How to Choose an Executive Coach

Executive coaching is one of the least regulated professional services you can buy. There is no licence. Anyone may use the title. The range of quality is enormous, and the price does not reliably indicate where in that range someone sits.

It is also, when it is good, one of the few development interventions with strong evidence behind it. A good coach changes how someone leads in a way that a course reliably does not.

Both things are true, which is what makes choosing hard.

First, decide whether you need a coach at all

This is the question most articles on the subject skip, because most are written by coaches.

Coaching is the right answer when the obstacle is behavioural and specific to you. You know what good looks like and you are not doing it. You avoid a particular kind of conversation. You cannot delegate. You are technically excellent and your team keeps leaving.

Coaching is the wrong answer, or at least an expensive one, when what you actually lack is knowledge. If you have never been taught how to run a performance conversation, a course teaches you that faster and for a fraction of the cost. A coach will get you there too, at several hundred dollars an hour, which is a strange way to buy information that is written down.

It is also the wrong answer for something clinical. Burnout, anxiety and depression are common in senior roles and a coach is not qualified for any of them. A good coach says so early and refers on. One who does not is a warning sign, not a bargain.

What the credentials actually mean

The main bodies are the International Coaching Federation (ICF), the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC), and the Association for Coaching. The ICF is the most widely recognised, with three levels: ACC, PCC and MCC, in ascending order of logged coaching hours and assessed practice.

What a credential tells you: this person completed structured training, logged a real number of hours, and was assessed against a competency framework. That is a meaningful floor. It rules out the person who read three books and printed a business card.

What it does not tell you: whether they are any good with you specifically, and whether they understand the world you work in. Credentialing measures coaching craft, not context. A PCC who has only ever coached in Silicon Valley technology firms may be an excellent coach and still be lost inside a family-owned manufacturer in Colombo.

Treat the credential as a filter rather than a decision.

What it costs

Globally, executive coaching commonly runs from a few hundred US dollars per session at the lower end to well over a thousand for senior coaches working with executive teams. Engagements are usually sold as blocks of six to twelve sessions rather than one-offs, because behaviour change does not happen in one conversation.

In Sri Lanka the market is smaller and rates are lower in absolute terms, but the shape is the same: a serious engagement is a five or six figure rupee commitment, and it is bought by organisations for senior people far more often than by individuals for themselves.

That price is not a scandal. A good coach is a highly trained professional giving you their full attention. It is simply why coaching reaches the people it reaches and stops there.

Seven questions to ask before you commit

1. What kinds of problem do you not take on? A coach with no answer to this either has not thought about their limits or does not have any, and neither is reassuring.
2. Who else have you worked with in a role like mine, in an organisation like mine? Not for names, which they should not give, but for whether the context is familiar.
3. What happens between sessions? If the answer is nothing, you are buying an hour a fortnight and doing the rest alone.
4. How would we know this is working? A coach who cannot describe what change would look like has no way to tell you when to stop paying.
5. What is your view on confidentiality with my employer, if they are paying? Get the exact boundary before the first session, not after something difficult has been said.
6. What is your training and when did you last do any? Coaching craft decays like anything else.
7. Can we do a chemistry session first? Almost every good coach offers one. Reluctance here is the single clearest signal.

How to judge the first session

The chemistry session is the real interview and most people waste it being polite. Three things to notice.

Did they mostly listen? A coach who spends the first meeting explaining their methodology is showing you what the engagement will feel like.

Did they ask a question you had not asked yourself? This is the whole product. A good coach reliably produces at least one uncomfortable question in the first hour. If you leave feeling validated and nothing else, that is pleasant and not worth the fee.

Did they push back on anything? You will have said something self-serving, because everyone does. A coach who lets all of it pass is going to be expensive company rather than a challenge.

If coaching is out of reach

For most people it is, and saying otherwise would be dishonest. If your organisation is not paying and the fee is not realistic personally, there are options that are not nothing.

• A structured assessment, so you are working on the real gap rather than the one you assume. Being wrong about the problem is the most expensive mistake in self-development, and it is free to avoid.
• A peer group of people at the same level in other organisations. Less expert than a coach, sometimes more honest, and it costs time rather than money.
• A mentor inside your industry. Different from coaching, since they will give advice rather than ask questions, but valuable for context a coach may lack.
• AI mentoring, which is what we build, and which is covered honestly below.

Where AI mentoring fits, and where it does not

We build an AI executive mentor, so read this section with that in mind.

It does not replace a good human coach and we would not claim it does. A coach who has run your kind of team for twenty years brings judgement built from having been there, and no model has been there. If someone is offering you a strong human coach at a price you can pay, take it.

What AI changes is not quality at the top, it is coverage at the bottom. Most people are never going to be offered a coach at any price, and for them the comparison is not AI against a coach. It is AI against nothing.

It has three properties a human coach cannot have. It is there at eleven at night when the situation actually happened rather than at the next appointment. It has no power over you: it cannot hire you, fire you, promote you, or mention you to anyone, which is why people raise things with it they would not raise in a review. And it remembers every prior conversation, so the sixth session starts where the fifth ended.

It is also not a therapist, and it says so when a conversation moves toward ground it should not be on.

The honest test is the same one you would apply to a human in a chemistry session: does it say something you had not thought of? Five conversations are free, no card needed, which is a cheaper way to find out than reading either our claims or anyone else's.