Ask people what most affects how long they live and they’ll say not smoking, regular exercise, a healthy weight. The research tells a different story, and most of us, coaches included, get it wrong.

In this webinar, Ashridge alumna Petra Lens looks at what that means for our profession. Executive coaching can be lonely work, so we start with ourselves: how do we recognise loneliness in our own practice? At Ashridge we learned, through the Centre’s work on relational coaching, that the relationship between coach and client is one of the strongest predictors of what coaching achieves. Connection is the instrument we work with in the room. So it matters when the coach, the client, or both are lonely.

Then we turn to our clients. Sustained loneliness affects what we expect most from leaders: strategic thinking, planning ahead, empathy and collaboration. For organisations, it shows up in sick leave and turnover.

We know by now that good leadership is about more than tasks and results. What we may not have realised is that the reason goes deeper than getting the best out of people. Drawing on the work of John Cacioppo and Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Petra shows how connection at work affects people’s health, their judgement and even how long they live, and what leaders and their coaches can do about it.