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How to Choose An Executive Coach

Choosing the right executive coach begins with understanding what you need. Are you preparing for a larger leadership role? Strengthening your executive presence? Working through feedback? Or trying to communicate more effectively with your team, peers or senior leaders?

How to choose an executive coach is important because they become a trusted advisor, sounding board and source of outside perspective. A strong coach can broaden your thinking, identify habits that may be limiting your impact and help you turn new insight into practical improvement.

But experience alone does not make someone the right coach for you. The most productive coaching relationships combine relevant expertise, a clear methodology and enough chemistry to build trust.

In this episode of What’s Your Story?, Sally talks with SW&A Executive Coach Francie Schulwolf about how to choose an executive coach. Drawing from her experience as both a corporate communications leader and a coaching client, Francie shares what leaders should look for and why the right match can make coaching more useful, relevant and lasting.

How to Choose an Executive Coach: Why Choosing the Right Executive Coach Matters

In the last year, millions of workers took early retirement, which created a band of less-experienced managers and leaders in most companies. It’s a great career opportunity and accelerated promotions for several managers. But it also pushes a less-experienced leader to learn how to drive while the car is moving, and it can create risks within a company when someone is leading who doesn’t have a bank of experiences to draw on.

That’s why coaching is a hot commodity. That’s why it is so important to know how to choose an executive coach.

A Coach becomes a trusted advisor to a new leader. A good Coach becomes a sounding board… and a confidante. A good Coach can broaden your thinking and help you solidify your options. And the best Coaches will help you expand your skills and your tools so that you can leverage the learnings even after the coaching relationship wraps up.

So, do you know how to choose an executive coach?

On this episode of What’s Your Story, Sally talks with her colleague and SW&A Executive Coach, Francie Shulwolf, about how to choose an executive coach, how they work together to identify the right direction and guidance for coaching clients. Francie has also been a recipient of coaching services from her previous leadership role in a large hospitality company. Over the years, she often says: “What we do here at SW&A is different. It’s so much richer in terms of takeaways.” So today’s podcast shares insights from both sides of the table on how to choose an executive coach.

More about Francie Schulwolf

Francie is an Executive Coach and Business Development Director at SW&A, and a former Communications Leader for a global hospitality company. Her focus is on developing strong, confident communicators. With close to twenty-five years of global, corporate experience in advertising, marketing and communications, she is intimately familiar with the demands executives face. This understanding, along with her honest and warm style, create a safe and comfortable environment for individuals to learn and grow. That is how to choose an executive coach.

Show Notes

• In the last year, millions of workers took early retirement which resulted in a shift in the workforce, creating a group of less experienced managers and leaders.
  • A good coach can broaden your thinking and help you expand your tools.
    • How do you find the right coach?
  • Role of the manager has shifted
    • Managers are taking on a more significant role.
    • Distractions are gone, people are home.
    • There is more pressure to get things done.
    • People were being more intentional more empathetic.
  • Do you need a coach if you have a mentor in your company?
    • Mentor sees you daily and helps you navigate the waters of your company.
    • A Coach provides you the valuable tools to enhance your leadership style and is a third party outside source that is focused on the individual’s leadership outside of the company.
    • A coach is results driven.
  • How to start
    • Decide what you need a coach for.
    • Coaches have the skillset to build leaders’ communication and leadership style.
    • Chemistry is important with the coach – Trusted relationships
  • Should you get a coach?
    • There is a difference between somebody who has experience vs expertise.
    • Coaches help you combine the two and become a compelling communicator and leader.
  • Tell your potential coach about what you are looking for
    • Most business decisions are not new decisions – a good coach has experience.
    • The coach brings insight.
    • Impressions are someone else’s perspective – insights shift to improvement.
  • Videotaping
    • Going through the before and after on the video – raise awareness of habits.
    • When you get out of your head and into the room, it shows.
  • Distinguish experience from expertise
    • The reason to go to a coach is the expertise in the final assessment.
  • The 4 things that help somebody align with a coach
    • Chasing chemistry – must have chemistry to get to a place of trust with a coach.
    • Insights vs improvement – get the feedback, doing something with it, have great awareness.
    • Balance experience vs expertise – What do you need to do to be better?
    • Inside coach vs outside coach – get a third party involved.

How to Choose an Executive Coach: What to Look for in an Executive Coach

Choosing an executive coach is more than comparing biographies or credentials. You are selecting someone who will listen closely, challenge your assumptions and help you make meaningful changes in how you lead and communicate.

Several factors can help you evaluate whether a coach is right for you.

How to Choose an Executive Coach: Relevant Experience and Coaching Expertise

Experience and expertise are related, but they are not interchangeable.

