Executive and Leadership Coaching in Milton Keynes

The Problem That Rarely Gets Named

You were promoted because you were good at the work. The work is now other people, and other people do not respond to being managed the way the work responded to being done well.

What that looks like from the inside is usually one of a handful of things. A gap between how competent you appear and how certain you feel, which widens rather than closes as you go up. Decisions where every option has a real cost and there is no clean answer, only a choice you will have to defend. Conversations you have been putting off for weeks, which are getting harder rather than easier. The feeling of being observed constantly, and of performing a version of yourself for eight hours a day.

And underneath most of it, nowhere to say "I do not know". Your team cannot hear it. Your boss probably should not. Your peers are, quietly, also your competition. And the person at home has heard about work and would like an evening off from it.

That is not a character weakness and it is not a wellbeing problem. It is the structure of the role. It is also fixable, which is the point of the work.

What the Work Actually Covers

Shaped around what you are dealing with rather than run off a syllabus, so treat this as the shape of a conversation rather than a course.

Seeing yourself accurately. Where your strengths actually are, what they cost you when overused, and the specific things you do under pressure that you cannot see and everyone reporting to you can.

Leading people. Motivating people who are not motivated by what motivates you, handling conflict before it becomes a formal process, and having the conversation you have been avoiding without it turning into either a row or an apology.

Deciding. Working out what you actually think, which is harder than it sounds when you have spent all week absorbing other people's positions, and then committing to it.

Pressure and resilience. Not managing stress in the abstract. What you specifically do when the pressure is on, and what would work better.

Boundaries. Where the role ends. This is the one senior people are worst at, and it is where the cost usually shows up first, at home rather than at work.

Why I Will Ask About Things That Are Not Work

I have written before about why executive coaching and life coaching belong in the same room, and I will say it here more plainly than I did then.

The idea that your professional life and your personal life are separate systems is a convenient fiction that survives because it is tidy. It does not survive contact with the actual week. A leader who is sleeping badly leads differently on Thursday. Someone who has not had an honest conversation at home for six months is unlikely to have one in a meeting either. If your confidence took a hit two jobs ago, it did not stay at that job.

So I will ask. Not to turn a coaching session into therapy, which is a different thing with a different purpose, but because working only on the work means working with half the information. In practice the sessions that change something are usually the ones where the honest answer to "what is actually in the way here" turned out not to be a work answer at all.

What the Evidence Says, Including the Part That Counts Against Me

Coaching has a thinner research base than counselling does. I would rather say that than dress it up, and I would rather tell you what the research says about people like me than quote only the flattering half.

The most useful summary is a meta-analysis by Jones, Woods and Guillaume, which pooled seventeen studies of workplace coaching by internal and external coaches. It found positive effects overall, with a stronger effect on how people feel about their work than on specific skills. That much is what you would expect from anyone selling coaching.

Three findings from the same paper are less comfortable and more useful to you.

Coaches inside the organisation outperformed coaches brought in from outside. I am the outside coach. The likely reason is context: someone who already knows the business does not spend the first sessions learning it. What I take from that is practical rather than defensive. I ask for more context earlier than most coaches do, and I would rather spend the first session on how the place actually works than on my own credentials.

Adding 360-degree feedback made the results smaller, not bigger. Multi-source feedback is sold as standard with a lot of executive coaching packages. On this evidence it is not free, and it may cost you something. I do not insist on it.

More sessions did not reliably mean better outcomes, and neither face-to-face nor online came out ahead of the other. Both are worth knowing before someone quotes you a twelve-session programme and tells you it has to be in the room.

One honest limit on all of it: seventeen studies is not a large evidence base. The wider picture sits on my business and team coaching page, where the summary of the coaching literature is blunter still.

If Your Employer Is Paying

Then there are three parties and it is worth being precise about who gets told what, at the start rather than later.

I will ask for a short conversation with whoever is funding it, with you present, to agree what the coaching is for. That part is legitimate and it is their money. What comes back to them afterwards is whether sessions are happening, and nothing else.

The content of the sessions is yours. Not summarised, not themed, not fed into a talent review. Anyone who lets an employer buy access to what a person said in the room is selling something other than coaching, and it does not work anyway, because you would simply stop saying the true things.

Plenty of people pay for this themselves and never tell anyone at work. That is a normal arrangement and I will not ask you to justify it.

Where and How

In person in Wolverton, within easy reach of Stony Stratford, Newport Pagnell, Bletchley and Woburn Sands, or at your workplace if that is more practical. Online suits this work particularly well, and on the evidence above it is not the lesser option, which means we are not limited to Milton Keynes.

Sessions are one to one. Frequency and number are agreed with you rather than sold as a fixed programme, for the reason set out above.

You can read what happens in a first session before committing to anything.