Executive Coaching
Your strategy is fine. Your relationships are the bottleneck.
For senior leaders, founders and newly-promoted executives who have run out of road on technical excellence alone.
Nobody gets promoted for being relationally skilled. Everybody gets stuck for not being.
The skills that got you here — being the sharpest analyst, the most reliable operator, the person who could always be handed the hard thing — are almost entirely individual skills. Then you get promoted, and overnight the job becomes something else: getting a room of people who do not report to you to change what they were going to do anyway.
Most executive derailment I see has nothing to do with capability. It is a leader who cannot hold a difficult conversation without turning it into a verdict. It is a founder whose leadership team has quietly stopped telling them the truth. It is a brilliant CXO whose peers have learned to route around them.
This is coaching, not mentoring. I will not tell you how to run your function — you know that better than I do. I will show you the effect you are having on the people you need, which is the one thing your seniority now makes almost impossible for you to find out on your own.
I bring two decades inside organisations to the room, so you will not spend the first three sessions explaining what a matrix structure is or why the quarterly cycle makes everything harder.
This is probably you if…
- You are respected and not particularly liked, and it is starting to cost you.
- Your team agrees in the room and nothing changes afterwards.
- You have stopped receiving bad news early.
- A 360 came back and one theme in it stung more than it should have.
- You have just stepped up a level and the job feels different in a way you cannot name.
- You are carrying a conflict with a peer that both of you are pretending is fine.
What you get
Specifics, not promises.
An honest mirror
The single scarcest commodity at senior level. Someone with no stake in your politics telling you what they observe.
Stakeholder mapping
Who actually decides, who influences quietly, and where your relational debt has built up without you noticing.
Difficult conversation rehearsal
We run the conversation you are avoiding, out loud, until you can hold it without armour or apology.
Executive presence work
Not posture and voice coaching. How you occupy a room, handle challenge, and stay regulated when it matters.
Emotional intelligence, applied
As a licensed EI coach I work with actual instruments, not vibes — self-awareness, regulation, and reading a room accurately.
Optional 360 input
Confidential conversations with peers and reports, reported as themes. Uncomfortable and usually decisive.
The arc
How an engagement unfolds.
Every engagement is different in content and identical in shape.
Start hereChemistry and contracting
A discovery call, then an explicit agreement on goals, confidentiality and what your sponsor (if there is one) will and will not be told.
Data gathering
Self-assessment, and optionally structured conversations with the people around you. We start from evidence, not impression.
The core work
Fortnightly sessions on the two or three themes that actually move the needle. Everything else is noise.
Live application
Real conversations, real meetings, real stakes between sessions. We debrief what happened, not what you intended.
Review and independence
A structured review against the original goals, and a plan for how you keep doing this without me.
Questions
Before you book.
A mentor gives you their answer from their experience. A consultant gives you a recommendation. A coach helps you find your own answer, which is the only kind that survives when I am not in the room. I have opinions and I will share them when asked, but they are clearly labelled as opinions rather than as the work.
Contracting for this happens before session one. The standard arrangement is a three-way goal-setting conversation at the start and a three-way review at the end, with the content of every session in between staying entirely between us.
Your sponsor hears progress against agreed goals. They never hear what you said. If an organisation will not accept that, I would rather not take the engagement.
A typical engagement runs six months, fortnightly, which is around twelve sessions. Shorter engagements work for a specific transition, such as stepping into a new role. Anything under six sessions tends to produce insight without behaviour change.
Frequently, and it is some of the most interesting work I do — because in a family business the boardroom relationships and the family relationships are the same relationships. Being able to work across both is exactly why my practice is built the way it is.
Yes. That usually works best as a combination of individual coaching and group work, sometimes alongside a Workforce Intelligence assessment where the team spans several generations and the friction is being misread as attitude.
You are, partly. So is everyone. The leaders who get the most out of coaching are the ones who arrive already suspecting that, and the ones who get the least are the ones who arrive wanting a technique for changing other people.
More answers on the full FAQ page
Next step
Ready to start a different kind of conversation?
A 30-minute discovery call, no charge and no pitch. We look at what is actually going on, and you decide whether coaching is the right next step.