Executive Coaching
Executive Coaching is a structured engagement, not just conversations, matching coach to leader, setting stakeholder-informed goals, and reviewing against them, so coaching produces measurable change rather than a pleasant chat.
Arrows link a chain of boxes, opening with matching coach to leader and ending in a formal close.
Reach for this when…
- A senior leader has been given a coach but nobody agreed what success looks like.
- Sessions feel good but nothing changes back at work.
- The board wants evidence that investing in leader development actually worked.
How to run it
- Match coach to leader with a genuine fit conversation, not just an assignment.
- Run an intake interview and gather input from peers and direct reports.
- Agree two or three goals in a written engagement agreement.
- Hold regular sessions over six to twelve months.
- Check in with stakeholders at the midpoint to test whether change is visible outside the room.
- Close with a formal review against the original goals.
A worked example
Situation. Zoltan Nagy, founder of Fizetlink, a fintech in Budapest, Hungary, had been assigned an executive coach after two senior hires quit within a year.
Applied. Instead of starting with how he felt about it, the coach interviewed four of his direct reports first, and the goals in the engagement agreement came from that, not from Zoltan's own account of the problem.
Result. The gap between his self-image, decisive, and what his team experienced, impulsive, reversing decisions, closed steadily. By the midpoint stakeholder check, two reports mentioned the change unprompted.
The catch
The engagement lives or dies on the stakeholder input at the start; skip it and coaching becomes a private, comfortable loop with no outside check on whether anything actually shifted. Fit between coach and leader matters more than credentials and is hard to assess in one call. Six to twelve months is a long, expensive commitment to make on a hunch.
If the leader can't name who gave input to the goals, the goals are probably self-selected and safe.
Origin: CCL / Various