Coaching
Executive Coaching
Your default moves under pressure are costing you money and people. You just can’t see it.
The problem
The strategy was sound. The organization still wouldn’t move.
You have the platform, the roadmap, the operating model. On paper the strategy is clear. But the organization moves slower than the plan assumed, decisions stall, and the same friction returns no matter how the work is reorganized. That is rarely a tooling problem. It is a leadership problem, and it is the half of the gap no dashboard will close for you.
Why this is the other half
You already bought the visibility. The organization still won't move.
Your platform is working. The dashboard shows exactly where strategy leaks, which team stalled, which initiative quietly died three sprints ago. That’s real. That’s not the gap.
The gap is that seeing the problem doesn’t fix it. A dashboard can show you the organization isn’t moving. It can’t make the organization want to move. That’s not a tooling problem anymore. It’s a leadership problem, and leadership problems have a specific fix, they just don’t respond to better reporting.
Three forces are usually running underneath the stall. Most leaders can only see one of them.
Fear
When people don’t feel safe naming a problem, they stay quiet, and the organization finds out about the failure only after it’s expensive. Google’s own research, Project Aristotle, studied 180 teams over two years and found psychological safety mattered more to team performance than anything else they measured, including who was on the team.[1]
Misalignment
People do their best work when they understand why it matters. When they don’t, effort goes through the motions instead of into the outcome. Replacing someone who disengages and eventually leaves costs half to two times their annual salary.[2] Retaining someone who’s aligned and supported almost never shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it gets ignored until the departure does.
Absence
The quieter failure mode, and the one leaders miss most, is a leader who simply isn’t there: avoids decisions, won’t take a position, disappears when a call needs to be made. Researchers call this laissez-faire leadership, and it’s not a neutral, low-key style. A landmark study found it was the single strongest predictor of falling job satisfaction over a two-year period, worse than any active negative behavior measured,[3] and follow-up research traced it as a root cause of the stress and role confusion that follows.[4]
The pattern holds even inside companies built on rigor. Google’s own internal research (Project Oxygen) found its highest-performing managers weren’t the most technically skilled, they were the ones who held a high bar and coached, empowered, and genuinely cared about their people. High standards without support burns people out. No standards and no presence lets them stagnate, or worse, leaves the organization not knowing where it stands until it’s too late to fix. Both, together, is what moves an organization.
Tooling makes the work visible. Leadership makes the work move.
I do the first as an adviser. The second is what this coaching is.
One thing this research can’t promise, and neither can I: results depend on you.
Coaching works when the client does the work, stays open to what the pattern-recognition surfaces, and is willing to test a belief instead of defending it. A closed, fixed-mindset client with the best coach in the world gets nothing. That’s not a caveat to soften the claim. It’s the actual mechanism, and it’s why the first conversation is about fit before it’s about scheduling.
The work
Alignment that cascades, not a workshop that fades.
Most leadership programs stop at the top of the building. The insight stays in the room it was created in, and the people actually building the work never feel it. This is built to move down the organization, one level connecting to the next. Four layers.
The individual leader
The highest-leverage point in the system. One leader’s pattern sets the conditions every level below executes in. This only works if the executive is a champion, not a sponsor. A sponsor writes the check and delegates the belief. A champion leads by example and carries the change personally. People do not align to what leadership funds. They align to what leadership visibly lives. The research agrees: a message about why the work matters lifts performance from a credible source, but not from leaders suspected of saying it to extract output.[5] If the executives will not lead from the front, no alignment work below them holds, and I will tell you that before we start.
The leadership team
When the values of a leader and the people they lead line up, you get identification, trust, and stronger working relationships. The fit between a person and their direct leader predicts higher-quality relationships, which predict satisfaction, commitment, and performance.[6] An aligned leadership team is the relay point for everything below it. An unaligned one is where the cascade breaks.
Values alignment, made concrete
Using the Demartini Value Determination Process, a framework I’m trained in, we surface each person’s real hierarchy of values, what their life already demonstrates, not what they think they should value (Demartini, The Values Factor). Then we connect their role and the mission to what sits highest, because work tied to a person’s highest values is intrinsically driven, not pushed. It also teaches the cross-connection that makes leadership work: I understand your values, you understand mine, and I can speak to you in terms of what matters to you. This is not a personality score and not a verdict, the same standard as the LCI and SEI.
