Leadership coaching

What it is

This is coaching for the person in the role, not a competency framework. Most senior leaders have no shortage of frameworks. What they lack is one place where they can think out loud without it being minuted, managed, or read as weakness.

The work covers the things that actually consume a leader: decisions where the information is incomplete and the consequences land on you, people you cannot fix, the gap between how you are read and how you intend to come across, and the slow narrowing of who you can be honest with as you go up.

Why Tom

Tom spent over twenty years in senior technology and transformation roles, including director level inside a large regulated organisation, and eighteen years advising executives and boards. He holds an ILM Level 7 qualification in executive and senior-level coaching alongside ICF and Association for Coaching accreditation. The combination matters: the work is grounded in having sat in the chair, not only in having read about it.

How to recognise it

• You make sound decisions for the organisation and consistently poor ones for yourself.
• The further you have gone, the fewer people you can speak to honestly - and the more carefully you have to speak to the ones who remain.
• More of your energy goes into managing how you come across than into the work itself.
• Candid feedback has quietly dried up, and you are no longer certain anyone is telling you the truth.
• By every external measure you are doing well, and some part of you is still waiting to be found out.
• You are deferring a decision you already know the answer to.

How the work goes

We start with what is actually on your desk and in your head this month, not an abstract development plan. From there the pattern usually becomes visible fairly quickly - the kind of decision you avoid, the type of person you over-accommodate, the story you tell about why this period is exceptional.

The sessions are confidential, unhurried and candid. Nothing is reported to anyone, because nobody else is paying and nobody else is party to it. That independence is the point: it lets you say the thing you would not say to your chair, your board, your team or your partner.

Sessions are 90 minutes, one to one, held over video. In-person sessions are available at the private practice in Thame, or at your location by arrangement.

What changes

Decisions get made rather than carried. The distance between how you intend to land and how you actually land narrows. And most people find they stop performing the role quite so hard, which tends to make them better at it.

Related areas

Life rarely arrives as one tidy problem, and these areas tend to overlap.