The Real Value of Hiring an Executive Coach

The CEOs I work with are not lacking in capability. They are not short on ideas, ambition, or experience. What most of them are short on is time to think clearly, and someone they can think out loud with who has no agenda in the room.

That is what coaching does, when it is done properly.

It is not therapy. It is not motivational. It is not a personality test wrapped in a six-month invoice. It is a structured space for senior leaders to do the one thing the rest of their week makes nearly impossible: see their own situation clearly, and decide what to do about it.

Why this matters more, right now

The advertising and media industry is in the middle of the biggest structural shift in a generation. Holding companies are merging or in flux. Client procurement is being rebuilt around AI. Creative talent is being asked to do twice as much in half the time, while the leadership above them is being asked to translate uncertainty into direction without faltering.

Most CEOs in this industry are running their organisations and quietly carrying all of that on their own.

The job of the coach is not to remove the weight. It is to help the leader carry it well, and to make sure the weight is not distorting their judgement.

What a coach actually does

Strip away the marketing language and there are really five things a good executive coach gives a CEO.

A mirror. Senior leaders rarely get honest reflections back. The higher you go, the less truth gets into the room. A coach exists outside the politics, the board dynamic, and the reporting lines. They tell you what they see.

A frame. Most leadership problems look like operational problems until you look again. A coach helps you separate what is actually happening from how it feels, and gives you frameworks to make sense of patterns that keep repeating.

A North Star check. Every senior leader I have ever coached has a moment, sometimes several, where they have lost sight of why they took the job in the first place. Coaching pulls that back into focus. Not as a wellness exercise. As a strategic one. Because a leader without a clear North Star makes inconsistent decisions, and inconsistent decisions corrode trust faster than almost anything else.

Alignment. Between what you say you want, what you actually do, and what your people experience. The gap between those three is where most leadership credibility is lost. A coach narrows the gap.

Tools to repair, not just reflect. This is the part most coaching skips. Awareness is useful. Awareness without the means to shift the underlying patterns is incomplete. The best coaches are equipped with practical modalities to help leaders interrupt long-running loops, the ones that get rehearsed at every promotion, every restructure, every difficult conversation. NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, is one of the more rigorous of these. Used properly, it gives leaders direct access to the cognitive and somatic patterns sitting underneath their behaviour, and a way to change them. Not theory. Not catharsis. Behavioural shift you can measure in the room. I am taking the next six months to deepen my own NLP practice for exactly this reason. Coaching that surfaces a pattern but cannot help you change it is half a service.

What it looks like in practice

The CEOs I coach are typically dealing with some combination of the following:

A regional restructure they did not design but have to deliver. A team that has outgrown its original shape but no one has admitted it yet. A founder relationship that is becoming harder to navigate. A merger that promised clarity and produced friction. A new mandate they accepted before they fully understood what it would cost them.

None of these are problems coaching solves directly. They are problems coaching helps the leader solve, by giving them the clarity, the language, and the courage to act sooner rather than later.

Most leaders know what they need to do. Coaching shortens the distance between knowing and doing. That is its real value.

Choosing well

Not every coach is right for every leader, and the credentials on the website are not the thing that matters most. What matters is whether the coach understands the world you operate in well enough to challenge you in it.

For senior leaders in advertising, media, and marketing, that means someone who has seen the inside of holding company politics. Someone who understands how regional roles actually work in Asia. Someone who knows the difference between a creative founder problem and a network agency problem, because they are not the same problem and they do not respond to the same coaching.

Beyond that, three practical things to check.

The coach is credentialled. ICF PCC or equivalent. This is not a vanity letter, it signals hours of supervised practice and adherence to a professional code.

The coach uses a behavioural framework, not just intuition. The Enneagram, when applied properly through a tool like the iEQ9, gives leaders a precise vocabulary for how they actually operate under pressure. Other frameworks work too. The point is rigour.

The coach is willing to say the thing you do not want to hear. If the first session feels comfortable in every way, you have probably hired the wrong person.

The closing point

Executive coaching is not a luxury, and it is not a fix. It is a discipline. A small number of structured conversations, in the right hands, will change how you make decisions, how you read your organisation, and how you show up in the rooms that matter.

The leaders who get the most out of it treat it the way they treat every other serious investment in their business. They commit to it. They do the work between sessions. They allow themselves to be challenged.

The ones who get the least out of it treat it as a perk.

The choice is the same as the one CEOs make every day about everything else: are you here to look like a leader, or are you here to be one.