Is Executive Coaching Worth It for a Senior Leader? How to Tell Before You Pay — an article by Carl Argent

The short answer

It can be, and the honest answer depends less on coaching in general than on three things: whether you have a real question to bring, whether the coach is someone you can think out loud with, and whether the work leaves you with something you would not have reached alone. Where those three are in place, the research on workplace coaching is fairly consistent. People tend to perform better, cope better and follow through on their intentions more reliably (Theeboom, Beersma and van Vianen, 2014; Jones, Woods and Guillaume, 2016).

It is probably not worth it if you are hoping for someone to give you the answer, if the arrangement was made about you rather than with you, or if what you are carrying is closer to exhaustion or dread than to a decision. The rest of this article is about telling the difference before you spend anything.

The question behind the question

Senior roles have a particular loneliness built into them. The more responsibility you hold, the fewer people there are with whom you can say, plainly, that you are not sure. Your team looks to you for the answer. Your peers are, in some measure, your competitors. Your board or your investors want confidence. Your partner has heard enough about work. So the question sits with you, and you turn it over at two in the morning, and in the morning you make the call anyway, because someone has to.

When a leader asks whether coaching is worth it, the question is rarely only about money. Underneath it there is often a quieter one: am I allowed to need this? You have got this far by being capable. Paying someone to help you think can feel like an admission that the capability is running out. It may help to notice that the leaders who use coaching most readily tend to be those who are secure enough to say what they do not know. Needing room to think is not a sign that the thinking has failed. It is what thinking at this level requires.

It is also worth being honest about the other reason the question comes up: the industry does not make it easy to trust. Almost anyone can call themselves an executive coach, the promises are large, and the number that appears on many coaching websites, a sevenfold return on investment, comes from a survey of coaching clients commissioned by a coaching body rather than from any controlled study. You are right to want something better than that before you decide.

What the evidence says, and what it does not

Set the marketing aside and the picture is more modest and more useful. Across the studies that have measured it properly, workplace coaching tends to produce moderate improvements in performance and skills, in wellbeing, in how people cope with pressure, in their attitudes to work and in their ability to set goals and pursue them (Theeboom, Beersma and van Vianen, 2014). A separate review reached a similar conclusion and found, perhaps surprisingly, that whether the coaching happened face to face or partly online made little difference to the outcome (Jones, Woods and Guillaume, 2016).

For leaders specifically, and in the conditions leaders actually work in, the findings hold. Executives coached through a period of organisational change tended to reach more of their goals and reported more resilience and greater wellbeing at work, alongside less stress and lower mood symptoms than before (Grant, 2014). The effects were not dramatic. They were the kind of shift a person notices in themselves before anyone else does.

What the evidence does not say matters as much. It does not show that coaching works regardless of who delivers it, or of what the client brings. Reviews of executive coaching consistently find that the outcome depends heavily on context: the reason the coaching was started, the fit between coach and leader, and whether the person being coached actually wanted it (Athanasopoulou and Dopson, 2018). In other words, coaching is not a product with a fixed return. It is a relationship with a purpose, and its value follows from both.

What coaching adds when you are already good at your job

If you are senior, you have already had feedback, training and years of experience. So what could an hour with a coach add? Three things tend to come up, and none of them is advice.

A room with no stake in the answer

Almost everyone you talk to about a decision has an interest in it. Your colleagues will live with the outcome, your family lives with you, your friends want you to be happy. A coach has no stake in what you decide and no need for you to decide anything in particular. That absence turns out to be rare and useful. When you can lay the situation out in front of someone who will not flinch, compete or reassure, you tend to hear what you actually think, sometimes for the first time. Much of the work of coaching is this: making your own thinking audible.

Seeing the pattern rather than the incident

Leaders usually bring a situation: a conversation that needs to happen, a colleague who keeps missing the mark, a decision that keeps circling. The situation is real and deserves attention. Over a few sessions, though, the situation often turns out to be an instance of something. The conversation you keep postponing looks like the last three you postponed. The colleague you keep rescuing looks like other people you have rescued. The decision that circles tends to circle around the same fear. Seeing the pattern does not solve it, but it changes what you are working on, and it means the next situation is not a fresh emergency.

Turning an intention into a rehearsed move

The last thing coaching adds is the least glamorous. It closes the gap between deciding and doing. Most leaders know, roughly, what they should do about the thing they are avoiding. What they lack is a specific, rehearsed first move and a plan for the moment their resolve gives way. Intentions framed as if-then plans, where you decide in advance what you will do when a particular cue arrives, are markedly more likely to be carried out than general resolutions (Gollwitzer, 1999). Rehearsing a difficult conversation with someone who pushes back, and then having a first sentence ready for Monday, is a large part of why coaching changes anything at all. Each small move that goes as planned then adds to your sense of what you are capable of, and that sense, more than any pep talk, is what confidence is made of (Bandura, 1997).

When it is not worth it

There are situations where the honest answer is no, or not yet, and it seems fairer to name them than to sell past them.

