Executive Career Coaching: What It Should Actually Change
- Aug 3
- 9 min read
Updated: Aug 11
She was four minutes into a board update when her voice changed. We were in my office, not a boardroom, and the board was me and an empty chair. It made no difference. Her voice dropped and got quieter, and the sentences got shorter. She finished the point and said she had done it again.
She had come to me about communication. That was the word her organisation used, the word in her development plan, and the word in her first email to me. She was a senior professional in a technical field. She chaired recruitment panels and sat on a board. She was good at her job, and she had been passed over twice for the level above. She had also been working on her communication for about six years.
She did not have a communication problem.
What executive career coaching actually is
The term covers a range of activity, and the distinctions matter more than the label.
Executive coaching usually supports someone already at a senior level with the demands of the role they currently hold. A difficult stakeholder, a change programme, a team that is not performing. The purpose is effectiveness in the job you have.
Executive career coaching is concerned with readiness and progression. Whether you are equipped for the level above, whether the people making appointment decisions can see it, and how you move deliberately rather than waiting to be noticed.
I describe my own work as executive career consultancy rather than coaching, and the difference is not cosmetic. Coaching convention holds that the client already has the answer and the practitioner's job is to draw it out. That discipline has real value in the right circumstances. It is the wrong instrument when the difficulty is that your picture of yourself is inaccurate, because well-formed questions can only ever return you to the material you already have. Consultancy means somebody examines the evidence and tells you what they see, including the parts you would rather not hear.
Which brings us to why that distinction matters so much at senior level.
The argument
Careers stall less often through a lack of capability than through a diagnosis nobody tested. Somebody forms a view about what is holding you back, that view gets written down, and everything that follows is built on it. Development, feedback, the roles you are offered. If the original view was wrong, none of the effort that follows can work, and the failure of that effort gets read as further evidence that the view was right.
Professionals who are ready for executive level but are not moving, not due to incapability, but because of six or eight years of sincere effort aimed at the wrong thing.
Why six years passed before anyone questioned it
Four things kept that diagnosis in place, and they are worth taking one at a time, because they operate in most organisations.
The diagnosis was plausible. It described something real. She genuinely did struggle in board updates, and anyone watching could see it. What the diagnosis got wrong was the cause, not the symptom. That is what makes an inaccurate description so durable. It is not fabricated. It is an accurate observation with the wrong explanation attached, which means every piece of new evidence appears to confirm it.
Nobody owned its accuracy. The description entered her appraisal at some point and was carried forward. Each new manager inherited it rather than forming an independent view, because inheriting a description takes ten minutes and forming one takes a year. The person who wrote it originally had moved on within eighteen months. Appraisal systems are built to record a judgement, not to test whether it was ever sound.
The market had something to sell against it. Communication is a purchasable category. There are courses, providers and frameworks, and a development budget can be allocated against it cleanly. "We do not know why she goes quiet in front of certain people" is not a line item anybody can authorise. So the organisation bought the thing that existed rather than the thing that was needed, which is a rational decision at the point of purchase and an expensive one over six years.
She could not challenge it herself. This is the part people underestimate. Rejecting the label would have meant denying something observably true, and she would have needed an alternative explanation to offer instead. She did not have one, which is precisely the problem. The explanation was not available to her from the inside. There is also a professional cost to arguing with your own development plan, particularly at senior level, where the expected response to feedback is to accept it and act on it.
So each intervention failed, and each failure was logged. Not as evidence that the diagnosis was wrong, but as evidence that the deficit ran deeper than first thought, or that she had not applied herself. The logic is circular and almost impossible to escape from within. We addressed the problem correctly; it did not improve; therefore, the problem is worse than we assumed.
Why senior people are structurally likely to carry an inaccurate description
The temptation is to read this as one badly run organisation. It is not. The conditions that produce inaccurate descriptions get stronger as you rise.
Tasha Eurich's research, published in Harvard Business Review, found that around 95 per cent of people believe they are self-aware while only 10 to 15 per cent are. The more useful finding here is that senior executives were less self-aware than frontline and mid-level leaders. That is counterintuitive until you look at the mechanism. Self-perception is corrected by external information, and the supply of honest external information falls as you gain seniority. There are fewer people positioned above you to give you a straight answer, and the people below you carry a real risk in offering one.
So the more senior you become, the more your working picture of yourself depends on descriptions written years ago by people who are no longer around to revise them.
Pressure compounds it. DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025, drawing on 10,796 leaders across more than 50 countries, found 71 per cent reporting increased stress. Under sustained load, people fall back on established explanations rather than generating new ones. Interrogating a six-year-old assumption about yourself is slow, uncomfortable work with no immediate return, and it competes with a full diary. Booking another course is easier.
Her situation was not unusual. It was what the system reliably produces.
What the wrong diagnosis costs
The cost is rarely dramatic, which is why it accumulates unnoticed.
Development spend produces nothing. Nobody told her she was not being considered. There was no conversation and no decision. Her name simply did not come up, because the version of her circulating in the organisation was not a version anybody pictures in an executive role. This is how succession planning quietly overlooks capable people, and the person concerned usually never finds out it happened.
