What to Expect from Executive and Leadership Coaching
What is executive and leadership coaching?
Executive and leadership coaching is a structured, confidential process that gives leaders space to think through decisions, relationships, transitions, and goals that benefit from dedicated reflection. The coach does not simply provide answers. Instead, coaching provides confidential space that helps leaders clarify what is happening, test their assumptions, consider different perspectives, and decide what they want to do next.
For leaders in colleges and universities, that often means sorting out what belongs to them personally, what their role requires, and what the institution needs. Clients use coaching to successfully establish themselves in new roles, make consequential decisions, strengthen confidence in their judgment, build on their strengths, prepare for difficult conversations, rethink how they are working, and translate reflection into action. Organizations use coaching to support capable leaders as their responsibilities grow or become more complex.
What does a coach actually do?
A coach is a strategic thought partner who listens closely, asks questions, reflects back what they are hearing, and helps clients notice patterns or assumptions that may be difficult to see from inside the situation. Clients may bring several goals, questions, or challenges into a session at once; part of the coach’s work is helping them separate those issues and decide what actually needs attention.
A coach may challenge an interpretation, offer a different frame, or ask a question that changes how the client sees the situation. The work then moves toward application: What conversation needs to happen? What decision needs to be made? What might the client try before the next session?
Coaching also creates accountability. Clients leave with actions they have chosen and return with new information about what happened.
Who is coaching for?
Coaching can be useful at many stages of a leadership career. What matters is less the title someone holds than the complexity of the responsibilities, decisions, or transitions they are navigating.
People often seek coaching when their responsibilities are growing and they want to develop ways of working that fit the next stage of their leadership. They may be taking on broader responsibility, deciding whether they want a larger role, strengthening important relationships, learning to delegate, or learning where they can exercise the greatest influence within institutional constraints.
Coaching can also help experienced leaders who need a confidential place to think through consequential decisions before acting. The common denominator is not seniority. It is having meaningful responsibility and wanting space to examine how to exercise it well.
Is coaching only for presidents and senior executives?
No. Presidents and senior executives often use coaching because their roles involve high-stakes decisions and few places where they can speak candidly. But coaching can be equally useful for deans, associate and assistant vice presidents, department leaders, directors, and others whose responsibilities are expanding.
A leader moving into a new role may need to rethink relationships with former peers, decide what to delegate, understand what belongs to their new position, or develop a broader institutional perspective. Someone earlier in a leadership career may be deciding whether advancement is even the right goal.
The question is not, “Am I senior enough for coaching?” It is whether the responsibilities you are carrying would benefit from dedicated reflection, challenge, and support.
When is executive or leadership coaching useful?
Professionals commonly engage a leadership coach during transitions such as:
starting a new or expanded leadership role;
navigating a consequential decision or institutional change;
developing relationships or team dynamics;
exploring how to position their experience for a new opportunity;
preparing for greater responsibility; or
wanting space to think through how one leads, communicates, or makes decisions.
What are some goals and challenges clients and coaches work on together?
The coach and the client develop a coaching plan together that typically addresses an issue such as:
identifying and building on leadership strengths;
becoming more intentional about leadership style;
learning how to lead effectively as more people come to depend on you;
developing new ways of working as the client’s role and responsibilities expand;
learning how to lead through influence when the client does not control all the conditions around the role;
developing the influence needed to advance outcomes across areas the client does not directly control;
clarifying whether the next leadership opportunity aligns with the client’s goals and values;
making consequential institutional decisions while considering their impact on the people involved;
creating more space for strategic work as responsibilities increase;
needing somewhere to think before a complicated judgment becomes an institutional decision;
navigating relationships with colleagues, supervisors, direct reports, faculty, HR, and leadership teams;
deciding what deserves the leader's attention and what does not;
developing sustainable ways to manage a heavy workload and avoiding burnout;
preparing for consequential conversations;
making sound decisions while balancing authority, responsibility, institutional norms, and important relationships;
deciding what kind of leader the client wants to become; or
translating a large, ambiguous professional responsibility into manageable actions.
