Executive Coaching

Selecting based on a single criterion.

Whether it's 'I only want an MCC,' or a price ceiling, or one attribute like industry background - when you optimize for a single variable, you cut off a huge swath of coaches who might have been a much better fit overall. The right coach for you is rarely the one who scores highest on any one dimension.

We personally know them, and we personally know their work. We've seen them coach. We admire their capabilities. We know they coach to our standards and can represent Tandem well.

That's actually the strongest signal anyone can get about a coach - direct exposure to their work, not their marketing. Clients miss this because they evaluate coaches based on what coaches say about themselves. We evaluate coaches based on what we've observed. If you can find a way to get a direct referral from someone who has been coached by them - not just a testimonial they curated, but a real conversation with a past client - you're getting as close to that standard as a buyer can get.

At the end of the day, it's 2,500 hours of coaching minimum, so it makes a difference. You've got the fundamentals right. You know how to work with the whole person. You know how to be silent, how to follow the client. You understand what a coaching session actually is.

No ICF certification is enough by itself. MCC can be a tiebreaker when everything else is equal. Clients also look for same gender, similar age, economic position, C-suite pedigree, experience running companies or departments.

I like to use the well-formed outcomes method. We look at: if we reach these outcomes, what will you have that you don't have now? What will you be seeing that you're not seeing now - behavior, data-driven results, things like that? What will you be hearing and what will you not be hearing - complaints, frustrations? What will you be feeling or not feeling - high stress, frustration, confusion? And what will you know that you don't know now?

Those give us concrete areas we can actually measure. Am I feeling less frustration? Am I feeling more camaraderie? Am I seeing faster work going through the system? Whatever it is we're trying to do - we have something tangible to look at.

The 700% ROI figure gets cited everywhere. It comes from a 2009 ICF study based on self-reported data - selection bias built into the methodology. The number isn't fabricated, but it isn't what rigorous measurement looks like.

What we actually measure: decision quality in the first 90 days. Direct-report retention at 12 months - the metric that translates most directly to dollars. 360-degree score shifts in targeted dimensions - the same instrument used at intake is repeated at midpoint and close.

The honest frame for an HR director: executive coaching produces measurable behavioral change in 6-12 months when the leader has authority to act and the organization supports the change. Don't promise a percentage. Promise a measurement framework.

It really depends on the engagement and one price doesn’t fit all. It ranges anywhere from low teens to 20, 30, 50 depending on the goals - that’s for the engagement. We absolutely avoid pricing by session. A session, an hour with a coach, is expensive and you are not getting any ROI. Frankly, when you’re talking about executive coaching cost, cost is important and is the wrong thing to focus on. What is your ROI? You spend $600 - is that a lot? Is that too little? For someone who makes $600 a minute, that’s a minute worth of their lives. Some people make $100,000 a year - that’s a lot of money. What are you getting? Are you preparing to step into a C-suite? How much is that change worth for you? So how does $600 sound from that perspective?

Probably 20 to 30% pay themselves. The rest is company-sponsored or at least partially sponsored. Internal conversations - we’re definitely not involved in those. Usually these are executives who are looking for coaching themselves, or we have L&D specialists who come to us and those conversations have already happened. They’re just looking for a very specific coach for very specific skills. The funds are already available.

They reach out, we set up a free consultation - either Cherie or myself - and we walk through a shortened version of our STORMS model. That's S-T-R-R-M-M-E-S: Subject, Time, Outcomes, Roles, Measurements and Motivation, Environment, and Start. All of these give us and them enough awareness to know if they want to work with us and what they want to work on.

If we agree, we send a proposal. They sign. Usually it's anywhere from 6 to 18 months, mostly bi-weekly sessions. We don't do open-ended contracts. Sessions expire at the time expiration - they can take them as often as they want or as infrequent as they want. Up to them.

We don't do hourly rates. If people ask us for an hourly rate, we don't give that price. We work on an engagement rate. The engagement is not only coaching - it's access to our training portal, access to our assessments, all of that.

That's actually a big red flag for us - when someone asks for hourly rates. It basically says the client might need some education. And I'm not saying that snobbishly. It's that the value perspective is missing. They're thinking about cost per hour instead of ROI per engagement.

Measurable outcomes: How will my next board meeting go? How will strategic planning for the next year or three years go? What outcomes will I get? What will I have to trade off? How will I show up? How will my key relationships survive or deteriorate? These are measurables.

