Executive Coaching
Insight fades. Skill holds.
One-to-one engagements with CEOs, senior executives, founders, and board chairs. Built on a real diagnostic, practiced in live conditions, with progress you and your sponsor can point to.
Why coaching doesn’t hold.
There’s a predictable arc to conventional executive coaching. Something real happens in the room: a leader gets clearer on a pattern they’d been circling, or a sharper read on a relationship that isn’t working. They leave with something they didn’t have when they walked in.
Two weeks later, the default has taken over. The insight was real. Insight and skill are simply different things, and coaching that produces only the first will keep producing this arc.
Building skill takes practice in real conditions, calibrated feedback, and enough time for new behavior to take root. Kurt Fischer’s skill research reached the same conclusion decades ago: skills are context-specific, built where they’re used or not at all. Two decades of coaching keep confirming him.
A leader can name the pattern in a session. Doing something different on Thursday, in the meeting where it costs something, is a skill.
What an engagement looks like.
Every engagement begins with diagnosis. Before we build anything, we need to see where the leader’s current thinking and behavior creates the constraint, which is often somewhere other than the stated goal.
Assess. Diagnosis before direction.
We start with the Lectical Leadership Decision Making Assessment, a research-grounded instrument that shows where a leader’s reasoning is today and where the next developmental edge sits, often before the leader can name it themselves.
Map. From assessment to specific skill.
From the assessment we identify the skills to build. Complex behaviors like decision-making under ambiguity or stakeholder navigation get broken into micro-skills that can be practiced and measured, then mapped to the rooms where they have to show up. Context decides whether a skill transfers.
Practice. Working sessions.
Sessions are practice grounded in the decisions, relationships, and challenges already in front of you. We work with what’s live: this week’s decision, the relationship that’s strained, the meeting that went sideways. New behavior gets introduced in the conditions where it has to work.
Measure. Progress you can point to.
We return to assessment touchpoints through the engagement, so the leader can see what’s changing and we can adjust the arc when it needs to shift. At the close, both the leader and their sponsor should be able to point to something specific.
Bryan noticed I do this little shoulder thing when I’m actually feeling confident. He pointed it out one session: there it is, that’s the tell. After our org went through layoffs and I was a mess in exec meetings, he’d watch for it coming back. He saw it return before I felt it. I’ve had managers, mentors, a therapist. Nobody’s ever paid attention at that level.
Chief Communications Officer · Software
Assessment as diagnosis.
Assessments are only as useful as the questions they’re built to answer. We select instruments for what the engagement needs, and every leader gets the same thing from them: a clear picture of where they are.
Lectical Leadership Decision Making Assessment
LDMA · Theo Dawson, Lectica
The spine of the practice. The LDMA measures the complexity and quality of a leader’s reasoning in professional contexts, which tells us where to work. Few coaching practices run a true developmental instrument; ours is built around one.
If your organization already uses DiSC, MBTI, CliftonStrengths, or similar, we’re glad to work with that data. We treat style instruments as conversation starters and developmental instruments as the map.
The shape of an engagement.
The twelve-month arc produces the most durable change: long enough to practice through resistance, past the point where the initial motivation runs out.
Async support between sessions. We come prepared, and we expect the leader to as well.
360 interviews with direct reports, peers, and the leader’s manager, at the start and at key points along the arc.
The people around a leader often see the growth edge more clearly than the leader does.
Transition engagements built around a specific role change: a promotion, a new mandate, a first C-suite seat. Compressed intake, accelerated stakeholder mapping, and a cadence designed for the highest-leverage window a leader gets.
Who hears what.
Coaching only works if you can say the true thing out loud, so the rules are set before the first session and they don’t bend. What you say in a session stays in the session. Your sponsor gets what they need to judge the engagement: the themes we’re working, how the arc is progressing, whether it’s worth continuing. They don’t get quotes, transcripts, or a verdict on you.
Where a 360 or an assessment is involved, we agree in writing up front on who sees what, and you see everything first. And if someone asks us to carry a message around you instead of to you, we decline, and you hear that they asked.
Who this is for.
Senior leaders: VPs, SVPs, C-suite executives, executive directors, and founders, at a moment where the usual approach isn’t producing what they need. Some are sponsored by their organizations and some are investing in themselves. The condition is the same either way: genuine willingness to look at what isn’t working.
A transition harder than the last one.
A stakeholder relationship that isn’t landing.
A decision environment more complex than your preparation.
Coaching before that was valuable but didn’t stick.
Willingness to look at what isn’t working.
Where we work.
Show us what you’re working on. We’ll tell you if we can help you sharpen it.
Most engagements start with a 30-minute call about a specific decision, transition, or stuck pattern. The call is with Bryan, and it will tell you quickly whether one-to-one coaching is what the situation needs.