Confidence erodes on a schedule. Each unsuccessful intervention is not neutral. It teaches you that you tried the correct remedy and remained deficient, which is a more damaging conclusion than the original difficulty. Over six years, she had built a substantial private case against herself, assembled entirely from evidence generated by treating the wrong problem.
You begin avoiding rather than resolving. She stopped volunteering for board updates and submitted a written paper instead. Nobody objected, because a written paper is a reasonable thing to submit. She turned down a piece of work that would have put her in front of an external panel. There was no moment of decision. The avoidance assembled itself out of a series of individually sensible choices.
Visibility falls, and the description hardens. The people who decide what you are offered form their view from what they see. When you systematically remove yourself from the situations where senior judgement gets observed, they see less, and what they do see confirms the existing account. She became known as someone who preferred to work through the detail rather than lead in the room.
Progression stops, for reasons nobody states. Nobody told her she was not being considered. There was no conversation and no decision. Her name simply did not come up, because the version of her circulating in the organisation was not a version anybody pictures in an executive role.
By the time she came to me, the original difficulty was the smallest part of the problem. The reputation built on top of it was doing far more damage.
Why the evidence has to come from outside
If your own account of yourself is unreliable, and your organisation's account is inherited and untested, you need a third source. That is why I start with a diagnostic rather than a conversation.
StrengthscopeLeader gives me a picture of how someone operates that has no relationship to their appraisal history, their manager's view, the politics of their organisation, or their own self-assessment. It is independent, and independence is the property that matters. It shows what a person does naturally when they are working well, where those same strengths tip into overuse and start costing them, and what happens to their behaviour under pressure.
That last one is usually where the answer sits. The strengths that carried somebody to senior level are rarely the problem in ordinary conditions. They become the problem when conditions change, and the person cannot see it, because from the inside it feels like doing exactly what they have always done.
What the work looked like
The sessions were built around practice rather than discussion. A great deal of development involves talking about difficult situations at a safe distance from them. We ran board updates instead. She delivered, took challenge, and handled being interrupted, and I watched for the point where her voice changed rather than assessing her content.
Her content was always good. The change was not random either. It happened when a particular type of person was in the room. Once we had that pattern, we had something more useful than six years of development objectives.
What sat underneath it was ordinary. She found certain people a wee bit intimidating and had never said so to anybody, and her body reacted before her thinking caught up. She was a highly credentialed professional in rooms she belonged in, and part of her had not accepted that.
She did not need to be more articulate. She needed to know what triggered it, spot it while it was happening, and have two or three things she could do at the time. Then she needed to get back in front of the people who decide what she is offered, which was the part that counted and the part six years of training had never addressed.
What executive career coaching should change
Three things, in this order.
Your diagnosis. The description you arrive with should be tested rather than accepted, and you will know it is happening because the language changes. You come in saying you need more executive presence. Three sessions later you understand that you are fine with your own team and lose it in front of one particular director, which is a different problem with a different fix. The same mistake shows up earlier in careers, where support for emerging leaders targets confidence when the actual gap is identity. If you finish the early sessions holding the sentence you walked in with, you are about to spend four months on the wrong thing.
Your evidence base. You should end up with a more accurate and less flattering picture of how you operate, built on something better than appraisal language. Something that shows where a strength has been overused until it started working against you. The person known for thoroughness who is now the reason decisions take four weeks. The one whose pace delivers results and leaves two colleagues behind every time.
What decision-makers can see. General career advice underplays this badly. Executive appointments are made by people forming a judgement on limited information. If the version of you they hold is wrong, your capability counts for very little, because they are not appointing your capability. They are appointing their picture of it. Closing that gap deliberately is executive positioning, and it is work rather than luck.
Why Ascent is structured the way it is
The sequence follows the problem.
The diagnostic comes before the first session, because everything else depends on getting the diagnosis right, and nothing said in an opening conversation can be relied on to do that. Month one is diagnosis and direction. Month two is strategy and positioning, where the accurate description gets translated into something you can articulate to other people. Month three is execution and preparation, including the high-stakes conversations, board updates and senior reporting where senior judgement actually gets observed. Month four consolidates it before the previous habits reassert themselves, because they will try.
Eight sessions across four months, with the work happening between them rather than during them. That spacing is deliberate. You need enough time to test something in a real meeting and enough proximity to still remember what happened.
It runs in that order for a reason. Working on visibility before the diagnosis has been corrected only makes an inaccurate impression more widely held.
Worth asking yourself
Think about the piece of feedback you have been working on longest. Then ask who gave it to you, what they were actually positioned to observe, and whether anybody has revisited it since.
For a great many capable people, the answer is that a remark made years ago by someone with a partial view has been shaping their development, their choices and eventually their prospects. Nobody checked it. It became true through repetition, and every failed attempt to fix it made it truer.
Executive readiness does not usually come from working harder on that description. It comes from finding out whether it was ever accurate.
If you want to start from evidence rather than somebody else's shorthand, Ascent is a four-month executive career consultancy for experienced professionals preparing to step into executive leadership.
By Paula Donnan
Strength at Work | Better judgement. Stronger leadership. Higher performance.
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