Intangible benefits: survivability - the job is cutthroat, and how much the engagement helps you survive there is a judgment call. And loneliness relief - the position is inherently lonely. You can't share what you know or think with people who report to you or the board who can fire you.

The ability to share, the ability to open up in a confidential relationship - that's probably the most important intangible benefit.

This depends on who’s hiring. If the company hires an executive coach for the executive, then it is very likely that the executive not leaving could be the biggest return on investment - unless they are trying to use coaching as a punitive measure rather than a true investment in how do we leverage this great leader that we have.

If the executive is actually buying coaching for themselves - which is very often the case - it’s a completely different story. The return on investment is about what the executive gets: often a promotion, a bigger bonus, a raise.

An example where retention was the ROI: an organizational leader who had deep knowledge about the industry and the way the organization was run, had a loyal following with all of their employees. The board was dissatisfied with some things around that executive, and the executive was dissatisfied with some things around the board. If the executive had vacated the position, it would have left the whole company in a really bad situation - the board didn’t have the competency to hire another person because they didn’t understand the job, and there was no backfill, no succession plan. Keeping the executive was the best return on investment because they were able to move forward and make improvements where they needed to go, find ways to communicate better so they could be more productive as an organization.

The pattern is consistent across engagements: the largest financial return is not the improvement - it's the departure that didn't happen. A VP who leaves over a fixable leadership challenge costs the organization 1-2x their salary in replacement costs plus 6-12 months of institutional knowledge loss. Coaching that retains one senior leader for two more productive years doesn't show up in the ROI studies, but it's often the largest financial return of the engagement.

It depends on what your goals are. Coaching in and of itself doesn’t just have a “here’s the ROI, you get a thirty percent return.” The ROI of coaching has some tangible things that it ties to, some things that are quite measurable, but it also has many intangible benefits - like confidence, like improved communication - that might be loosely tied to a dollar figure return on investment.

We have to decouple the concept of return on investment as “I spend this much money and I make this much money in return.” For coaching, return on investment can impact the bottom line, but it’s an indirect impact.

There’s a bit of a formula that has to be applied - and by the way, I don’t have the formula - around: what’s the likelihood this would have been done had the person not gotten coaching? What is the cost savings they got because the thing was done? And what percentage of that do we want to attribute to coaching - ten percent, whatever? Those things have to be discussed with the person getting coaching upfront. If you want to save a hundred thousand dollars this year by making improvements, when we go to measure, what percentage do we want to attribute to coaching? Because it’s not going to be a hundred percent direct.

That is built into the beginning of the engagement based on the goals that need to happen. And then there are also return-on-investment results that you see at the end that are the unexpected results - unexpected impacts of coaching. Some of those might be good and some of those might be not great.

The 700% ROI figure gets cited everywhere. It comes from a 2009 ICF study based on self-reported data - selection bias built into the methodology. Not fabricated, but not rigorous measurement either.

What we actually measure: decision quality in the first 90 days. Direct-report retention at 12 months - the metric that translates most directly to dollars. 360-degree score shifts in targeted dimensions, using the same instrument at intake, midpoint, and close.

The honest frame for an HR director: executive coaching produces measurable behavioral change in 6-12 months when the leader has authority to act and the organization supports the change. Don't promise a percentage. Promise a measurement framework.

The VP who learns to pause before reacting changes how the entire product team handles disagreement. The director who stops solving every problem changes how ten direct reports develop judgment. Published research measures the individual. It rarely captures what changes around them.

This is what makes coaching qualitatively different from training: training teaches skills to the individual. Coaching changes how the individual interacts with the system.

The most prevalent topics are executive presence, board relationship, and investor relationship. In their previous positions, even if they dealt with these, they were less prominent. Now it's the core of their job.

Secondary: company direction overall, how to put their stamp on the whole company. The challenges are path-dependent - what you face coming from finance looks different than coming from ops or technology.

The challenge is that there are several different things going on.

Experience gap. They lack the experience to understand how to interact with people at the level they need to interact with. What they generally need is to learn more and observe more about how people at that level interact differently. They often don't notice the gap because they're working with whatever helped them in the past. Executives ask more questions than they jump in and have ideas.

Confidence and proving behavior. In the lower levels, they may want to prove themselves and prove their value - they have to add to conversations, be the one with the ideas, argue their ideas. But the higher up you get in leadership, the more you sit back and wait and understand. There's a different presence, a calming presence. There is a confidence - not arrogant, but confident. You don't have to say everything. There was this old commercial: "When E.F. Hutton speaks, everybody listens." That concept. They don't constantly talk because the more you talk the less people listen, but when they do speak, people pay attention because they're strategic in what they say and do.

