MCC-led executive coaching that helps senior leaders think more clearly, lead more effectively, and deliver measurable business outcomes – backed by a proprietary framework and real assessment tools.
The skills that got you promoted won’t carry you through what comes next. These are the patterns we see in the leaders who come to us.
You deliver results, but your leadership presence doesn’t match your track record. Peers and direct reports experience you differently than you intend – and nobody tells you.
You’re still solving problems tactically when the role demands strategic thinking. Letting go of the work that made you successful is harder than anyone admits.
The higher you go, the fewer people you can be honest with. You need a thinking partner who understands organizational complexity – not a therapist, not a consultant, not another meeting.
A structured coaching engagement – not open-ended conversations. Every phase has clear objectives, measurable milestones, and concrete tools behind it.
360 feedback, assessments, stakeholder input
Define goals tied to business outcomes
Build a development roadmap with milestones
Challenge thinking and expand possibilities
Measure progress against defined benchmarks
Sustain growth beyond the engagement
Behavioral and cognitive assessment for job-role fit
Emotional intelligence assessment for leadership effectiveness
Multi-rater feedback from peers, reports, and stakeholders
Leadership development model targeting 21 key dimensions
Our philosophy: You’re whole, not broken. We’re not here to fix you – we’re here to be the thinking partner who helps you see what you already know but haven’t acted on yet.
Executive coaching isn’t a nice-to-have. The research is clear – and the leaders we work with see it in their own results.
Leaders learn to show up with the authority and confidence their role demands – consistently, not just on good days.
Move from reactive problem-solving to proactive leadership that anticipates challenges and shapes direction.
When leaders change how they communicate and delegate, their teams start performing at a different level.
New roles, reorganizations, board dynamics – coaching helps leaders land on their feet when the ground shifts.
Self-awareness, empathy, and the ability to manage your own reactions under pressure are learned skills, not fixed traits.
Not just the next promotion – the ability to keep growing, learning, and leading at every level you reach.
ROI data from ICF Global Coaching Study and Manchester Inc. research
Anonymized stories from real engagements. Different leaders, different challenges – same structured approach.
A senior product management leader was consistently delivering strong results but being passed over for promotion. Office politics and emotional triggers were creating blind spots that undermined her leadership presence.
Through 360° feedback and targeted coaching, she identified specific patterns – how she showed up in high-stakes meetings, where her reactions were being misread, and which relationships needed repair. We built a concrete plan for managing her triggers and communicating her value.
Within 6 months, she established clear professional boundaries, rebuilt key stakeholder relationships, and her direct manager formally acknowledged she was ready for promotion.
An operations manager felt stuck in a dead-end role with no clear path forward. Low confidence and a narrow view of her own capabilities were keeping her from pursuing opportunities she was qualified for.
Coaching focused on reframing her narrative – what she brought to the table, how to communicate it, and where to direct her energy. We worked on strategic positioning within her organization and building the confidence to advocate for herself.
She was promoted to a senior leadership position within the engagement period – and promoted again three years later, crediting the coaching as the turning point in her career.
Not career coaches who read about leadership. Our MCC-credentialed team has held executive roles at Fortune 500 companies and built organizations from the ground up.
15 years in executive leadership (developer to CEO) plus 15 years in organizational development. Specializes in executive presence, strategic leadership, and high-stakes transitions.
Full profile
Former VP at Citi, S&P Global, HPE, and Solera. Built multi-million dollar products and teams. Specializes in leadership in tech, career strategy, and organizational dynamics.
Full profileOur coaching team works from Dallas and Houston, Texas, and serves leaders nationwide. Beyond our founders, Tandem has a team of highly credentialed coaches matched to your specific industry and challenge.
Dedicated coaching partnership with an MCC or PCC coach. Typically 6–12 months, bi-weekly sessions, with assessments and stakeholder check-ins.
Coaching for intact leadership teams working on shared challenges – alignment, communication, decision-making, and collective performance.
Most engagements are virtual with the flexibility to meet in person in Dallas or Houston. Same structured approach, same results, regardless of format.
Executive coaching is a structured, one-on-one development partnership between a senior leader and a credentialed coach. Unlike consulting, your coach doesn’t give you the answers – they help you find clarity on challenges you’re already capable of solving. Unlike therapy, coaching is forward-looking and focused on professional performance, not processing past experiences.
A good coaching engagement starts with clear goals, uses assessments and feedback to establish a baseline, and measures progress against concrete outcomes. At Tandem, our ASPIRE® framework structures every engagement around business results, not open-ended conversations.
Executive coaching engagements typically range from $15,000 to $50,000+ depending on scope, duration, and the seniority of the coach. Factors that affect pricing include the length of the engagement (usually 6–12 months), the assessments included, and whether stakeholder check-ins are part of the design.
We offer a range of engagement structures to fit different needs and budgets. For a detailed breakdown of what influences coaching costs, see our Executive Coaching Cost Guide.
Research consistently shows strong returns. The ICF and Manchester Inc. report an average ROI of 788% on coaching engagements, with 77% of organizations reporting improvements in business measures like productivity and revenue, and 70% of individual leaders showing measurable performance gains.
