What Does an Executive Coach Do?

Before coaching starts, the coach checks fit and sets up the agreement

An executive coach's first job is to make sure coaching is the right help for you. That usually happens on a short discovery call, where the coach listens to what you want to change and is honest about whether they are the right person. You can learn what to expect in what is a coaching discovery call.

If you go ahead, the coach agrees the practical and ethical frame: goals, session rhythm, confidentiality, and the role of any sponsor. A clear agreement protects you and makes the rest of the work possible.

In a session, an executive coach does six things

During a session, the coach's work is mostly invisible because it happens in how the conversation is shaped. These are the core activities:

• ✦Listens for what you say, how you say it and what you leave out
• ✦Asks questions that open new options or expose a hidden assumption
• ✦Reflects your words back so you hear your own thinking more clearly
• ✦Notices patterns across sessions, such as the same trigger showing up with different people
• ✦Challenges you, respectfully, when your story does not fit the facts or your goals
• ✦Helps you commit to a specific action and decide how you will know if it worked

Between sessions, a coach may bring in tools and outside perspectives

Some of an executive coach's most useful work happens outside the session. Depending on your goals, a coach might use a leadership or behavioural assessment, run interviews or a 360-degree feedback process with your colleagues, or suggest a short reflection exercise.

These tools give you information you cannot easily get about yourself. The coach's role is to help you make sense of that information, not to hand down a verdict.

The coach and the client each have a distinct job

Coaching only works when both sides do their part. Confusing the two roles is one of the most common reasons coaching disappoints.

There are four things a good executive coach will not do

Knowing the boundaries of the role helps you spot a good coach and avoid a poor one.

• ✦Decide for you. A coach may offer a perspective with permission, but the decision is yours. See do executive coaches give advice.
• ✦Act as your therapist. Coaching is not therapy. If mental health is the main concern, a coach should encourage you to speak to a licensed professional.
• ✦Report on you. Session content stays confidential, even when your employer pays.
• ✦Manage your people for you. A coach can help you prepare for a hard conversation, but you are the one who holds it.

A hypothetical example: what the coach did in one session

Imagine a sales director who says his team is not stepping up. The coach asks what stepping up would look like, and he struggles to describe it. The coach notices that he has interrupted his own answer twice to say he will just do it himself.

The coach points that out. He pauses, then laughs: the team cannot step up because he never steps back. He leaves with one experiment: hand a key client meeting to a team member and debrief afterwards rather than attending. That is what an executive coach does: helps you see what was hiding in plain sight, then turn it into action.