Personalised coaching could be the key to postgraduate resilience

Many higher education institutions already excel at equipping students with academic expertise. But they often struggle with chronic stress and the pressure of navigating complex human interactions. Developing resilience in our students is no longer an option; it is crucial to their success in the future.

We launched the Leadership Initiative for Future Talents to address this challenge. With an aim of fostering self-awareness, psychological resilience and adaptive leadership skills, we democratise elite-level executive coaching – historically reserved for senior corporate executives or students on expensive executive programmes – and bring it to postgraduate students early on.

A personalised journey to emotional resilience

Instead of offering generic wellness advice, the initiative approaches emotional resilience as a personal self-management pursuit. We invite students to join when they enrol on our postgraduate programmes. Before any coaching begins, they complete a set of scientifically validated assessments. These diagnostics map out their psychological strengths, behavioural tendencies and blind spots.

With the assessment results, students proceed to their three personalised one-and-a-half-hour hour coaching sessions. We engage certified executive coaches who are familiar with common leadership pitfalls. The coaching is guided by each student’s unique assessment data, life circumstances and anxieties.

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• Coaching students in self-care lessons that will help them manage stress

Instead of providing advice, the role of the coach is to be a supportive companion on a journey of discovery. Students are empowered to take the initiative to reflect on their individual circumstances and to proactively navigate change. Ideally, this can develop into a habit, helping students self-coach through future challenges.

From the coaching session to the boardroom

While the personalised coaching progresses, the team design experiential workshops focused on critical soft skills, such as adaptive communication and persuasion, and practical job market essentials like interviewing skills. These workshops place students in realistic scenarios, such as navigating a difficult negotiation or delivering a persuasive speech. Here they can apply the behavioural insights gained through coaching under the observation of peers and coaches. Through these exercises, students learn to manage their emotions, receive peer feedback and, importantly, realise they are not alone in experiencing the anxieties they feel.

Finally, students engage directly with our network of business leaders in different networking events, specifically curated for the leadership initiative. These interactions are designed not as transactional job interviews, but as a safe space for students to ask hard questions about topics such as career transitions, workplace politics and professional setbacks.

Measuring progress to encourage lifelong development

LIFT is an evidence-based initiative. We track students’ self-awareness, leadership and reasoning skills, psychological well-being, perceived stress levels and lifelong learning capability at different points in the programme. To encourage students to invest ongoing efforts into nurturing their self-awareness and resilience, we provide them with individualised reports.

Overall, we found these measures improved, and we also saw lower levels of stress experienced by students who engaged in personalised coaching. Those who joined workshops only showed higher self-awareness, more effective leadership and team skills, as well as improved cognitive ability to reach nuanced understanding of social and contextual factors when making decisions.

Beyond survey results, graduates of LIFT re-engage in subsequent years as business leaders and peer mentors in our events, contributing to our ecosystem. These are signs that we have achieved something impactful.

Building an ecosystem for future leaders

A key pillar supporting the initiative is its ecosystem of faculty members, business leaders and executive coaches. Institutions looking to build a similar cross-sector support network can follow a three-pronged approach:

Leverage professional coaching bodies: Engage established professional coaching associations. Many certified coaches are eager to work with young talents and often offer their services for a subsidised rate.

Tap into the alumni network: Every institution has alumni who are very willing to give back to their alma mater. Reach out to mid- to senior-level alumni with a clear, value-driven proposition, such as helping the development of resilient graduates for their fields through career workshops and networking events.

Design mutually beneficial corporate partnerships: Frame the initiative as a pipeline for talent acquisition. Corporations are always actively looking for candidates who possess high emotional intelligence, self-awareness and resilience.

In an era of rapid social and technological disruption, preparing graduates who are able to calmly retool themselves as the world changes around them is crucial. By investing in our students’ psychological capital, self-awareness and resolve, we empower them to find purpose and nurture their development.

Pamsy Hui is senior lecturer and associate department head; Terrance Leung is professor of practice; Celine Ho is professor of practice; Juley Xiao is lecturer; Leon Lam is Asia senior vice-president and general manager and Asia-Pacific vice-president of strategy at Merit Medical and mentors start-ups; Amy Ou is associate professor, and Wu Liu is professor, all at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

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