Coaching Effect Summit aims to grow leaders and improve team performance

Looking to take your team’s performance to the next level? The upcoming Coaching Effect Summit, delivered by CoEffex, provides the proven data and support business leaders need to increase their team performance and positively impact their lives. 

Taking place at Omaha’s Tenaska Center for Arts Engagement over May 5 and 6, this annual event offers leaders the opportunity for professional development, learning sessions and networking with peers in leadership roles from across the Country. The “Driven by Data. Powered by People” theme focuses on the critical need for leaders to balance emerging technology while maintaining strong personal connections to create a thriving team culture. Chief encouragement officer Jake Thompson and world-renowned speaker and focus expert Penny Zenker will appear as featured keynote speakers.  

In Dec. 2025, the Ecsell Institute and The Molitor Group merged to create CoEffex, combining 30 years of coaching development research and excellence. Under the new brand and leadership, CoEffex is positioned to be the world’s leader in measuring and improving coaching effectiveness, helping companies ensure growth year after year. Current Coaching Effect data shows: 

Employees who report to high-performing coaches are three times more likely to be on a team that is excellent at achieving all their measurable goals, 17 times more likely to bring difficult challenges or issues to their leader, and 11 times more likely to say their manager always helps them learn from their mistakes.

“When the Ecsell Institute was founded back in 2008, our founder believed the success, or failure, of sales teams was a reflection of how well they were being coached and led by their manager, but his organization at the time had no company specific coaching data to support that intuition,” said Will Kloefkorn, CoEffex vice president of strategic development and conference emcee. “Today, CoEffex has measured more than 1,000,000 coaching interactions via their Coaching Effect System and the research clearly shows that improved coaching effectiveness positively impacts key business outcomes like turnover, engagement, revenue growth and other core business metrics. And poor coaching has the opposite effect.”

CoEffex’s current president, Sarah Wirth, will be a breakout presenter at the Summit. Wirth is the co-author of “The Coaching Effect,” a best-selling book that garnered a great deal of attention and uncovered an untapped niche for the company to provide coaching support not only to business leaders, but also to high school and college athletics leaders, as well as leaders in education throughout North America.  

It doesn’t matter if you are a front-line business leader, a girls' volleyball coach or superintendent of a school district, The Coaching Effect can help you measure and improve your coaching effectiveness and impact.

Now in its 17th year, the Coaching Effect Summit will finally take place in the company’s own backyard, Omaha, Nebraska. Past events have been held in Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas and other locations around the country.  

Kloefkorn said many of the expected guests are current CoEffex partners or repeat customers, and thanks to the CoEffex merger, this conference promises access to a deeper well of resources than ever before. 

“Folks who know us are already familiar with the quality of our work and they use this summit as their annual professional development event and a way to thank their leaders for all their hard work,” Kloefkorn said. “We want everybody to walk away with a few research proven coaching tips they can take back to their team to generate a bigger impact. And we want them to feel supported by a community of leaders who really care about making a difference in people’s lives through the coaching relationship.”