How To Find The Best Exec Coach For You

Exec coaches are great, they will help you unlock problems you couldn’t solve on your own and provide templated help. Often exec coaching can feel copy-paste from one coachee to another, this can work; however, finding the best exec coach for you is critical and having a personalised experience is pivotal in your career development and executive growth.

Here are my top recommendations for effective coaching:

1. Prioritise Personal & Professional Growth Together: Coaching should always be centred on your holistic development, focusing on both your personal journey and your professional advancement. You are you, what drives you outside of work will appear in work, and what drives you at work does overlap your personal life. It's about building you up for short, mid, and long-term success.

2. Find A System That Help You! (Drills-Based, Workshop Approach Might Just Be It): Forget passive chats. They rarely work; chats and conversations help to bring things to the surface, but aren’t going to help you get the reps in to improve core areas of your work. For instance, my coaching is designed as intensive workshops with practical drills. This ensures you're actively developing skills and getting tangible outputs, not just uncovering problems and being told to go and address them - this is why you want and would benefit from coaching.

3. Commit To The Homework: Coaching isn't just during our sessions; it's an investment in yourself. The homework-based system is critical for your development and for carrying the training forward post-workshops. Homework can be small activities, or it could be a challenge to improve core aspects of your team’s performance in digestible chunks and in methodical steps. No outside session work means you aren’t given the opportunity to develop throughout your workday.

4. Develop Your IQ, EQ, and PQ: Work skills aka IQ is what most exec coaches work on, they will help you find an area or two to work on and push you towards fixing them. I believe to my core this is just part of the coaching process, you have to work on your emotional intelligence (EQ), you have to work on your work skills (IQ) and you have to be built to have PQ (political skills), without knowing when to blend the two or three together you will likely struggle to improve as an exec or Department leader.
   My coaching is designed to cover the Q triad: We work on improving your traditional "hard skills" (IQ), your life skills and emotional intelligence (EQ - some have, some really don’t), and your political intelligence (PQ) to help you mature as a leader, understand the game being played around you and galvanise those around you. IQ coaching is good, but without the package of IQ, EQ & PQ, many struggle.

5. Utilise Proven Templates and Frameworks: Templates and frameworks help you to identify & break down issues and create opportunities to apply a different method to problems that arise. The issue is often said framework isn’t personalised and isn’t co-created for you and your specific work environment.
   These templates and frameworks can be helpful, but you need to understand the frameworks and templates, and when/where they can be applied and have a coach who will support you through sessions and homework.
   I provide dedicated, proven templates and frameworks that we collaborate on to customise to your working style and workplace, giving you practical tools to shape your future and your team's development.
   Just think: The number of times we follow a new template or a new way of doing things and as soon as there’s a question, it breaks you stop using it or revert back to how it was always done…because it wasn’t set up for you and wasn’t worked through together to help it and you to be successful

6. Seek a Coach Who's "Been There, Seen It, Done It" With Broader Experiences: It's crucial to work with someone who has lived through similar challenges, experienced the highs and lows, and understands the pitfalls. This practical experience ensures the coaching is relevant and effective. If you are considering taking on a mentor or coach who has/had the same role, be mindful that they will be relaying their story and their experiences and likely won’t set the goals to help you improve. Often, coaches who have similar experiences and have broader experiences - have the breadth of knowledge blended with the battle scars to help step out of the situation, guide and coach towards a better outcome.

7. Focus on Career Development: Many coaches focus on small elements of the problems you are facing or improving small tactics; these tactics will work, however, rarely do they drive your career forward. The problems you might be experiencing with the CEO or the continued lack of confidence from the C-Suite needs a broader lens and a lens to zoom in on, and importantly zoom out on too. Coaching should be about your career, not just the job or struggles in the job - great coaches will cover these and apply a broader lens.
   Everything I do in coaching is geared towards your career development. It's about helping you with small steps and giant leaps and understanding how to co-create and craft the path you want to go on.

8. Ask Questions for Better Answers: A little secret, most great leaders ask the best questions; they ask clarifying questions, they drive conversation by directing laser-focused questions. This leads to better answers and better outcomes. Work on this tool is critical, but there is hard work needed.
   I won't just give you the quick fixes or easy answers - there will be times this will be needed. Instead, I'll ask a lot of questions to help you step out or step up out of your situation and help to guide you to your own solutions, helping you grow and improve your decision-making skills and provide you a chance to ask yourself better questions and ask those around better questions for better outcomes.

9. Foster Respect and Curiosity: Find an exec coach who will help you to create a safe place between you and then enable you to build a great environment that unlocks curiosity and creates great work.
   Respect and curiosity are foundational principles for me. We show this by respecting each other's time, energy, and requirements, which then maintains curiosity to guide, learn, and mature throughout the coaching journey.

10. Leverage Ongoing Support Systems: Space and distance are critical in a relationship, but coaching often needs a system that makes you feel supported when you need it most and not just in a coaching session.
    Beyond the sessions, having access to resources like a private chat for quick support or a "999/911 Emergency Call" for critical situations ensures you're continuously supported when you need it most is a fundamental I swear by and have built my coaching around. Emergency calls can be around hiring and firing, it could be around an important board update, it could be about a continuous clash with a leadership peer or important team member that came to a head, these are all times you will look for coaching and help from a trusted partner.

If you’d like to discuss executive coaching (I specialise in coaching across the C-Suite, from CEO and founder to Marketing and Product leaders, and those at a level below), please feel free to drop me an email at coach@dannydenhard.com or DM me on LinkedIn.
Here are my coaching client testimonials.