Behind the Scenes: What Executive Coaching for Senior Leaders Actually Looks Like

There are twenty-two people I am going to think about today.

Two CEOs. Eight VPs. Four directors. Eight heads of department. Spread across seven countries, working in pharma and medtech, SaaS, consulting, energy, finance, food and government.

Twelve women, ten men. Both CEOs are women.

I'm careful about what I share about clients. Coaching is confidential by nature, and that matters. But I think there is something worth saying about what a working executive coaching practice actually looks like, because people who are considering coaching often have a slightly vague image of it that doesn't quite match the reality.

This is what it looks like on a Tuesday morning in July.

The one thing they have in common

Twenty-two is a varied group in almost every way you can name.

The industries are different. The titles are different. The countries, cultures and org structures are different. One client is managing a team across four time zones. Another just stepped into their first P&L role. Another is eight months into a job that looked different from the outside than it has turned out to be on the inside.

But here is the thing they all share: they are moving through a transition.

Not always a dramatic one. Not always a crisis. Often it is a genuine inflection point: a new role, a significant promotion, a sudden shift in scope, a restructure that landed differently than expected, or a quieter moment of "I've been doing this for fifteen years and I want to be deliberate about the next fifteen."

That is where coaching tends to be most useful. Not when something has gone wrong, but when something is changing and the normal support structures around you, your boss, your team, your peers, are either too close to the situation or not quite the right fit for the kind of thinking you actually need to do.

What pure-play coaching means in practice

Something I am conscious of when I describe what I do: it is quite narrow.

I don't run leadership development workshops. I don't facilitate team offsites. I don't do HR consulting. I work 1:1. Apparently, that makes me slightly unusual.

It is a deliberate choice.

One-to-one coaching is a particular kind of work. It is a space built entirely around one person: their situation, their thinking, their goals. The moment I add other services to the mix, the attention splits. I have nothing against coaches who also train, speak, facilitate and consult. Some of them are excellent. But I want to be genuinely good at one thing, and that one thing is being useful to a senior leader in a conversation of two.

After seven years of doing this, I still find every client and every situation completely absorbing. That is not something I say lightly.

The setup

Most of this work happens on a screen.

I finally upgraded to a large monitor after seven years of managing on a laptop and a webcam. It is one of those things that sounds too small to matter until it suddenly matters enormously. I wish I had done it years ago.

But the technology has never been the point.

The coaching happens in the conversation: the questions that create a pause, the moment when something a person has been circling around for weeks finally gets named, the shift in someone's voice when clarity arrives. None of that requires particularly impressive kit.

It just requires showing up properly. Which I very much enjoy doing.

Why I am sharing this

I don't write about my practice often, and I don't usually talk numbers.

But every now and then it feels worth saying, plainly, that this is a real thing that real senior people find genuinely useful. The twenty-two people I am working with are not in coaching because something has broken. They are in it because they are serious about where they are going and they want to think carefully about how they get there.

If you are a senior leader moving through a transition of any kind and you are wondering whether coaching might be useful to you, the most straightforward way to find out is a conversation.

My details are on this site.