Experience means a coach has worked with leaders facing business situations similar to yours. Expertise means the coach can assess what is happening, identify the habits affecting your performance and guide you toward a more effective approach.

Ask whether the coach has worked with leaders at your level and whether they understand the environment in which you operate. Industry knowledge can be helpful, but the coach should also bring a broader perspective that helps you see familiar challenges differently.

How to Choose an Executive Coach: A Methodology That Fits Your Goals

A productive coaching engagement should have more structure than a series of interesting conversations.

Ask the coach how the process begins, how goals are established and how progress is evaluated. If assessments, stakeholder interviews or recorded practice are used, ask how those tools inform the coaching plan.

At SW&A, coaching is grounded in Content, Style and Situation. Leaders examine what they communicate, how others experience their communication and how the expectations of a particular audience or setting should shape their approach.

That structure connects coaching to the moments that matter: an executive presentation, a difficult conversation, a new leadership role, a high-stakes meeting or an important message to employees.

How to Choose an Executive Coach: Chemistry, Trust and Candor

Chemistry matters because coaching requires honesty. You should feel comfortable enough to discuss challenges openly and confident that the coach will handle those conversations appropriately.

But comfort is not the only goal. The right coach should also challenge you. Look for someone who can establish trust while providing direct, specific feedback.

A coach who agrees with everything you say may be supportive, but may not help you see what needs to change.

How to Choose an Executive Coach: Practical Improvement

Awareness is an important first step, but it is not the final outcome.

Effective coaching should help you apply insights in real situations. That may include practicing an upcoming conversation, reviewing a recorded presentation, preparing for questions from senior leaders or developing a clearer storyline for a strategic recommendation.

Ask how the coach will help you move from insight to action and how the two of you will recognize progress.

How to Choose an Executive Coach: Questions to Ask an Executive Coach

Before committing to a coaching engagement, consider asking how to choose an executive coach:

• What types of leaders and communication challenges do you coach most often?
• How would you describe your coaching methodology?
• How will we define goals and evaluate progress?
• How do you balance support with direct feedback?
• What happens during a typical coaching session?
• How do you maintain confidentiality?
• If my organization sponsors the coaching, what information will be shared?
• How will we apply the coaching to situations I face at work?
• What do you expect from me between sessions?
• How will we determine whether the relationship is the right fit?

Clear answers will help you understand not only the coach’s qualifications, but also what it will be like to work together.

How to Choose an Executive Coach: Executive Coach Versus Mentor

A mentor can offer valuable knowledge about your company, function or career path. Because mentors often work within the same organization, they can help you understand its culture, relationships and unwritten expectations.

An external executive coach provides a different kind of value. The coach is removed from internal politics and focused specifically on your development. That outside perspective can make it easier to examine feedback, test new approaches and discuss concerns that may be difficult to explore with someone inside the company.

Many leaders benefit from having both. A mentor helps you navigate the organization. An executive coach helps you expand how you lead within it.

How to Choose an Executive Coach: Finding the Right Coaching Fit

The right executive coach should understand your goals, bring relevant expertise and offer a process that turns feedback into improvement. Just as important, the relationship should create the trust required for honest conversation and the challenge required for growth.

When those elements align, coaching becomes more than advice. It becomes a practical way to strengthen your communication, expand your leadership range and prepare for the situations ahead.

How to Choose an Executive Coach: Who Will Challenge You

When considering how to choose an executive coach, pay attention to more than credentials, experience and personality. Consider how the coach responds when you describe a difficult situation.

Does the coach simply validate your perspective? Or do they ask questions that help you examine the situation from the listener’s point of view?

The right executive coach should create a relationship that is supportive but not overly comfortable. Growth often begins when a leader recognizes a gap between intention and impact. A strong coach helps identify that gap without making the leader defensive or prescribing a generic solution.

Look for a coach who is willing to be candid, specific and practical. Feedback should connect to recognizable behaviors and real situations, giving the leader a clear path toward improvement.

How to Choose an Executive Coach – Red Flags When Selecting an Executive Coach

Knowing how to choose an executive coach also means recognizing when the fit may not be right.

Be cautious if a prospective coach:

• Cannot explain their coaching process clearly
• Promises a specific outcome before understanding your goals
• Relies almost entirely on personality assessments
• Offers broad advice without connecting it to your work
• Avoids discussing confidentiality
• Focuses on interesting conversations rather than measurable application
• Has difficulty explaining how progress will be evaluated
• Uses the same approach for every leader and situation

An effective coach should be able to describe how the engagement will move from discovery to insight, practice and application. The process should be flexible enough to respond to the leader’s needs but structured enough to create progress.