It is rarely worth it when the coaching was arranged about you rather than with you. If an organisation has decided you need fixing and a coach has been assigned to do the fixing, the conditions that make coaching work are mostly absent. Research on what predicts a good outcome points to the leader’s own motivation and trust in the process as central (Bozer and Jones, 2018). That does not mean sponsored coaching cannot work; it often does, when you have chosen it and the confidentiality is clear. It means that consent is not a formality.

It is not worth it if what you want is to be told the answer. A good coach will not run your business, and a coach who is willing to tends to be worth avoiding. If you need expertise on a specific problem, buy expertise: a consultant, a lawyer, a mentor who has done your job. Coaching is for the part where you already have the information and are still stuck.

It is also not worth it, or not yet, when what you are carrying is closer to exhaustion, dread or a low mood that has settled in than to a leadership question. Coaching assumes a person with enough capacity to reflect and experiment. Where that capacity has been worn thin, counselling tends to serve better, and a coach with a counselling background should be able to tell you so without making it awkward.

Finally, it is not worth continuing with a coach you cannot be honest with. Across many studies, the quality of the working relationship is one of the stronger predictors of whether coaching produces anything (de Haan, Duckworth, Birch and Jones, 2013). If you find yourself performing for your coach, managing their impression of you as you manage everyone else’s, the sessions will be pleasant and useless. Say so, or find someone else.

What it costs, and how to think about the cost

Executive coaching in the UK is priced in a wide band. Individual sessions with an experienced coach commonly run from the low hundreds of pounds to several hundred pounds an hour, and structured programmes over several months are often quoted in the thousands. Coaches with a corporate background at board level tend to charge at the upper end. Location matters less than it did; online work has largely levelled the regional differences.

For transparency, my own self-funded executive coaching starts from £150 for a 75-minute session. You can have one focused session before deciding whether further work would help, and we agree the fee, the focus and the boundaries of confidentiality before you commit. Company-sponsored engagements are quoted separately, because they involve agreeing what the organisation may receive and what stays private.

The more useful question is not what a session costs but what the decision attached to it is worth. A leader who spends three sessions on a conversation they have been avoiding for six months is not buying three hours. They are buying the end of six months of avoidance and whatever it has been costing the team. Measured that way, coaching is often either clearly worth it or clearly not, and the ambiguity in the middle tends to come from not yet having a real question.

How to tell it is working

Because the returns are quiet, it helps to decide in advance what you will look for. Three markers tend to be reliable.

The first is that you leave each session with something specific to do before the next, and that you mostly do it. Coaching that produces only insight is enjoyable and does not last. The plan does not have to be large. It has to be concrete enough that you will know whether it happened.

The second is a change in the texture of your thinking about the problem. Researchers describe hope, in a technical sense, as having a goal, seeing more than one route to it, and believing you can walk the route (Snyder, 2002). If, after a few sessions, the thing that felt like a wall has started to look like a set of routes with trade-offs, that is coaching doing its job, even before anything has changed outside.

The third is what happens when an experiment fails, because some will. Leaders are often far harder on themselves than on anyone they manage, and a failed attempt can become evidence about who they are rather than information about the plan. Treating yourself with the same steadiness you would offer a capable colleague who had tried something and missed is not softness. People who can do it tend to recover faster and try again sooner (Neff, 2003). Coaching that helps you review a failed experiment without the shame, and adjust it, is worth considerably more than coaching that only celebrates the ones that worked.

If none of those three is present after three or four sessions, it is reasonable to stop. A coach who is working well will usually have said so first.

Try it this week

Before you speak to anyone, take fifteen minutes with a blank page and write down the one situation at work that you have thought about most in the last month and done least about. Under it, write what you have already tried, and what you are afraid would happen if you acted. Read it back once. If what you have written is a question you cannot answer alone, coaching may be worth exploring. If what you have written is mostly tiredness, that is worth knowing too, and it points somewhere else.

Quick answers

If you want to take this further

Working together adds what an article cannot: your actual situation rather than a typical one, a strengths profile that shows where you may be overplaying what usually serves you, and a rehearsed next step reviewed against what really happened. You can read more about executive coaching with me and a free initial conversation is the usual first step. Where what you are carrying seems to run deeper than a leadership question, counselling is also available.

Sources and further reading

Athanasopoulou, A., & Dopson, S. (2018). A systematic review of executive coaching outcomes: is it the journey or the destination that matters the most? The Leadership Quarterly, 29(1), 70–88.

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: the exercise of control. New York: W. H. Freeman.

Bozer, G., & Jones, R. J. (2018). Understanding the factors that determine workplace coaching effectiveness: a systematic literature review. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 27(3), 342–361.

de Haan, E., Duckworth, A., Birch, D., & Jones, C. (2013). Executive coaching outcome research: the contribution of common factors such as relationship, personality match, and self-efficacy. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 65(1), 40–57.

Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503.

Grant, A. M. (2014). The efficacy of executive coaching in times of organisational change. Journal of Change Management, 14(2), 258–280.

Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., & Guillaume, Y. R. F. (2016). The effectiveness of workplace coaching: a meta-analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(2), 249–277.

Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: an alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101.

Snyder, C. R. (2002). Hope theory: rainbows in the mind. Psychological Inquiry, 13(4), 249–275.

Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 1–18.

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