What Executive Coaching Looks Like When a Former Operator Does It

For the ten years I spent leading teams, I never liked the word boss. I thought of what I did as coaching long before I did it for a living. Finding the roadblock someone was stuck behind, giving them a way to see a problem differently, being the connective tissue between where a plan started and where it needed to end up. When I began coaching leaders formally, the work was familiar. It was the same job I had always gravitated toward, with the org chart out of the way.

This article is about what executive coaching actually is, how it works, how it differs from therapy, and why the leaders I work with, many of them in some kind of transition, come looking for it. I coach the way I operated, so some of this will read differently from the standard description of the field. That is on purpose.

Coaching Stopped Being a Fix and Became Standard Equipment

For a long time, coaching carried a remedial reputation. A coach was something a company assigned to a leader who was in trouble, and being coached was a thing to keep quiet about. That reputation is largely gone at the senior level. The market data shows it. The International Coaching Federation's 2025 global study, run by PwC across 127 countries, put worldwide coaching revenue at an estimated $5.34 billion, with a record 122,974 practitioners, up 54 percent since 2019. A field growing at that pace is not being carried by leaders in crisis.

The most telling single data point is older. Stanford's Rock Center and The Miles Group surveyed more than 200 CEOs and senior executives in 2013. Nearly two-thirds of CEOs were getting no outside coaching at the time, yet almost all of them said they were open to it, and 78 percent of the executives who were being coached said the coaching was their own idea. Among senior leaders, the appetite for a coach is close to universal. What varies is whether they actually have one.

The Two Doors

A leader usually arrives with one of two kinds of problem. Sometimes it is the objective work: the operations, the org structure, the plan, the decision in front of them that has a right answer they cannot quite see yet. Sometimes it is the work they need to do on themselves: their path, their next step, the way they show up, the story they are telling themselves about what they are capable of. Over time I noticed I was doing the same thing on both sides of that line, and that most coaches only work one side of it.

Here is what I mean. Whether I am helping a team turn a chaotic product process into a roadmap, or helping a leader turn a stalled career into a direction, the method does not change. You take the messy middle and you give it a shape. You find the through-line. Product development and human development run on the same process, which is why I named the firm for the critical path. There is a critical path through the work, and there is a critical path through the person, and finding either one is the same discipline applied to different material.

The objective problem and what it is doing to the person are rarely separate anyway. A stalled plan and the leader losing confidence over it are the same situation viewed from two angles, and you cannot fully address one while ignoring the other. I work both sides because I have sat in the seat. I carried the P&L pressure and the org chart and the misfiring process, so when a leader brings me the objective problem, I can actually help solve it, and then help with what it has been doing to them.

What I Actually Do in the Room

Most of the people I work with are not short on intelligence or effort. They are buried in the trees and can no longer see the sky. My job is to part the trees enough that they can see what direction they are heading, or work out which direction they should be looking. A lot of that is asking the right questions and listening to the answers. A lot of it is adding order to something that has none yet.

The pattern I see most often is a leader who thinks they need to learn something they do not know. They feel like there is a world outside their bubble that holds the answer, and they are looking for access to it. Almost always, the answer is already inside the bubble. There is just too much noise for them to find the signal. The work is organizing what is already there and showing them how to take one real step, so that the motion itself tells them whether they are moving closer to the goal or further from it. Then they can correct. People spin in place for months because they cannot see the next step, when the only thing they needed was to take a step and read the result.

The work looks different depending on the person. Some need the north star. Some need order imposed on chaos. One of my clients ran his own business, usually had the right instinct and the right direction, and mostly needed a reliable feedback loop, someone to tell him his thinking was sound or to tie his idea to an established framework so it landed more cleanly. That is legitimate value in its own right. A trusted, informed sounding board is often the exact thing a capable leader is missing.

Does Executive Coaching Actually Work?

This is where most writing on coaching reaches for numbers that do not survive scrutiny, the 500 and 700 percent return-on-investment claims you see quoted as fact. Those come from small, self-reported studies and should be read as marketing. The honest case is quieter and more durable, and it comes from peer-reviewed meta-analysis.

