by Tom Preston, Founder of The Preston Associates and Luciana Nuñez, Head of Americas and Partner at The Preston Associates, co-authors of
In today’s complex business landscape, executive coaching has emerged as a powerful tool that offers leaders personalized guidance, objective feedback, and strategic support for navigating uncertainty and accelerating their professional development.
Whether you’re seeking to enhance your leadership effectiveness, manage through organizational change, or simply reach your full potential, an executive coach can be your partner providing the structured reflection, accountability, and expertise you need.
Evaluating Which Coach is Right for You
If you are thinking about working with an executive coach, it is important to understand the type of firm and coach that would benefit you the most.
First, seek a firm that has the qualifications needed to be credible and impactful with you and your people. You can begin by reviewing a firm’s website and then speaking with their representative. In a conversation, they should be clear about how their coaches are trained and qualified, be clear as to where their experience and expertise lies, and the type of work they are best suited to do. It is important to understand, for example, whether their coaches have a business and leadership background, a psychological or organizational development background, or whether they have drawn on other experiences to develop their coaching practice and expertise.
Navigating the Coaching Landscape
One of the issues with the world of executive coaching today is the plethora of coaches out there and their varied experience, training, and areas of focus. It is also important, especially for international organizations wishing to deploy coaching across geographies, to understand the cultural awareness and experience of firms and coaches.
Increasingly, executive coaching is divided between the top echelon firms and the more mid-market firms. The former tend to have a strong cadre of coaches who are hand-picked, supervised, and developed by the firm they work with. The latter often act as coaching consolidators who aggregate a database of coaches but are not responsible for any uniformity of approach or quality across the coaches they represent. Further, as more digital coaching offerings become available, the democratization of coaching is an advantage in that it becomes more broadly available, yet has the potential disadvantage of not being of consistent quality or methodology and therefore risks achieving varied outcomes.
Rethinking Coaching Requirements
Many buyers of coaching assume that it is desirable for a coach to have had directly relevant experience — a lawyer who works with a coach who has been a lawyer, for example. We challenge this approach. What is important is that a coach has the context and experience of coaching in the field, but often being too closely associated with a particular set of experiences or a particular profession can result in the relationship being more akin to mentoring than to coaching, which are actually distinct activities and disciplines. We argue that business acumen and experience coupled with leadership familiarity and a broad understanding of the context of a particular sector or profession are of greater value than a “I’ve done exactly your job” approach.
The Value of Diversity in Coaching
We believe that it is important for coaching firms to represent as much diversity as possible in a way that mirrors the existing or desired level of diversity in an organization. This might be diversity of experience, cultures, operating environments and geographies, backgrounds, sectors, gender, and all the many other facets of diversity. Yet within that level of diversity a commonality of approach or framework will ensure that there is a consistency of outcome, no matter where the coaching is taking place or delivered.
The Initial Discovery Process
Suitable coaching firms and coaches should be open to taking the time to get to know you as part of the relationship building process. They should demonstrate commercial and personal curiosity as to what good looks like, be interested in an organization’s current and desired culture, and what is working or not for a particular leader or leadership challenge. This process, which is normally free, allows you to check whether you feel the fit is right and the type of questioning and dialogue is of the quality that you would expect.
Making the Most of the Pros
Once you have selected one or more coaches as possibilities, you should do the following before making your final decision about who to work with.
Chemistry Is Key
Schedule a one-hour meeting with each of your possible coaches to establish how comfortable you would feel working with that person. We call these meetings chemistry meetings. These meetings will usually include an exploration of your coaching objectives, perhaps a look at career ambitions and aspirations and what would need to happen for those to be achieved, a look at your stakeholder constellation and which of those relationships might need work, and perhaps a look at how the coaching relationship might work in terms of frequency, location, and how to get a briefing from your line manager.
Terms of Engagement
Once you have chosen the coach you think best suited to you and your objectives, then move into agreeing on the number of hours to be delivered, the cost, and the feedback gathering process. Other items to discuss might include reporting procedures, invoicing, organizational briefings, or the use of psychometric tools or other interventions that could form part of the coaching process.
Feedback and Insights
Our strong recommendation is that all one-to-one coaching assignments should include a feedback and insights process. This is done by the coach speaking with key stakeholders to understand what the person is good at, could do more of, less of, start, or stop. This is in addition to any online type of 360-degree feedback that’s part of the general human resources approach to feedback, and is essential because it provides the coach with independent data about how others experience the person being coached. Without it, there is potential to obscure critical information from both the coach and the person being coached that could help address blind spots or the impact the leader actually has as opposed to the leadership impact they intend to have or need to have.
Commitment to Growth
As you consider embarking on a coaching journey, remember that success depends on a combination of careful selection, chemistry with your coach, clarity of purpose, and your own commitment to growth. By approaching coaching as a strategic partnership rather than a quick fix, you position yourself to realize its full transformative potential.
Tom Preston, co-author of , is the founder of The Preston Associates, one of the world’s premier executive coaching firms. With decades of experience coaching leaders across industries and geographies, he has helped organizations achieve extraordinary outcomes. A former private equity executive and bestselling author of “Coach Yourself to Success“, he brings deep insights and practical wisdom to his work.
Luciana Nuñez, co-author of , is Head of Americas and Partner at The Preston Associates. She is an accomplished executive coach and former CEO with more than 20 years of leadership experience at Fortune 500 companies, including Bayer, Danone, and Roche. She blends her strategic expertise with a passion for coaching, serving as a board member, investor, and advisor to entrepreneurs and executives worldwide.