analyzing, asking questions, and possibly delaying decisions. Lean With. Take a collaborative stance, focusing on caring and connecting. Actions include empathizing, encouraging, and coaching. Don't Lean. Be still and create space for a new solution to bubble up from the subconscious. This stance also serves to calm emotions if they have been triggered. Actions include contemplating, visualizing, and breathing. Leaders should identify which stance is their default, make a plan for using alternative ones in various situations, and be ready to pivot if an approach is not working.

Today's business leaders increasingly rely on coaches for help in understanding how to act in a demanding and volatile world. These confidants and advisers can earn up to $2,000 per hour. To understand what they do to merit that money, HBR conducted a survey of 140 leading coaches and invited five experts to comment on the findings. Commentators and coaches agreed that the reasons for engaging coaches have evolved over the past decade. Ten years ago, most companies hired a coach to help fix toxic behavior at the top. Today, most coaching is about developing the capabilities of high-potential performers or acting as a sounding board. As a result of this broader mission, there's a lot more fuzziness around coaching engagements, whether it be with regard to how coaches define the scope of engagements, how they measure and report on progress, and what credentials a company should look for when selecting a coach. Do companies and executives get value from their coaches? When we asked coaches to explain the healthy growth of their industry, they said that clients keep coming back because "coaching works." Yet the survey results also suggest that the industry is fraught with conflicts of interest, blurry lines between what is best handled by coaches and what should be left to mental health professionals, and sketchy mechanisms for monitoring the effectiveness of a coaching engagement. The bottom line: Coaching as a business tool continues to gain legitimacy, but the fundamentals of the industry are still very much in flux. In this market, as in so many others today, we have to conclude that the old saw still applies: Buyer beware!