Three studies carry it. A 2014 meta-analysis by Theeboom and colleagues found significant positive effects across multiple outcomes, with an overall effect in the moderate range. A 2016 meta-analysis by Jones and colleagues, restricted to workplace coaching, found a moderate positive effect. The most rigorous came in 2023, when De Haan and Nilsson pooled 37 randomized controlled trials covering more than 2,500 participants and still found a significant moderate effect after controlling for the self-selection that inflates weaker studies. Moderate and replicated across the most skeptical study designs is a stronger result than the inflated ROI figures ever were.

Two of those studies found something useful about dosage. More coaching sessions did not produce bigger effects. That fits what I see. A focused stretch of the right work does more than an open-ended arrangement that never ends. I think of it the way I think of an engine. When a piston is misfiring you can feel the inefficiency, and a proper tune-up gets the machine running better right away. Coaching does the tactical tune-up, and the gains hold through maintenance. One caveat on the durability point: the strongest evidence that coaching effects persist after the engagement ends comes from health and academic coaching studies, where benefits held for months. Executive-coaching-specific long-term evidence is still being built, so I would rather tell you that than overstate it.

The other half of the value case is what coaching prevents. When a senior leader derails, the cost shows up in lost productivity, in the people under them leaving, and in the strategic calls that go wrong while no one is pressure-testing the leader's thinking. Coaching is inexpensive against that.

Coaching, Therapy, and the Line Between Them

Coaching is forward-looking and built around performance and goals. It assumes you are already capable and works on making you more effective. It requires no diagnosis and no clinical license. Therapy is a regulated clinical practice that addresses psychological history and symptoms. They answer different questions, and a good coach knows exactly where the line is and refers across it when the situation calls for a clinician.

What I have found in practice is more interesting than the clean split suggests. Many of the people who seek out coaching are already comfortable with therapy and are often already in it. The stereotype that coaching reaches people who would never see a therapist does not match who actually shows up. And the real work often sits exactly where professional and personal overlap, because those two are intrinsically linked rather than separable. The research on work-family enrichment (Greenhaus and Powell, 2006) makes the same point academically: what happens in one domain of your life changes the quality of the other. A leader's energy is not neatly divided between office and home.

This is also where neurodivergence comes up more than people expect. Adult ADHD is common. The CDC estimated in 2024 that about 15.5 million US adults, roughly 6 percent, have a current diagnosis, and about half were diagnosed as adults. Plenty of high-functioning leaders are managing it, diagnosed or not, and a lot of coaching value comes from understanding where a person's energy actually goes and how the value they create at work feeds the rest of their life. When something crosses into clinical territory, that is a referral, and I make it. Coaching that tries to do therapy's job is coaching done badly.

The Sounding Board Problem

Something specific happens to a leader's support system as they move up, and it has less to do with loneliness than with candor. The higher you go, the fewer people you can speak to plainly. I felt it myself the first time I moved from associate manager to manager. My peer group shrank almost overnight. People who had been peers were now direct reports, or they started treating me as an authority, and it got quiet. As a coach I have watched the same structural shift, sharper, at the executive level. A vice president may have plenty of peers on paper, but the work is so bucketed that they often feel no one else understands their exact seat, and worse, the people who could be a sounding board are sometimes competing with them for budget or the next role. Candor becomes a risk. Being vulnerable with someone who might be working against you is not a smart move, so leaders stop doing it.

The evidence here is mixed, and I would rather say so. Some vendor surveys find senior leaders report more loneliness and stress than individual contributors, and DDI's 2025 leadership study found 71 percent of leaders reporting increased stress in their current role. But the most rigorous source, Gallup's 2024 global workplace study, found that job level has surprisingly little association with loneliness overall, and that work location matters more than rank. So I would not tell you that leaders are simply lonelier the higher they climb. The defensible claim, and the one that matches what I see, is narrower. What degrades as you rise is the availability of a safe, informed sounding board with no stake in your decisions. A coach is often the only person in a senior leader's orbit who has no competing interest in the answer.

This is why the best development I ever got came from outside my own chain of command. At Blue Apron I had a mentor who was the chief technology officer, well outside my reporting line as a project management leader. His value was precisely that he had no stake in my work. He could show me how what I was doing landed on the groups around me, without the distortion that comes from a boss evaluating me or a peer competing with me. The research on developmental networks (Higgins and Kram, 2001) makes the general version of this point: a single hierarchical relationship rarely meets all of a leader's development needs, and the people best positioned to tell you the truth are often the ones with no authority over you and nothing to win or lose from your choices. A coach is the deliberate version of that relationship. One more layer of conflict of interest removed, and a genuinely outside view.

