Search for executive coaching jumped 128% this quarter. A lot of that is people who have heard the term and are not sure what they would be buying.
The actual job
An executive coach works on you, not on your business.
A consultant looks at your problem and tells you what to do. A business coach mostly points at the business: the goals, the growth plan, the numbers. An executive coach points at the person making the calls. How you decide. How you handle conflict, or avoid it. What you are like to work for, as opposed to what you believe you are like to work for.
The mechanism is usually a gap. You think you are direct and your team experiences you as blunt. You think you delegate and your team experiences you as absent until you are suddenly not. Almost nobody sees their own gap, which is the entire reason the job exists.
The good ones use evidence rather than vibes: 360 feedback, sitting in on your meetings, talking to your reports. If a coach is working purely from what you tell them about yourself, they are working from the least reliable source available.
The three situations where it pays
A step change in scope. You went from running a team to running managers, or from twenty people to eighty. The behaviors that got you here actively work against you at the next size. This is the highest-return case and the most common legitimate one.
A pattern you keep repeating. Third senior hire in two years who did not work out. Same argument with your cofounder in a new costume. When the situation changes and the outcome does not, the constant is you.
A decision that needs a thinking partner. Sell, raise, restructure, exit. You need somebody with no stake in the answer, which rules out your board, your team, and your spouse.
The situation where it is an expensive mistake
When the problem is structural and you are treating it as personal.
If your team misses deadlines because nothing is written down, nobody owns anything, and priorities change weekly, no amount of coaching the leader fixes that. You have an operating system problem. Coaching a person to work harder inside a broken system is a way to spend thousands of dollars making one individual feel worse.
Diagnose which one you have first. If the same failure happens across different people, it is the system. If it follows one person across different situations, it is the person.
What it costs and what to ask
Expect $300 an hour and up, often well up, with monthly retainers commonly in the $1,000 to $5,000 range. We broke the ranges down in [what a business coach costs](/insights/what-does-a-business-coach-cost).
Three questions worth asking any coach before you sign:
- What does a typical engagement look like, in weeks and sessions?
- How will we know at ninety days whether this is working?
- Who else do you talk to besides me?
A coach who cannot answer the second one is selling you a feeling.
Fix the system first
If you read the structural case above and recognized your company, start there. Goals written down where the team can see them, metrics that are current, and somebody or something noticing when follow-through stops.
That is what [Goal Boss](/) does, and it is deliberately the unglamorous half. Coaching works much better on a leader whose organization is not quietly on fire for reasons that have nothing to do with their leadership style.