What are some benefits or results from coaching?
Executives and leaders benefit from the coaching experience by:
seeing situations and opportunities more clearly;
distinguishing what belongs to them from what belongs to the institution or other people;
making decisions according to explicit values and institutional responsibilities;
identifying the relationships, authority, information, and support they need to succeed;
preparing for important conversations in advance;
turning reflection into action and learning from what happens next; or
developing the institutional perspective required at higher levels of leadership.
How can coaching help when you are moving into a new leadership role?
Moving into a new leadership role often changes your relationships, responsibilities, and decision-making context all at once. You may be building new relationships with former peers, managing people for the first time, or making decisions that affect parts of the institution you have never had to consider before.
Coaching gives you a place to think through those changes while they are happening. A coach can help you clarify what the new role requires, prepare for important conversations, examine assumptions carried over from your previous role, and notice patterns in how you respond to new responsibilities and opportunities
Coaching can also be useful before a transition or early in a transition, when it can help you think deliberately about relationships, priorities, expectations, and how you want to establish yourself in the role.
Do you need to have a specific challenge before you start coaching?
No. Some people begin coaching with a clearly defined challenge: an important relationship, an upcoming decision, a job search, a new role, or a conversation they need to prepare for. Others start with uncertainty about what they want next, a sense that they want to develop a more sustainable or effective way of working, or several concerns that feel tangled together. Still others want to establish themselves in a new role or build a high-functioning team.
Part of the coaching process is figuring out what deserves attention. A client may discover that the problem they arrived with is connected to a larger question about their role, priorities, relationships, or the conditions they need in order to work well.
You do not need a fully formed agenda before you begin. You do need a willingness to examine what is happening and what you want to do about it.
How is leadership or executive coaching different from other kinds of support?
The primary purpose of coaching is not to give you answers or solve the problem for you. The coach helps you think more clearly, examine assumptions, consider options, and decide how you want to move forward. Other forms of support may be more appropriate when you need subject matter expertise, plans or other deliverables, or instruction. Coaching is most useful when the work depends on your own judgment, choices, and follow-through.
How is coaching different from advising?
An advisor draws on experience or subject matter knowledge to recommend what someone should do. That can be valuable when you need guidance about an unfamiliar process, want the perspective of someone who has handled a similar situation, or need help understanding your options.
Coaching serves a different purpose by helping you identify what you know, what you are assuming, what matters most, and what different courses of action could mean. The goal is to strengthen your ability to exercise judgment rather than substitute someone else’s judgment for your own.
In practice, the two can sometimes sit alongside one another. What matters is being clear about which kind of support is being offered at a given moment.
How is coaching different from mentoring?
In higher education, the terms "mentor" and "coach" are often used interchangeably, but they serve different strategic purposes, and they play different important roles in your career journey.
The mentor typically shares their experience and earned insights over an extended period to help their mentee navigate a similar path. A mentor also sometimes functions as a sponsor, someone who can leverage their social capital and influence to open doors and create opportunities for the mentee.
The coach helps a client set clear goals and take ownership of their professional development and career journey over a defined period of time, often several months to a year. The coach creates a confidential space that facilitates the client’s insight, self-discovery, and growth with powerful questions and tools that help them build on their strengths and transform their learning into actions.
In a mentoring relationship, the mentor often gives direct advice. In a professional coaching relationship, the coach provides the confidential thinking space and guides the inquiry-based exploration necessary for the leader to find their own clarity.
How is coaching different from consulting?
A consultant is generally hired for expertise: to assess a situation, recommend a course of action, or help solve a defined organizational problem. Coaching puts more emphasis on the client’s own judgment.
A coach may offer an observation, ask the client to consider another perspective, or sometimes share relevant experience. But the purpose is not to take over the decision. The client remains responsible for deciding what fits their circumstances, values, role, and institution—and for acting on that decision.
How is coaching different from counseling or therapy?
Counseling and therapy address mental health and emotional well-being and may involve diagnosis, treatment, healing, or processing experiences that extend beyond the scope of coaching.