How to Choose an Executive Coach – Clarify Expectations for Sponsored Coaching

When an organization sponsors executive coaching, the leader, coach and organizational sponsor should understand how the engagement will work.

The organization may have goals related to leadership effectiveness, executive presence or communication impact. The individual leader may have additional concerns that require confidentiality. Both perspectives matter.

Before coaching begins, clarify what information will be shared, who will receive progress updates and how success will be evaluated. These agreements protect the coaching relationship while keeping the engagement connected to organizational priorities.

A coach should be able to explain these boundaries clearly. Trust becomes difficult to establish when a leader is unsure which conversations will remain confidential.

How to Choose an Executive Coach – Decide How Progress Will Be Recognized

Executive coaching is most valuable when insight changes behavior.

A leader may become more concise in executive conversations, organize recommendations more clearly or handle questions with greater confidence. Another may learn to deliver feedback directly, adapt communication for different audiences or create stronger alignment across a team.

The outcomes will vary, but progress should be visible.

Ask how the coach will establish a starting point and evaluate change. Feedback from stakeholders, recorded practice, self-assessment and observation of real business situations can all help demonstrate improvement.

The goal is not to create a perfect communication style. It is to help the leader develop a broader range of choices and use those choices intentionally.

Ultimately, learning how to choose an executive coach comes down to three questions: Does this person understand the challenge? Can they provide the insight and structure needed to address it? And is there enough trust for honest work to happen?

When the answers are yes, coaching can create improvement that continues long after the engagement ends.

How to Choose an Executive Coach – What to Expect from the Right Executive Coaching Process

Choosing the right coach is important, but the design of the coaching engagement matters just as much.

Executive coaching should not feel like a series of unrelated conversations. Each session should build on the one before it, connect to the leader’s goals and create opportunities to apply new skills in real business situations.

A strong coaching process usually begins by identifying the moments in which the leader’s communication matters most. Those moments might include leading a team through change, gaining support for a strategic recommendation, communicating with senior executives or delivering difficult feedback.

The coach and leader can then determine which communication habits are helping, which may be limiting impact and what improvement should look like.

How to Choose an Executive Coach – Coaching Should Connect to Real Business Situations

The most useful executive coaching is immediately relevant.

Leaders should be able to bring current challenges into the coaching conversation. Instead of discussing influence in the abstract, they might prepare for a meeting in which they need to gain support from skeptical stakeholders. Rather than talking broadly about executive presence, they can examine how they communicate during a high-pressure conversation.

Applying coaching to real situations makes the development more specific and memorable. It also allows the leader to test a new approach, evaluate the response and continue refining the skill.

The right executive coach will help the leader prepare for the immediate moment while also identifying lessons that can be carried into future situations.

How to Choose an Executive Coach – The Leader Must Be an Active Participant

Even the most experienced coach cannot create change without the leader’s participation.

The leader should arrive willing to reflect honestly, consider feedback and experiment with new behaviors. That may require reviewing recorded communication, asking trusted colleagues for input or practicing an approach that initially feels unfamiliar.

It also requires work between coaching sessions. A leader may need to apply a new storyline in an executive meeting, adjust how they deliver feedback or become more intentional about listening before responding.

The coach provides perspective, structure and accountability. The leader turns those insights into action.

How to Choose an Executive Coach – Look for Development That Can Be Sustained

A successful coaching engagement should not make the leader dependent on the coach.

As the work progresses, the leader should develop tools that can be used independently. They should become better at assessing an audience, identifying the most important message and adapting their communication to the situation.

At SW&A, this is why we ground executive communication coaching in Content, Style and Situation. The framework gives leaders a practical way to evaluate what they say, how they say it and what a particular business moment requires.

Over time, the leader should need less direction because the decision-making process behind effective communication has become more intentional.

How to Choose an Executive Coach – Consider the Value Beyond the Immediate Goal

Leaders often begin coaching because of one immediate challenge. They may be stepping into a larger role, preparing for an important executive conversation or responding to feedback.

But the value of executive coaching can extend beyond that initial need.

A leader who learns to communicate a recommendation more clearly may also become better at aligning a team. Someone who strengthens executive presence may become more effective during change. A leader who learns to receive feedback without becoming defensive may create greater openness among direct reports.

When determining how to choose an executive coach, consider both the immediate objective and the broader leadership capability you want to develop.

The right coach helps solve the challenge in front of you while giving you the awareness, communication tools and confidence to approach the next one more effectively.

Like what you hear? Let us walk you through how to choose an executive coach Hear more episodes like this on the What’s Your Story podcast page!