Executive coaching and leadership coaching overlap. Executive coaching is senior leadership coaching, usually paid for by the organisation and tied to the role. Leadership coaching develops how someone leads at any level, and is often chosen by the leader. When one pattern has followed you through several roles, the useful work is often underneath the role.
Vikram has been regional managing director for three weeks. His office in DIFC still smells of new carpet.
On Thursday, HR sends a kind email. The company would like to offer him executive coaching: six sessions, fully funded, with a short check-in with HR at the midpoint. The same week, a friend from his old firm sends him the number of a leadership coach she worked with privately. "She changed how I run my team," the friend writes.
Vikram reads both messages twice and does nothing with either. Because there's something he hasn't told HR, and hasn't quite told himself. This is his third promotion. Each time, the first ninety days look the same: fourteen-hour days, every email his team sends read before it goes out, and by month six his strongest people quietly looking elsewhere. New title, new city, same ninety days.
He doesn't need to know which coaching is more prestigious. He needs to know which one will reach that.
What's the difference between executive coaching and leadership coaching?
The terms overlap and are used loosely. As a working distinction, executive coaching is senior leadership coaching, usually sponsored by the organisation and anchored to the role and its goals. Leadership coaching develops how a person leads at any level, from first-time manager to founder, and is often chosen and paid for by the leader.
If you're a coach working out which of the two to offer, we've written a separate piece for you on executive coaching vs leadership coaching. This one is for the leader choosing.
And if you'd like to talk your own situation through first, Sara, our veteran RS Method Master Coach, offers a free mentoring session on Zoom of 20 to 40 minutes. She'll listen, and she'll tell you plainly whether we're the right fit. You can book it here. Or read on.
When is executive coaching the right call?
When the change is about the role, and the organisation has a stake in it.
A new regional remit. A merger where two teams have to become one. A board relationship that isn't working. A promotion into a job that asks for a different kind of leader from the one who earned it. These are the situations executive coaching tends to be built for, and the sponsor's involvement is part of its value: the organisation is saying, out loud, that it wants you to succeed.
It also comes with a third party in the room, even when they aren't in the session. Before you start, settle three things with your coach and your sponsor together:
- what the organisation hopes will be different, in its own words;
- what stays between you and the coach, and what gets reported back;
- who can end the engagement early, and how.
If those answers are clear, executive coaching can be a strong investment in the role. If they're vague, or the sponsor wants to "stay close to the detail", you've learnt something about the engagement before it begins.
When is leadership coaching the right call?
When the change is about you, and you want to set the agenda.
Leadership coaching is usually broader. It can range across how you lead your team, how you handle your own boss, how you show up at home after a hard week. You choose the coach. You choose what to bring. Nobody else hears about it unless you decide they should.
It's often the better fit at earlier stages of leadership, and it's often the better fit at very senior ones too, for the simple reason that what a senior leader most needs to work on isn't always something they'd want in an HR file.
It isn't the same as mentoring. A mentor shares their own experience and advice, and a good one is worth a great deal. A coach helps you see and change what's driving your own behaviour. Many leaders have both, and should.
What if the same pattern has followed you into every role?
Then neither label is the real question.
Vikram's ninety days aren't a role problem. They've survived three roles, two countries and a dozen bosses. A pattern that travels that well is usually older than the job. In the RS Method we describe it this way: every pattern is a thought fused to a charge. The thought, for someone like Vikram, might be "if I don't check everything, I'll be found out." The charge is the weight his body put on that thought, very likely long before he managed anyone.
Coaching that works on the role argues with the thought. It might give him a delegation framework, a weekly rhythm, a better question to ask his team. All useful. But under pressure the charge fires first, and the framework arrives a second too late.
Removal works on the charge itself. The memory stays. The weight goes. And a leader whose old charge has come off often finds that the delegation skills he already had start working on their own.
That's the layer the RS Method works on, whether the coaching carries an executive label or not. If you think you might be carrying a pattern like Vikram's, Sara is a good person to talk it through with. Her session is free, it's on Zoom, and she'll help you see what's underneath and what can be done. You can book it here.
How do you decide which one you need?
Five questions. Answer them on paper, quickly, before you reply to HR or call anyone's coach.
- Who first noticed the problem? If it was your organisation, executive coaching may be the natural frame. If it was you, lying awake, leadership coaching probably is.
- Would you be comfortable with your sponsor hearing what you most want to work on? If not, protect that work. Take it somewhere private, alongside anything the company offers.
- Is it this role, or every role? List your last three positions. If the same difficulty appears in all three, write it down in one sentence.
- What have you already learnt about it? If you can explain the problem fluently and it still happens, more explanation isn't what's missing.
- What happens in your body when it starts? A tight chest, a rush, a flat calm. If there's a signal, there's a charge, and that's where the work is.
If your answers to three, four and five surprised you, read them again. They're telling you which layer to choose before they tell you which label.
What should you look for before you say yes to a coach?
Whichever label you choose, three things matter more than the title on the proposal.
- Work on the layer under the behaviour. Skills and frameworks have their place. But if a pattern has followed you through several roles, the coaching needs to reach what's driving it. That's where the RS Method starts.
- A practitioner who can hold the room. Ask what the coach's own training asked of them personally, not only professionally. The Master Coaches who work beside me in RS Method rooms were trained under one principle: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained.
- A first step that costs nothing. The first conversation, with Sara, is free. If private work is right for you, she'll find the fit: paid sessions or a package with one of my trained RS Method Master Coaches or with me. And she'll say so if we're not the right fit.
You can read how the method itself works on The RS Method, and how we think about coaching that changes who you're being, not only what you do, in what is transformational coaching. Our overview of leadership and executive coaching in Dubai sets out both ways in.
What people describe afterwards is rarely about a job title. In Talya Whitaker's words: "There are no words for how this has changed my life, changed every cell of my being." That was her experience, not a promise about yours.
If you're a leader deciding what kind of help to take, the next step is a free session with Sara. Don't let the decision sit in your inbox beside the HR email. Book your free session with Sara.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. Somewhere in your calendar this week there's a meeting where the old pattern will show up on cue. You don't have to have chosen a label by then. Just book your free session with Sara first.