Senior leaders are navigating transformation, talent shortages, succession risk, and increasing board pressure simultaneously. Yet many executive development solutions still rely on outdated assumptions that leadership growth happens through frameworks, dashboards, or a fixed number of sessions.

Executive development today requires true partnership. In our work with CEOs and executive teams, we consistently see organizations investing heavily in leadership development without seeing sustained behavior change, improved decision quality, or stronger succession readiness. The issue is not the intention. It is the model.

What Are The Hidden Risk of Commodity Coaching

The rise of scaled coaching platforms has expanded access to development across organizations. For early and mid-level leaders, this can be helpful. For senior executives, it often introduces meaningful risk.

At the executive level, leadership challenges are contextual, political, and time-sensitive. Performance issues rarely exist in isolation, and team dynamics, strategy, and succession are deeply intertwined. When coaching is reduced to a transactional experience, executives are left without a partner capable of holding the complexity of their role. Organizations see activity without impact, utilization without transformation, and data without insight.

Why Executive Development Must Be Bespoke at the Top

Executive roles are not interchangeable, and development cannot be standardized without losing effectiveness. Effective executive development requires:

• Deep discovery rooted in the leader’s role, context, and pressures
• The ability to evolve in real time as business conditions shift
• Integration of individual, team, and organizational realities
• Advisors who can challenge assumptions and support action in the room

Off-the-shelf models fail because they prioritize predictability over precision. Senior leaders do not need philosophical conversations removed from their reality. They need a trusted advisor who can engage complexity without oversimplifying it.

Leadership Teams Do Not Improve in Isolation

One of the most common failures in executive development is treating leaders as individual problems rather than participants in a system. When executives are developed independently without an enterprise lens, systemic issues remain unnamed and unresolved.

Strategy stalls in the middle layers, high-potential successors are underprepared, and senior leaders are pulled back into the weeds. An advisory partner working across leadership populations can identify patterns invisible to any single leader. This insight allows organizations to intervene earlier, more intelligently, and with greater leverage.

Succession Planning Is No Longer Optional

Organizations are facing a growing shortage of ready-now executive talent. Succession planning is often delayed until it becomes urgent, reactive, and costly.

Executive advisory work supports succession by clarifying future-state leadership profiles, assessing readiness beyond performance metrics, accelerating development for next-in-line leaders, and reducing reliance on external hires. Succession is not a spreadsheet exercise. It is a leadership system that must be actively developed over time.

What to Look for in an Executive Advisory Partner

Senior leaders should expect more from their development partners. Indicators of a true executive advisory firm include:

• Advisors with lived executive and enterprise leadership experience
• The ability to work across individuals, teams, and systems
• A clear philosophy grounded in business realities rather than trends
• Comfort operating in ambiguity, conflict, and complexity
• A focus on outcomes, not activity or session counts

When executive development is done well, it becomes a strategic advantage rather than a discretionary expense.

Final Thought

Coaching is a tool. Advisory partnership is a strategy.

As leadership challenges evolve, so must the way organizations invest in their most senior leaders.

Transcript

Tegan Trovato

Today, we’re talking about something every senior leader faces, understanding what you actually need in your own executive development and how to choose partners who can meet those needs. Executive development isn’t one size fits all.

At this level, growth is highly situational, deeply personal, and shaped by the real pressures you’re navigating. And yet, many executives and the teams who support them assume that all coaching or advisory firms are interchangeable, and they’re not. The philosophy of the firm, the lived experience of the people behind it, and the way they tailor their work to your context, all determines whether the development you invest in will create real movement or simply check a box.

So today, we’re unpacking what meaningful executive development truly requires, why some approaches fall flat, and how to recognize partners who can think with you, challenge you, and help you lead through the complexity of your world.

Executive Ownership and the Role of Talent Leaders

Maggie Gough

Okay, today we are going to talk about what talent executives sometimes miss when they’re hiring a coaching firm. And, you know, one of the things that you have said when we were planning for this episode is that we have got to make sure that this actually expands beyond just talent executives. Tell me and tell the listeners why that was important to you.

Tegan Trovato

Because it’s not necessarily the talent development leader’s job to be super clear on what development the exec needs. It is our own job as executives to chart our development. Now, I get, you know, talent development’s job is to find the vendors and the partners and to have a budget sometimes.

Sometimes the exec owns the budget. But the point is, we should be the authority on what we need by the time we’re in an executive seat, for sure.

Maggie Gough

Yeah, well said. And that’s why I wanted to bring it up again, because I really appreciated in our planning conversation when you said, ultimately, it is an executive’s responsibility for their own development. And I was like, yeah, that’s right.