Gender dynamics. Compare yourself to how other successful executives operate at that level - both men and women. Notice what works. If you're the one walking around cleaning up cups while everyone else walks out, that puts you on a different level. If you're the one bulldozing through every conversation when being approachable could get you further, that costs you too. The point is to recognize how certain tendencies - how you communicate, how you show up emotionally, even how you dress - either supports or takes away from your executive presence. Watch what works, regardless of who's doing it.

Leaders flagged for presence challenges tend to show a consistent pattern in EQ assessments. Self-awareness scores are high - they know exactly what's happening in the room. The gap is in emotional expression: the distance between what the leader thinks and what the team sees them thinking.

ProfileXT reveals a related dimension: high analytical drive paired with low interpersonal attunement. These leaders compensate by over-preparing for every stakeholder interaction - elaborate slide decks, rehearsed talking points, scripted one-on-ones. The compensation works well enough that nobody names it until the data makes it visible.

Their teams experience detachment or disengagement. The executive thinks they're being measured and professional. Their team thinks they don't care. The surprise is never that the gap exists - it's that they've been compensating for it so successfully that it became invisible to everyone except the people who work for them.

This is a matter of a misalignment in what the role is and what the personality that lives in that culture should be.

If you’re in an organization that is the good old boys club and only white men over fifty are considered competent, then a Black man over fifty is not going to mesh there just because of the way they look at things. If that same organization has a woman executive come in who’s twenty-five, or a male that comes in at twenty-five, they do not fit with the definition of what that company calls success.

If the person you’re coaching does not have the power to change the makeup of that, then the coaching around executive presence is not going to help them. You can only impact change over what you control.

But - if that person IS the new CEO or board president, they then have the power to change what’s underneath them and can force the change within that executive team or create new people in that executive team. So there’s limitations, and the variable is positional power.

Organizations carry implicit definitions of "executive presence" that are culturally constructed. The real question: is the leader actually lacking presence, or is the organization's definition excluding behaviors that are equally effective? A leader who influences through questions rather than declarations may get tagged as "lacking decisiveness" in an organization that rewards directive leadership.

The coaching intervention might target the leader's behavior, the organization's definition of effective leadership, or both.

Your presence will not matter if the environment you’re in is more toxic than your power to change it. You can have all the executive presence in the world, but if the environment around you is toxic and it doesn’t honor or respond to executive presence, then building executive presence is not going to solve those problems. There are cultural problems that need to be solved, things that need to be fixed in the organization itself.

The level of executive presence that you have might be wonderful in one organization, but not in another organization. And in that case it’s not about building more executive presence - it’s about building the flexibility and the ability to adapt to and respond to the environment you have. And sometimes the courage to say: I’m going to draw boundary lines and say I’m not going to live in this environment. I can get a different job that’s better for me.

Coaching cannot change an organizational culture's definition of presence. If the culture penalizes a leadership style that is fundamentally authentic to the leader, coaching can help them work within that tension, but it can't resolve it. Sometimes the right answer isn't "develop your presence" but "find an organization that values the presence you already have."

This happens more often than the feedback framing suggests. The clearest cases involve leaders entering a new organizational culture with strong presence in their previous context. A director-level engineer joins a financial services firm from a product-led tech startup. In the startup, directness was presence. The same behaviors read as abrasive in the new environment. Six months in, the feedback arrives: "You need to work on your executive presence."

When you assess the situation, the 360-degree feedback splits cleanly by audience. Peers from her original function give high marks; stakeholders from the traditional business units give low marks. The root cause is organizational, not individual - it's cultural acculturation. The coaching work becomes building a map of the norms that govern how presence is perceived in this specific organization, not coaching her to communicate differently.

The biggest shift is the scope of what you're present for. At the VP level, executive presence is about credibility and influence - can you move people to act who don't report to you? At the C-suite, presence shifts to what you represent, not just what you produce. The question becomes: does this person embody where the organization is going?

Presence at the executive level has an organizational transmission function. The way a CFO walks into a board meeting shapes what the board believes about the company's financial discipline.

Leaders who excel at VP-level presence often struggle at the transition because they keep performing the VP version - demonstrating competence, influencing through reasoning, building credibility through content quality. That worked. It no longer works because the audience has changed. Board members and external stakeholders have already granted competence. They need to read what you represent. The coaching work is helping the leader stop proving and start embodying.