Why I Work With Leaders in Transition

Out of everyone I could coach, the person in transition is the one I am drawn to, and it is because the transition is where the isolation and the identity strain peak at the same time.

For high achievers, a great deal of self-worth is tied up in what they produce. When someone is between roles, they are not producing in the way they measure themselves by, and the feedback loop that used to tell them they were good at their job is gone. The current market makes it worse. Candidates rarely get real feedback on interviews. They get silence and form rejections instead. Greenhouse's 2024 research found that 61 percent of US job seekers were ghosted after an interview. The odds get harder later in a career, where age discrimination is well documented: a peer-reviewed field experiment by Neumark and colleagues, sending out more than 40,000 applications, found robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring, and BLS data shows older jobseekers stay unemployed longer, with 28.3 percent of those 55 and older in long-term unemployment against 23.4 percent of younger workers. If you were laid off or pushed out, there is an added weight, the quiet belief that if the last place did not want you, no one will.

There is research behind why job loss lands so hard on this particular group. A 2005 meta-analysis by McKee-Ryan and colleagues found that the more central work is to a person's sense of self, the worse the psychological toll of unemployment, more so than income or demographics predict. For accomplished people, being out of work does not read as "I am between jobs." It reads as "I am broken." Part of my job is to interrupt that story with evidence.

The clearest example I can give, and I will keep it anonymous, was one of my first clients. She was a genuinely strong leader who had been separated from her company after friction with her boss, and her self-esteem was gone. She did not want to be a leader anymore. As we worked through her candidacy preparation, it became obvious that she was not only cut out to lead but excelled at it. I did not tell her that directly, because people rarely believe it when you tell them. I kept surfacing her own proof points, the moments she had risen above, and let her arrive at the conclusion herself. Before our seven-week engagement was even finished, she had two offers in hand, because she had stopped shrinking.

Candidacy preparation is a real, structured discipline, and it is one I rebuilt from the ground up rather than inherited. I took it back to bedrock and rebuilt it around in-depth research rather than on what had simply worked before. It covers the tangible parts of a job search, the resume, the positioning, the interview, and the way a leader tells their own story to a hiring committee. But the mechanics of preparing a candidacy and the coaching work of rebuilding a leader's confidence go hand in hand. A resume can be flawless and still fall flat if the person carrying it into the room does not believe what it says. You cannot fix the document and ignore the person holding it.

The Research Triangle Is Filling Up With Exactly These Leaders

This matters locally, because the region is absorbing a large number of senior leaders in transition. North Carolina had the highest net domestic migration in the country between July 2024 and July 2025, a gain of about 84,000 people, drawing disproportionately from high-cost coastal states, with California and New York posting the largest domestic losses. The Raleigh metro was the tenth fastest-growing large metro in the country, and the Durham and Chapel Hill area recorded the nation's largest jump in the share of adults holding a bachelor's degree or higher, now above 53 percent. The cost-of-living gap is a big part of the pull, with Raleigh's index near 97 against a national average of 100, while Manhattan sits around 228. A lot of accomplished people are landing here, mid-move, having left behind whatever support structure they had built somewhere else.

What Good Coaching Actually Requires

My real concern about my own field is this. Anyone can call themselves a coach tomorrow. You put up a website and you are in business. There is no license required in the United States and no proof asked of you that you can actually help a person, listen well, or draw out what is already there. The numbers bear this out. The ICF counts roughly 122,974 practitioners worldwide, while it holds only about 59,646 of its own credentials, and it openly admits its credentialing rate is overstated by who it surveys. So even by the industry's own generous count, a large share of people working as coaches hold no professional credential at all, and that is before you count the uncounted many who never show up in any survey.

I have seen firsthand what happens when coaching is done without care, when a practice is run for retention rather than results and the goal is to keep a client billing rather than to help them find their answer and move on. It happens more than it should, precisely because nothing in the field requires otherwise.