So there’s things that we’re going to unpack today that are specifically related to talent executives and the way that they may go about their work. But there are going to be a lot of nuggets in here for leaders in your own development that you’re going to want to pick up on. So let’s dive into that.

Tegan Trovato

And let me clarify talent development leaders, because they have a lot of different titles. It could be chief learning officer. It could be director of learning and development.

It could just be a component of a CHRO’s job. I mean, where learning sits in an organization can vary quite a bit. So in essence, we’re addressing the leader who is responsible for bringing in the partners that do executive development, because we have seen where that has gone well, some of their investments, and where they haven’t.

We have clients who are learning officers, and they have thoughts on these things. So we’re kind of synthesizing it and reporting it back. And we’ve experienced it on both sides.

I also used to be the head of learning and development for a couple of organizations. So I’m also very familiar with the challenges of this role and budgeting and finding decent partners and all of that. So I have a lot of thoughts, but they’re from different seats at the table, if you will.

Maggie Gough

Yeah, well, that will give us a good perspective to look at today.

Tegan Trovato

That’s what I’m here to try to do, yeah.

The Flashy Trap: Commoditized Coaching and Data Promises

Maggie Gough

This first one we talk about is kind of a common pitfall for anyone who’s going out into the world and hiring a firm for anything or even a software. And I remember this back from my own days, being in a seat of having to buy these things. And even as a COO now, when I go to buy things, you know, you and I will laugh like I love to be sold.

And so that first pitfall is falling for the flashy and the promise, especially now in this world of tech and AI, there’s a lot of bells and whistles that come with things that feel really exciting, and you can see the potential and what it can offer. But where’s the pitfall in that?

Tegan Trovato

Yeah. So one of them is that we assume that all of those partners are the same. You know what, maybe I should back up.

Coaching is, this is part, and this is not me being biased, I promise you listeners, but coaching is one of the best ways to do executive development. And the reason is senior executives don’t need theoretical learning. Many of them have their MBAs, so we’ve already squeezed the juice from the academic route.

Their learning is in doing. And so what they really need is a thought partner and a safe place to think through how they’re going to lead and how they’re going to solve problems and have someone they trust call out their BS when they need it and also tell them they’re brilliant when they need it. And so if learning is by doing, then they really just need a place to think about what they’re going to go and do and then a partner to kind of challenge them to go do it and to do it within a timeline, right?

Just to set the stage, so when leadership development execs are looking at coaching firms, they often just assume they’re all the same. Part of the reason they assume they’re all the same is that they’ve never had a coach themselves. So talent development notoriously is the cobbler’s son who has no shoes.

So there is no budget for talent development to have talent development. And the same was true for me in talent development. I had to pay for my own executive coach after I’d already built a workplace coaching program, right?

So that’s not unusual. We’re not in that seat where we don’t generate revenue, so we don’t really feel entitled and we have trouble building the business case to be entitled to some of the money for the development. But because of that, a lot of learning officers or L&D folks don’t have experience with coaching themselves.

So coaching to them is a one-dimensional experience. It’s a lineup of sessions. How many sessions do you get for how many dollars?

And the truth is coaching firms are very different. Each of them has a culture. Each of them has a belief about what it takes for executives to grow.

Each of them either targets coaching talents very specifically in alignment with that or they don’t. So just for some examples. And then who’s at the helm varies.

Like who is it that’s influencing these firms and guiding them in terms of what they’re offering their clients? What experience do they have as they’ve built out the programming for the coaches and the coaching? So the approach can vary dramatically.

Maggie Gough

So what kind of questions would be helpful to ask to get at that who’s at the helm and what is their experience? What are the things that would be important to look for when hiring a coaching or an executive advisory firm?

Tegan Trovato

That they have someone at the helm who is either leading a large business, like that it’s large enough, you know, that they… I guess what I’m getting at is the person who is creating the programming for executive development, do they understand the lived experience of the executive? Have they worked in corporate America?

Have they had their own budgets? Do they understand the pressures and the competing priorities and the real pain? Do they understand what executives need in order to grow and what it is they’re tactically and topically facing out in the world?

And if you have a firm that’s highly academic, that has its own value. I’m not talking smack. Like there are some really academic executive coaching firms that I love, that I think are really brilliant.

And they tend to employ coaches with a philosophical or academic bend and not all executives are interested in that. So really thinking about, you know, what is the wiring of that firm? What is their philosophy on coaching?

