Good executive coaching is worth what it costs. It is also routinely bought to solve problems it structurally cannot solve, which is why so many executives finish a programme feeling they paid for encouragement.
The most underrated benefit. Many senior people are precise about everything except their own next decade, and an outside interrogator is genuinely better at this than a friend.
Turning twenty years of accidents into a coherent story that a board can repeat. This is a real craft and most people are poor at it about themselves.
Rehearsal with an experienced observer measurably improves how you handle a board conversation or a compensation discussion.
A search is unstructured, discouraging and easy to avoid. Somebody expecting a progress report on Thursday changes behaviour.
It cannot create access. A coach can help you decide that forty companies are right for you and can rehearse what you will say. They generally cannot tell you which of the forty is about to have a seat open, and they cannot introduce you to people they do not know. Access is the binding constraint in most senior searches, and coaching does not relieve it.
It cannot substitute for volume of real conversations. No amount of preparation replaces having been in front of twelve relevant people. Programmes that fill months with exercises are quietly converting search time into study time.
Coaching improves what happens once you are in the room. It rarely gets you into the room. Buy it for the first job, not the second.
Executive coaching ranges from a few thousand to well into five figures, and price correlates weakly with value. What correlates better is whether the coach has actually operated at the level you are targeting, and whether they will tell you something you do not want to hear in the first meeting.
Seven questions that separate an operator who has done the job from a well-marketed programme, and the answers that should end the conversation.
Read → Executive career coachingFour different kinds of help, four different business models, and one question that explains all of them — who is paying, and for what.
Read → Where Brinksignal fitsThe refusals are the product. What we do not claim, do not sell and do not guess — and why each limit exists.
Read →A short call, your target list, and an honest answer about whether this fits how you are running your search.