My standard is the one I would want as a client. Real coaching requires carving out genuine time for the person, having no conflict of interest with their outcome, and actually caring whether they find their solution, even when helping them get there faster is the less lucrative choice. I would rather solve your problem in a quarter than string it into three. That is the whole point of a critical path.

So Is Coaching Right for You?

Coaching is worth it if you are carrying decisions you have no safe person to test them against, if you have moved into a role or a market where your old network no longer reaches, if you are performing well and want to perform better, or if you are in a transition where the stakes are high and the map is unfamiliar. It is the wrong call if what you actually need is a licensed clinician, or if you want someone to simply hand you the answer the way a consultant would. The support that made leadership manageable inside a big company does not follow you out the door, and rebuilding a version of it is part of the work of whatever comes next.

FAQ

What is executive coaching?

Executive coaching is a structured, confidential working relationship focused on making a capable leader more effective. It is forward-looking and organized around the leader's goals and the real work in front of them rather than their psychological history. It requires no diagnosis and no clinical license, and a typical engagement runs for a defined period with regular sessions.

Is executive coaching only for leaders who are struggling?

No. Coaching once carried a remedial reputation, but at the senior level it is now standard development for high performers. In the 2013 Stanford and Miles Group survey, 78 percent of coached executives said the coaching was their own idea, and nearly all senior leaders said they were open to it. The global coaching market reached an estimated $5.34 billion in 2025, growth driven by leaders who treat coaching as ongoing maintenance.

What is the difference between executive coaching and therapy?

Coaching is forward-looking and focused on performance and goals, requires no diagnosis, and is not a licensed clinical practice. Therapy is a regulated clinical practice that addresses psychological history and symptoms. In my experience many coaching clients are already comfortable with therapy, and a good coach refers to a licensed clinician when an issue is clinical rather than developmental.

Does executive coaching actually work?

The peer-reviewed evidence says yes, with a moderate and replicated effect. Meta-analyses have found moderate positive effects, including a 2023 study using only randomized controlled trials across more than 2,500 participants. Notably, more sessions did not produce bigger results, which suggests the quality of the work matters more than the length of the engagement. The headline ROI figures of several hundred percent that circulate online come from small self-reported studies and should be treated as marketing.

How much does executive coaching cost, and how do people pay for it?

At large companies, executive engagements commonly run from $25,000 to well over $100,000, and some employers now offer development stipends or lifestyle spending accounts that can be applied to coaching, though those benefits are still offered by a minority of employers. Tuition and education assistance is more common, offered by roughly 46 percent of employers. Independent arrangements for a leader paying on their own vary widely by coach experience and engagement structure.

How do I know if a coach is any good?

Be careful here, because anyone can call themselves a coach and no license is required. By the ICF's own numbers, a large share of practicing coaches hold no professional credential. Look for a coach whose experience matches the problems you are actually facing, ask how they structure an engagement and measure progress, and notice whether they challenge your thinking in the first conversation or simply agree with you. Ask for references, and treat a coach who promises specific outcomes before understanding your situation as a warning sign.

Why do leaders in transition seek coaching?

Leaving a role, or a company, usually means losing a support structure that included honest feedback, a peer group, and a sense of producing value. For high achievers, whose identity is often fused with their work, that loss lands hard, and research shows the psychological toll of unemployment is worse the more central work is to a person's sense of self. A coach provides an informed sounding board with no stake in the outcome, which is exactly what disappears in a transition.

Does executive coaching help with a job search or resume?

Yes, when the coaching includes candidacy preparation. That covers the practical side of a job search, the resume, the positioning, and interview readiness, alongside the confidence work that determines whether a strong candidate actually presents as one. A polished resume does little good if the person walking into the interview has stopped believing in their own record, which is why I treat the document and the person as one piece of work.

Is virtual executive coaching as effective as in-person?

For most clients, yes. Research has found that a large majority of coaching clients rate virtual sessions as equally or more effective than in-person ones. Virtual delivery has made a coach's location largely irrelevant, so access is rarely the real constraint.

How long is a coaching engagement?

It varies, but it does not need to be open-ended. The research found that more sessions did not produce larger effects, which matches my experience that a focused stretch of the right work outperforms an arrangement that never ends. A good engagement has a clear purpose and a sense of when the work is done.