How To Choose an Executive Coach

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Executive coaching is not a regulated profession. Anyone may use the title, with any level of training or none, and the quality of practice varies more widely than most buyers realise. That places an unusual burden on the person choosing, particularly when the coaching is for a senior leader whose judgement affects a great many others.

What the evidence supports, and what it does not

Coaching has a better evidence base than its reputation sometimes suggests. The most rigorous review to date, by de Haan and Nilsson (2023), pooled 39 randomised controlled samples covering more than 2,500 participants and found a statistically significant, moderate effect across leadership and personal outcomes. An earlier meta-analysis by Theeboom and colleagues (2014) found positive effects across performance and skills, wellbeing, coping, work attitudes and goal-directed self-regulation.

Two points follow from this. Effects appear stronger for what leaders do than for how they feel, so coaching seems better at changing behaviour than at shifting attitude or personality. And a moderate average effect means good coaching helps considerably while poor coaching does very little, which brings us back to how you choose.

What to look for

Training, and what it is grounded in. Ask what the coach was trained in, and by whom. Coaching drawn from psychology brings an understanding of how people actually change, which matters when the work involves questions of identity, anxiety or long-standing patterns. Registration with a recognised professional body indicates that practice has been assessed against a standard rather than self-declared. Our own coaching practice is registered with the Association for Coaching.

Supervision. This is the question we would ask first, and the one most rarely asked. A coach in regular supervision has somewhere to take their own blind spots. It is standard in clinical practice and a reliable marker of a serious coach. A coach without it is working without a mirror.

Whether they can hold complexity, and know their limits. Senior roles bring real difficulty, and sometimes distress. A capable coach can sit with that rather than hurrying past it, and can also recognise when something belongs in therapy rather than coaching, and say so. Blurring that boundary is among the more common failures in this market. Clarity about it is a sign of quality, not a limitation.

The relationship. Across the research, the working alliance is one of the more consistent predictors of outcome. Chemistry is not a soft consideration, it is a functional one. Meet two or three coaches before deciding.

Contracting and confidentiality. Be clear from the outset about what is reported to the organisation and what is not. A good coach sets this out unprompted. If the sponsor expects a summary, the leader should know precisely what it will contain.

How the work will be evaluated. Agree at the beginning what would count as progress and how it will be reviewed. Coaching that cannot be evaluated tends to drift.

Questions worth asking in a first meeting

What were you trained in, and who accredits you? Who supervises your practice, and how often? How do you decide that something is outside the scope of coaching? What would you expect to be different in six months, and how would we know? And what do you find difficult in this work?

That last question is the most revealing. A coach who cannot answer it candidly may struggle to help a leader do the same.

A few signs to be cautious of

Guaranteed outcomes. A single proprietary model applied to everyone. Reluctance to discuss training, supervision or boundaries. A great deal of certainty about people they have not yet met.

Finally

The value of coaching lies less in the technique than in the quality of thinking it makes possible, and in whether the person opposite can be trusted with what is difficult. That is worth choosing carefully.

Our own leadership development and executive coaching is psychologically grounded and supervised. If you are weighing up your options, we are glad to talk, including if the answer turns out to be someone else.