Leadership Coaching: What It Is, What It Costs and When It Is the Wrong Answer
Leadership coaching is a structured working relationship in which a trained coach helps a leader develop specific capabilities against goals the leader sets. It is forward-looking, performance-focused, and built on questions rather than advice.
It is also, for a certain kind of problem, exactly the wrong thing to buy. This piece covers what it is, how to choose one, and how to tell which situation you are in.
What Leadership Coaching Actually Involves
The shape is consistent across most providers.
A contracting conversation first. What you want to be different, how you will both know whether it is working, what happens in the room and what does not leave it. A coach who skips this is worth questioning.
A fixed rhythm. Typically six to twelve sessions across three to nine months, at sixty to ninety minutes each. The number matters less than the fact that there is one: coaching works towards something, and working towards something requires an end.
A method underneath. GROW is the most widely taught framework, and there are many others. The point of a method is that the coach is doing something deliberate instead of simply having a good conversation.
Questions, not answers. The defining discipline. A coach believes you have the answer and that their job is to get it out of you. Where they do offer expertise, most will name the shift explicitly, because the two modes work differently.
Leadership Coaching and Executive Coaching Are Mostly the Same Thing
Providers use the terms interchangeably and the distinction is largely marketing. Where anyone draws a line, executive coaching implies board and C-suite work while leadership coaching is used more widely across senior and middle management.
Do not choose on the label. A coach who has spent fifteen years with operational managers and a coach who has spent fifteen years with boards are genuinely different purchases, and neither term reliably tells you which one is in front of you.
What It Costs, and Why the Range Is So Wide
Coaching is unregulated, so price signals the individual, not a standard. The variables that actually move it:
- Whose money it is. Organisational budgets and personal budgets are quoted differently for identical work.
- Seniority. Board-level work commands a premium, partly for the stakes and partly for scarcity.
- What is bundled. Psychometrics, 360 feedback and stakeholder interviews add cost and are not always separated out in a quote.
- Session length and frequency, and whether contact between sessions is included.
Ask what is included before comparing two numbers. Two quotes that differ by half often turn out to describe different things.
How to Choose One
Decide what you want to be different first. “I want to be a better leader” cannot be coached. “I lose the room when I am challenged in board meetings” can. Vagueness at this stage is the most common reason engagements disappoint.
Check accreditation, then stop weighting it heavily. The ICF, EMCC and Association for Coaching accredit against training and supervision standards. It is a floor, not a ranking, and it tells you nothing about fit.
Test the chemistry deliberately. Almost every coach offers an exploratory conversation. Use it to notice whether you told them anything true. If you performed for the whole call, that will not change later.
Ask what happens when it is not working. A good answer exists. An evasive one is the most useful thing you will learn.
Ask who else hears about it. If an organisation is paying, establish what is reported and to whom before the first session, not after something difficult has been said.
When Coaching Is the Wrong Answer
Coaching assumes a goal. That assumption does the work, and it is also the limit.
Some senior people arrive without one. Not because they are unclear thinkers, but because the situation has not resolved into anything that can be stated as an objective yet. What they have is a growing sense that something is wrong, a decision they keep not making, or a quarter in which they have stopped recognising their own judgement.
Ask that person what they want to achieve and they will invent something plausible, because the question demands an answer. The engagement then proceeds efficiently towards a goal neither of you believes in.
There is a second case. Coaching is a professional relationship with a structure, and structure implies a record: notes, objectives, sometimes a report to whoever is paying. For most work that is fine. For the thing a chief executive has told nobody, it is the reason they will not raise it.
Confidential counsel is the other option. No goal set in advance, no method being applied, no notes, and nobody to report to. You say the true thing first and work out what it means afterwards, which is the reverse of how coaching operates. The full comparison, including mentoring, is in coaching, mentoring and counsel.
Neither is better. They answer different questions, and buying the wrong one costs a window that does not reopen quickly.
Which One You Need
A rough test, and it holds more often than it does not.
Coaching, if you can finish the sentence “by the end of this I want to be able to ___”. A named capability, a specific situation you handle badly, a transition you can see coming. Executive presence is the classic example: a definable gap between competence and how it reads, and it responds well to structured practice.
Counsel, if the honest answer to that sentence is “I do not know yet, and that is the problem”. Or if there is something you have not said out loud to anyone, and the reason is that everyone available to you has a stake in the answer.
Craig Fearn does the second. He is not a coach, does not set objectives, and keeps no session notes. If the description above is closer to where you are than the coaching one, two lines is enough to start.