Coaching is not a substitute for clinical care. It focuses on questions, choices, goals, and situations the client is navigating in a professional context and on what they want to understand, change, decide, or do next.
What happens during a coaching engagement?
A coaching engagement usually has a discovery phase, a working phase, and periodic opportunities to assess progress. You and your coach identify what you want from the engagement, use individual sessions to work on the situations and decisions that arise, and revisit your goals as your circumstances change. The process is cumulative. Insights from one session may lead to an action or experiment between sessions, and what happens next becomes useful material for the following conversation.
What happens before coaching begins?
Before regular sessions begin, you and your coach establish what you want the coaching to accomplish and whether the relationship is a good fit. You may discuss your current role, the circumstances bringing you to coaching, broader goals, and what kind of support would be most useful.
You will also clarify practical expectations such as confidentiality, scheduling, the length of the engagement, and the respective responsibilities of coach and client. From there, you may develop a coaching plan that captures your initial goals. That plan is a starting point rather than a fixed curriculum and can change as new priorities emerge.
What happens during a coaching session?
A session generally begins with a check-in and a decision about what would be most useful to work on that day. You might bring a decision, relationship, upcoming conversation, leadership challenge, or simply something you have been trying to understand.
Your coach listens, asks questions, reflects what she is hearing, and may challenge an assumption or invite you to look at the situation differently. By the end, you will usually identify what you are taking away and whether there is something you want to do, try, investigate, or think about before the next session. You may also decide how your coach can help with accountability.
What happens between sessions?
Much of the value of coaching comes from what happens after the conversation. You may leave a session with a decision to make, a conversation to have, something to observe, or a new approach to try.
The goal is not to complete “homework” for your coach. It is to use the time between sessions to test your thinking in the real conditions of your work. What happened? What worked differently from what you expected? What obstacles or opportunities emerged? Did the situation look different once you acted?
You may also agree that your coach will check in about a commitment or provide another form of accountability. At the next session, those experiences become new evidence to work with, helping you refine your judgment and decide what to try next.
What makes coaching effective?
Coaching works best when there is a strong working relationship, a clear purpose, and enough time between sessions for reflection to turn into action. The coach creates a confidential space for honest thinking, asks questions that help the client see more clearly, and challenges without taking over the decision. The client brings the willingness to examine assumptions, try something different, and return with what happened.
Over time, that cycle can help a leader become more confident in their own judgment, more deliberate about how they respond to difficult situations, and better able to recognize what is and is not theirs to change.
What should I expect from my coach?
You should expect your coach to listen closely, respect your perspective, and take your goals seriously. A good coach does more than offer encouragement. They may notice patterns, challenge an assumption, ask a question you have not considered, or help you separate several questions or priorities that have become tangled together.
You should also expect consistency. Your coach should remember the larger goals of the engagement, help you connect one session to the next, and create enough structure that useful insights do not simply disappear when the conversation ends. At the same time, the work should remain yours: Your coach supports your judgment rather than replaces it.
You should also expect effective administration including maintaining files, scheduling, and timely communication.
What will my coach expect from me?
Your coach will expect you to participate actively in the process. That means bringing the situations and questions that matter, being willing to examine your own assumptions and choices, and saying when a particular direction is or is not useful.
You may also agree to take an action between sessions: have a conversation, gather information, try a new approach, set a boundary, or simply pay closer attention to a pattern. You are not expected to arrive with every answer or to execute every plan perfectly. What matters is being willing to learn from what happens and bring that new information back into the coaching process.
Is executive and leadership coaching confidential?
Yes.
Confidentiality gives you room to speak candidly about goals, decisions, relationships, doubts, mistakes, and situations you may not be able to process openly with colleagues or supervisors. That privacy is part of what makes coaching useful. You can test an interpretation, admit that you are uncertain, or think through a difficult decision before it becomes an institutional action.
What happens when my college or university is paying for my coaching?
