What executive coaching actually is (and what it is not)
By Eylem Samland — FIERA Leadership
Executive coaching is a badly named category. It sits somewhere between therapy, consulting and mentoring in most people's heads, which makes it hard to know whether you need it.
A working definition
Executive coaching is a confidential, structured working relationship with someone who has no stake in your decisions, whose job is to improve the quality of your thinking and the effect you have on the people around you.
Two things follow from that. The coach does not need to know your industry better than you do. And the value is rarely the advice. It is the thinking you can only do in a room where you have nothing to protect.
How it differs from adjacent things
- A consultant analyses your business and recommends what to do. A coach works on how you decide and how you lead while you do it.
- A mentor gives you their path. It is generous and it is also their path, from their market, in their decade.
- Therapy works on your history and your mental health. Coaching works forward, on current professional situations. A good coach names the boundary when you reach it.
- A trusted friend is free and biased. That is fine for support and poor for challenge.
What a session actually looks like
Typically 60 to 90 minutes, every two or three weeks, over six to twelve months. You bring a live situation: the co-founder conversation you keep postponing, the report you are about to lose, the strategy you cannot get the board to fund.
- You describe the situation as it is, including the part you would not say in a leadership meeting.
- The coach slows it down and separates what is actually happening from your story about it.
- You test options out loud, including the one you have been avoiding.
- You leave with something specific to do or say before the next session, and you are held to it.
The work is not getting answers. It is getting an hour where you are not performing.
When coaching is the wrong tool
- You need a decision made for you. Hire an advisor.
- The problem is a broken business model, not leadership. Coaching will not fix unit economics.
- Someone else has decided you need to change and you do not agree. Mandated coaching mostly produces compliance.
- You are in acute personal crisis. That deserves clinical support first.
How to judge whether it is working
Within three months you should be able to point to conversations you had that you previously avoided, decisions made faster, and at least one person on your team who has noticed a difference without being told to look for it. If none of that is true by month three, say so. A good coach would rather rework the contract than continue politely.
Not sure whether coaching is the right next step? A free 30-minute discovery call is the cheapest way to find out. (Book a free discovery call)