In our own practice, the outcomes are less about a single number and more about specific shifts: a leader who stops losing key talent, a VP who earns a seat at the strategy table, or an executive team that starts making decisions in days instead of weeks.
Most engagements run 6 to 12 months with bi-weekly sessions. That timeframe allows enough space for genuine behavior change – not just intellectual understanding, but new habits under pressure. Shorter engagements (3–4 months) can work for focused challenges like a specific transition or presentation skills, while longer engagements are typical for senior executive development.
Look for ICF (International Coaching Federation) credentials – they’re the industry standard. The levels are ACC (Associate), PCC (Professional), and MCC (Master Certified Coach). MCC is the highest credential, held by fewer than 5% of coaches worldwide and requiring 2,500+ hours of coaching experience.
Beyond credentials, ask whether the coach has actually done the work you’re doing. A coach who has held executive roles brings a different quality of understanding than one who studied coaching as a second career. At Tandem, both lead coaches (Cherie Silas and Alex Kudinov) hold MCC credentials and have extensive corporate leadership backgrounds.
It starts with a conversation. We learn about your goals, challenges, and context – then determine whether coaching is the right fit and which coach on our team is the best match. From there, we design a structured engagement using our ASPIRE® framework, including initial assessments, goal-setting, and a clear timeline with milestones.
There’s no obligation and no pressure. If coaching isn’t the right answer for your situation, we’ll tell you.
Executive coaching works best for leaders facing a real challenge they can’t think their way through alone – a new role, a stalled team, a hard decision, a difficult colleague, or a gap between how they want to lead and how they actually show up under pressure. It works less well when the leader wants validation, or when the real issue is structural (wrong role fit, wrong company) rather than developmental.
Our typical clients are VPs, SVPs, and C-suite leaders in the middle of a leadership stretch – promotion, scope expansion, post-restructure leadership, M&A integration, or succession planning.
Sessions are fully confidential. If your employer sponsors the engagement, they see only what you choose to share, plus high-level engagement structure: that sessions are happening, that goals were set against agreed business outcomes, and whether the engagement is producing change.
We use a three-way conversation at the start to align goals between you, your sponsor, and the coach, then sessions are private. Mid-engagement check-ins (without session content) and a closing conversation round out the structure. ICF ethics require this confidentiality – it’s not optional, and it’s the foundation that makes real coaching work.
Both are ICF credentials, awarded at different levels of demonstrated mastery. PCC (Professional Certified Coach) requires 500+ hours of coaching experience and passes the ICF assessment at the professional level. MCC (Master Certified Coach) is the highest credential – fewer than 5% of ICF coaches hold it, and it requires 2,500+ hours, more rigorous performance assessment, and demonstrated mastery across all eleven ICF core competencies.
For executive coaching, the difference matters because senior leaders bring complex situations – power dynamics, strategic ambiguity, stakeholder politics – where an MCC’s depth of experience and assessment skill changes the quality of the conversation. We staff every senior executive engagement with an MCC or PCC coach.
Yes – transition coaching is one of the most common engagements. New-role coaching focuses on building context fast, mapping stakeholders, and avoiding the common new-leader traps (overcorrecting from day one, hiring too quickly, breaking the team you inherited).
Promotion or scope-expansion coaching helps a leader actually operate at the new level instead of doing the previous job better. These engagements often run 4–6 months – shorter than standard ones because the inflection point is concrete and the success criteria are observable in months, not years.
Have a question that’s not answered here?
Get in TouchExecutive coaching comes in many forms. Here’s what you should know before making a decision. For the full picture – what happens in sessions, what it costs, how to measure results, how credentials work – see our definitive guide to executive coaching.
The labels get confusing. Executive coaching focuses on senior leaders navigating complex organizational challenges – strategic thinking, executive presence, stakeholder management, and high-stakes decisions. Leadership coaching is broader, often targeting emerging leaders or managers developing foundational skills. Life coaching addresses personal goals and life transitions, without the organizational context.
The difference matters because it determines your coach’s frame of reference. An executive coach who has worked with C-suite leaders understands board dynamics, P&L accountability, and the politics of senior teams in ways that other coaches don’t.
Explore the different types of coaching for leadersExecutive coaching is a significant investment, and pricing varies widely. Solo coaches may charge $200–$500 per session, while MCC-credentialed coaches at established firms typically work on retainer engagements starting at $15,000. Factors include the coach’s credentials and experience, engagement duration, assessments included, and the number of stakeholder check-ins built into the design.
The question isn’t just what it costs – it’s what the alternative costs. A senior leader who underperforms for 12 months, or a key executive who leaves because they didn’t get development support, has a far higher price tag.
Read our full breakdown of executive coaching costsThe coaching industry is evolving. Virtual coaching has become the norm (not a compromise), AI-driven assessments are supplementing traditional tools, and organizations are investing in coaching at earlier career stages. The biggest shift: companies are moving from reactive coaching (fixing a problem leader) to proactive development (accelerating high-potential talent).