When an institution sponsors executive or leadership coaching, the expectations should be clear before the engagement begins. The institution may participate in defining the broad purpose or developmental goals of the coaching, but that does not mean it receives a report on what you say in individual sessions.
Any information that may be shared with a sponsor should be agreed upon in advance by the client, coach, and institution. That might include whether the engagement is occurring, its general goals, or progress against agreed objectives. The substance of individual coaching conversations remains confidential unless you have agreed otherwise.
What happens if the same coach is working with me and also with others at my institution?
That arrangement can be useful, because it helps the institution improve its collective capacity for effective leadership, but it requires especially clear boundaries. Your coach may understand more about the institution’s structure, pressures, and context because they are working with several people there. At the same time, each coaching relationship remains separate. You should not expect your coach to tell you what another client has said, confirm another person’s concerns, or carry information from one coaching conversation into another.
If overlapping roles create a conflict or make confidentiality difficult to maintain, the coach should address that directly. The goal is for each client to have a genuinely private space while still benefiting, where appropriate, from the coach’s broader understanding of institutional leadership.
How do I know whether coaching is the right kind of support for me?
Coaching may be a good fit if you are carrying a decision, transition, relationship, or leadership responsibility that would benefit from dedicated time to think rather than an immediate answer from someone else. You may have a specific challenge in mind, or you may want to grow into a new responsibility, explore an opportunity, or become more intentional about how you lead.
Coaching is particularly useful when the work involves your own judgment: deciding what matters, understanding what is and is not within your control, considering different ways forward, and choosing how you want to act.
If what you primarily need is specialized technical advice, clinical support, or someone to make a recommendation for you, another kind of support may be more appropriate.
Since Ilene has been a higher education leader, does her coaching include expert advice?
As an experienced higher ed leader, I have decades of experience and do form interpretations of a client’s situation that may be helpful to share. And for my institutional consulting clients, I do develop plans, recommendations, facilitated workshops, toolkits, and other deliverables.
However, leadership coaches — particularly those following ICF standards — are careful about when they give specific advice because that can interfere with the long-term goal of you developing your own capacity to solve problems. Even in cases where a coaching client describes a problem very similar to one I went through personally, I am unlikely to “give the answer” or suggest my way of solving it. Instead, I support the client’s ability to look at the problem through various lenses and to consider what course of action would be called for by each of those perspectives.
The distinction is not absolute. I do sometimes step back and ask the client if it would make sense to share my experience or interpretation. If so, I bracket and label that and make a clear return to coaching.
The result of maintaining this distinction between coaching and advising is that you create plans that you are responsible for and, crucially, develop the steadiness to do so again when the next challenge emerges.
What is Ilene’s coaching methodology?
Most professional coaches work using a particular methodology. Mine is informed by my International Coaching Federation-accredited training and the ICF’s Code of Ethics, as well as by my 15 years of experience as a faculty member and 10 years of experience as an Associate Vice President and Provost/Vice President for Academic Affairs. Briefly summarized, my approach is to create a confidential, judgment-free environment to:
Get centered: Identify the strengths you have and can rely on, and identify the values you want to lead with.
Unpack complexity: Test and refine ideas before they reach the public stage.
Discern agency: Identify where you have choices and power, even within highly constrained institutional systems.
Cultivate steadiness: Develop the capacity to remain grounded and clearheaded when institutional "noise" is at its loudest.
How long does a coaching engagement usually last?
If your budget allows it, I generally recommend a program of eight sessions to begin to have a significant impact. That will depend on what issues you want to work on. Many clients choose to continue getting support after that initial engagement.
What happens if I’m interested in working with Ilene as my leadership coach?
The first step is a discovery conversation. We will talk about what is bringing you to coaching, what you would like help thinking through, and what you hope might be different as a result.
The conversation is also an opportunity to determine fit. You can ask questions about how I work, and we can consider whether coaching is the right form of support for what you need.
If we decide to work together, the next steps are straightforward: We will agree on the scope of the engagement, establish confidentiality and other expectations, begin developing the goals that will guide our work together, and begin scheduling your coaching sessions.