CEO and C-suite coaching: what it’s for.

The job nobody can help with

Every other role in a company has someone above it. Someone to escalate to, test an idea on, or take a decision off your plate. The chief executive doesn’t. The board is there to govern, not to think alongside you. The leadership team reports to you, which shapes what they say. Your family hears a version of it. Your peers at other companies are, in some sense, competitors.

That leaves a lot of hard thinking done alone, at speed, under scrutiny. CEO coaching exists for that gap.

A gap most CEOs live with

In 2013 researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Business and The Miles Group surveyed chief executives about coaching. Nearly two thirds said they did not receive coaching or leadership advice from anyone outside the company. Yet almost all of them said they would welcome it and would make changes based on feedback.

That gap is familiar. CEOs are often the most willing to hear the truth and the least likely to get it.

What chief executives actually ask for

The same survey asked CEOs where they most wanted to develop. Conflict management came first, named by about 43 percent. Then sharing leadership and delegation, team building and mentoring.

In my own work, those themes come up in recognizable forms. The decision you have been avoiding because two people you rely on want opposite things. The responsibilities you know you should hand off but keep pulling back, because handing them off feels riskier than doing them yourself. The leadership team that agrees in the room and does something else afterwards. And the quiet cost of all of it: the hours, the sleep, the people at home who see what is left over.

The filtered information problem

The higher you go, the more cleaned up the information that reaches you. People soften bad news, frame problems as solved, and tell you what they think you want to hear. Not because they are dishonest. Because you have power over their careers, and they know it.

A coach sits outside that system. I have no stake in your approval, no position to protect and no agenda for the business. That makes it possible to say what others won’t: that a decision is late, that a pattern is costing you, that the problem you keep describing is not the real one.

You set the weather

One of the hardest things for leaders to see is how much of the organization’s climate comes from them. The late night message that tells everyone they should be working too. The flash of impatience in a meeting that teaches people to stop raising problems. The relentless pace that the leader experiences as normal and the team experiences as a threat.

In the book I am writing on executive burnout there is a sales leader who eventually stops sending messages at midnight, and realizes he had been the weather the whole time. That realization is not about blame. It is about leverage. Small changes at the top travel further than large changes anywhere else.

For founders

Founders carry a particular version of this. The company grew around them, often from nothing, and their sense of who they are is usually wound tightly into how it is doing. Delegation feels like loss of control because, for years, it was. Pace stays at startup levels long after the company stops being a startup.

The founders I work with are rarely short of ambition or ideas. More often they are running at their redline so constantly that they can no longer tell what any other setting feels like. Part of the work is separating the person from the company enough to make clear decisions about both.

What CEO coaching is not

It is not strategy consulting. I won’t tell you what market to enter or how to structure the deal. It is not board advisory or governance work. And it is not therapy. I am licensed as a clinician, which is exactly why I keep those lines clear. If something clinical comes up, I will say so and refer you to someone else.

What it is: a structured, confidential space to see your own patterns clearly and change them while you keep running the company.

How it works with me

We start with a free twenty minute conversation. If it is a fit, the first weeks are a structured intake and, where useful, confidential interviews with a few people who work closely with you. You get a written read of the pattern and what we will change. Then sessions twice a month, access between them for the meeting that can’t wait, and a defined review at ninety days.

If the company is paying, goals are agreed with a sponsor, often the board chair or the head of people, and what you say in sessions stays private. Some CEOs start with a single Strategy Day on one pressing decision before committing to longer work.

Signs it’s time

A few patterns tend to bring chief executives in. Decisions are sitting longer than they should. You are the bottleneck and you know it. The leadership team is not functioning the way it needs to, and you are compensating. You are hearing less and less of the truth. Or the results are good and you are quietly running on empty, which is exactly when the reckoning is cheapest to pay.

Sources: David F. Larcker, Stephen Miles, Brian Tayan and Michelle E. Gutman, “2013 Executive Coaching Survey,” Stanford Graduate School of Business and The Miles Group.

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