For executives evaluating coaching, this means more options, but also more noise. The fundamentals haven’t changed – a credentialed coach with real executive experience, a structured framework, and measurable outcomes is still what separates effective coaching from expensive conversations.
Read about the latest trends in executive coachingStart with credentials. ICF MCC is the highest coaching credential in the world, held by fewer than 5% of coaches. Then look at who the coaches actually are – have they held executive roles themselves, or are they career coaches with only classroom training?
Ask about structure. A firm with a defined methodology (like our ASPIRE® framework) will deliver more consistent results than one that relies on each coach’s individual style. Ask about assessments, stakeholder involvement, and how progress is measured. If the firm can’t articulate how they track outcomes, keep looking.
See what makes the best executive coaches stand outFor HR and L&D leaders procuring coaching at the organization level, the first decision is structural: a boutique coaching firm with vetted, credentialed coaches, or a marketplace platform that matches you from a pool of hundreds. The two models look similar in a deck and produce different outcomes in the room. A platform optimizes for breadth of coach inventory and self-serve matching; a firm optimizes for engagement design, coach-to-leader fit, and outcome accountability the buyer can defend in a budget review.
Which fits depends on what you are actually buying – a credential-checked coaching transaction, or a coaching engagement with a thesis. We walk through the firm-vs-platform trade-off, what credentials matter, and the three questions that filter out the vague providers.
How HR and L&D evaluate executive coaching servicesCoaching for senior leaders – VPs, SVPs, and division heads with P&L accountability – works differently from coaching emerging managers. The stakes are bigger, the visibility is higher, and the typical challenge isn’t a skill gap. It’s the gap between technical mastery and the political, strategic, and stakeholder demands of senior leadership.
Senior-leader engagements often focus on stakeholder mapping, board and executive-team dynamics, strategic decision-making under uncertainty, and the shift from running a function to influencing across one. The right coach has actually sat in those rooms – not just studied them.
How high-performance coaching works for senior executivesCEO coaching is its own engagement category, not a more expensive version of senior-leader coaching. The CEO seat carries a structural isolation that distorts every relationship in the business – direct reports filter what they share, board members operate as evaluators rather than peers, and the people who knew the leader before the title are no longer in the room. A coach is often the one relationship in the CEO’s professional life with no agenda other than the CEO’s effectiveness.
What the engagement looks like, what it costs, and how to evaluate a CEO coach without falling for the credential-or-charisma trap – we cover it in depth in the CEO coaching guide.
What happens when the person at the top gets a coachHealthcare executives operate in one of the most complex leadership environments in any industry – clinical accountability, regulatory pressure, mission-driven culture, and consolidation dynamics that reshape org charts every few years. Coaching for healthcare leaders has to hold both the patient-care frame and the business frame at the same time.
We work with physician leaders moving into administrative roles, hospital system executives navigating M&A integration, and senior nursing and operations leaders being asked to scale across geographies. The work is the same disciplined coaching engagement – what changes is the context the coach is fluent in.
Talk to a coach about leading in healthcareSome leaders are running a business. Others are running a mission. Purpose-driven executives – in nonprofits, mission-led for-profits, and impact-focused organizations – face a particular leadership tension: the work matters more than the title, but the title’s demands are still real. Stakeholders include funders, beneficiaries, and a team that signed up for meaning, not just paychecks.
Coaching for purpose-driven leaders surfaces the values that drive the work, then translates them into decisions, boundaries, and an operating rhythm that’s sustainable. Burnout in purpose-driven leadership rarely comes from working too hard – it comes from the mismatch between mission and the daily work required to deliver it.
How coaching helps purpose-driven leaders find clarityA leadership development consultant works upstream of the curriculum decision. Before you choose a vendor, run a cohort, or buy a platform license, the consultant’s job is to translate the business outcome you want into the program design, facilitator standards, and measurement framework that will actually produce it. That’s a different role from the consultancy that sells you the program they already built.
Independent consulting matters when the design problem is yours, not the vendor’s – when you need someone whose recommendation is not constrained by what they happen to have on their shelf. The boutique vs. big-firm trade-off shows up here too, and the right answer depends on whether the program needs depth on a specific transition (new-VP, post-acquisition, ICs-to-managers) or breadth across an enterprise rollout.
What an independent leadership development consultant actually doesMost leadership development programs deliver content; coaching delivers behavior change. The two work best when they’re designed together rather than bolted on. A cohort program produces a shared vocabulary and a peer network; individual coaching turns the framework into the leader’s actual decisions, with someone watching the gap between what was taught and what gets practiced.
Designed together, leadership coaching and development becomes a tier-by-tier system – emerging managers, mid-level leaders, executives – with each tier’s curriculum, coaching cadence, and measurement framework chosen for the leadership transition that tier is actually living through. That’s a different conversation from “buy our LMS and add coaches.”
How cohort programs and individual coaching work as one engagementStart with a conversation. We’ll learn about your challenges, your goals, and whether coaching is the right fit. No pressure, no sales pitch – just an honest assessment from coaches who’ve been where you are.
Free initial consultation · No commitment required