Cascading down each level, at scale
Alignment that stops with the executive team is theater. The point is to reach the people building the work. I lead this work myself. When an engagement calls for taking the Value Determination Process across an entire company, level by level, I bring in experienced fellow Demartini-method facilitators I know and trust to work alongside me. You get scale without handing your leaders to a junior team working from a manual.
The evidence
Purpose and alignment are measurable, and the effects are large.
This is not a soft claim. Connecting people to the meaning of their work, and aligning their values with the mission, shows up in performance data across decades of research.
Connection to the why changes output, fast.
In a controlled field experiment at a university call center, fundraising callers who spent five minutes meeting one person who’d benefited from their work increased their weekly call time by 142% and weekly revenue by 171%, using the identical script.[7] This means the highest-leverage lever in your organization may not be a new tool or a new process. It’s whether the people doing the work can see who it’s for.
Engagement tied to purpose is a business outcome.
In Gallup’s meta-analysis of more than 183,000 business units, teams in the top quartile of engagement showed 23% higher profitability and 18% higher productivity than bottom-quartile teams, with turnover reduced 21% to 51% depending on the organization’s baseline.[8] This means engagement isn’t a culture initiative sitting next to the P&L. It’s inside the P&L.
Coaching investment has been independently studied.
A 2009 study commissioned by the International Coach Federation and conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that 86% of companies using coaching reported recouping at least their full investment, with a median company return of seven times the cost.[9] This is older data, cited here because it’s the version of this claim we could actually trace to its source, not because it’s the newest.
Trust the research, and verify it in your own organization. The effects are consistent and well-documented, not magical. They show up when alignment is real and mission-relevant, not forced onto personal preferences where fit can backfire.[10] That is why this is coaching and not a slogan.
A note on sourcing: widely-circulated executive coaching ROI figures in the 500-800% range are deliberately excluded here. We could not trace their original source to a study that still exists and can be independently verified, so we don’t use them, even though they’re the numbers you’ll see everywhere else.
[1] Google’s Project Aristotle research on team effectiveness. rework.withgoogle.com
[2] Gallup, “This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion.” gallup.com
[3] Skogstad, A., Einarsen, S., Torsheim, T., Aasland, M. S., & Hetland, H. (2007). The destructiveness of laissez-faire leadership behavior. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(1), 80–92. doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.12.1.80
[4] Skogstad, A., Hetland, J., Glasø, L., & Einarsen, S. (2014). Is avoidant leadership a root cause of subordinate stress? Work & Stress, 28(4), 323–341. doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2014.957362
[5] Grant, A. M., & Hofmann, D. A. (2011). Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. faculty.wharton.upenn.edu
[6] Kristof-Brown, A. L., Zimmerman, R. D., & Johnson, E. C. (2005). Personnel Psychology. onlinelibrary.wiley.com
[7] Grant, A. (2011). How Customers Can Rally Your Troops. Harvard Business Review. hbr.org
[8] Gallup, State of the Global Workplace. gallup.com
[9] ICF Global Coaching Client Study, Executive Summary (2009), commissioned by the International Coach Federation, conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Association Resource Centre. researchportal.coachingfederation.org
[10] Kristof-Brown, A., Schneider, B., & Su, R. (2023). Person-organization fit theory and research: Conundrums, conclusions, and calls to action. Personnel Psychology, 76(2), 375–412. doi.org/10.1111/peps.12581
Who this is for
Who this is for
You’ve reorganized three times. Modernized the stack. Brought in new leadership. And somehow the same friction keeps coming back. That’s not a process problem. That’s not a tooling gap. That’s a leadership problem. And you’re ready to look at it.
The business case
The business case
A quarter where strategy stalls costs you velocity you can’t get back. It costs you people who leave because they don’t see the point. And it costs you competitive ground you’ll spend the next two quarters clawing back.
Scoped in the first conversation, not billed by the hour. Coaching is the lowest-cost, highest-leverage intervention available, because it works on the one variable everything else depends on, and because, done right, it does not stay with one leader. It cascades.
Leadership is the variable. It always was.