How do they recruit talent and ensure the quality of those coaches that the coaches also have the experience that they can understand their clients well enough? That does not mean they need to come from the same industry. I don’t believe in that, but I do believe in them having experienced the realities of executive leadership enough of that reality to be effective coaches.

So I think those are some of the high-level questions I would certainly look for if I was a talent development leader.

Bespoke vs. Boxed: Matching the Intervention to the Leader

Maggie Gough

Well, and I appreciate that kind of foundational setting before then we can get into where sometimes there’s other offerings that can be added on in addition to some of those foundational items that also sometimes kind of end up having us look over here instead of that foundation first. And so that’s kind of back to that. Tell us about what it looks like when we hit that pitfall of falling for the flashy stuff.

Tegan Trovato

Yeah, flashy. Look, where does the flashy stuff come into coaching? So for those of you who aren’t in a talent development, I’ll bring up the speed on what’s been happening in our industry for the last, like, five or six years.

So coaching has typically been reserved for the most elite leaders, senior leaders in an organization, and that is because it is rather pricey. Training can be so inexpensive. Cohort learning can be really inexpensive.

Private executive coaching and executive team coaching and advisory is not inexpensive if you’re going with a reputable firm with really high-quality coaches. And so what has happened in our industry is that it’s been disrupted, and rather in a positive way in that there’s commoditized coaching now and it can be priced hourly, it can be really inexpensive, it can be connected to you really quickly, and you’re going to get what you pay for. This is not typically the coaching we would give senior executives.

However, what’s happened in a positive sense is that there are leaders who are much lower level than the executive team who now have access to coaching that they usually have to wait 10 to 15 years to be eligible for. So it has really innovated our industry, which I appreciate, because we were due for some disruption and innovation. The other thing is that data collection and AI in general have disrupted coaching in that when you have that commoditized coaching option, and you have that many people in coaching, you ideally can then collect data.

So a lot of these firms are saying, yeah, we have dashboards and reporting and metrics, and we can measure the ROI. What we know from chief learning officers is that is mostly untrue. They are not seeing anything meaningful.

Their vanity metrics is the phrase that we’ve heard some of our most senior executives reflect back to us from other firms they’re getting, that they even aren’t seeing good utilization data, like of these 100 people in coaching, how many of them are using their sessions as planned. So the promise is strong, and the value proposition is strong. And it sounds simple, like we should be able to collect that.

But for whatever reason, chief learning officers and chief HR officers are not seeing the value that they thought they were going to see in that data. So what we saw was about four or five years ago, some of our largest clients who have thousands and thousands of employees, especially the global ones, were partaking of this commoditized coaching, that they could enroll hundreds of people in all at once and quickly have access. And the feedback was really negative about the quality of the coaches, and then they weren’t getting great utilization data.

So we lost some business to that for a while, and now we’re seeing it all come back, especially for senior leaders. This has proven not to be, this commoditized coaching has proven not to be quality enough for the senior execs we coach, for example. So it is righting itself, right?

The pendulum swung on innovation, and now it’s kind of swinging back more towards the middle, and talent development leaders are understanding the right place to plug that in, in the organization.

Maggie Gough

And I’ll add that it has challenged us. You know, you talked about healthy disruptions. It has challenged us to really think about the data that comes in to our organization through coaching.

And obviously, this is all highly confidential, so we’re never getting really specific data back. We’re not learning about specific sessions. But what we do uncover are thematic information about organizations at a very high level.

And that’s been a way that we have then increased our own aptitude and output for senior executives in terms of helping them see some of the things that we can see at a global scale over their organization. And I think that that has added a lot of value in what some other firms, I’m sure we’re not the only ones doing that, right, to keep up with the pace of the market. And so I think that that is important.

The data still is really valuable, but it’s like, what data are you looking at and for whom? And the vanity metrics are not something the senior executive team wants, but maybe they want to understand what themes are happening across their organization within their executive team. And so it’s different sets of data.

And so I think that there can be bells and whistles that are exciting with really healthy firms, and that disruption has helped us to develop some of those.

Tegan Trovato

Yes. Well said, Maggie.

Maggie Gough

Let’s think about boutique organizations who say, we have bespoke offerings, and then there are more of a one-size-fits-all coaching Talk to us about the difference between what each of those are and where they can be positioned for the right audience.

Tegan Trovato

This is what I meant when I said, you know, the mistake that we often see in talent development for execs is just assuming all coaching firms are the same, right? When you have large employee populations, ideally you do find a partner who can tackle a lot of that employee population for you. That is the entire point of having a system and managed providers.

And I believe in that. I used to have to partake in that. But at the more senior levels of the organization, it is much more bespoke.

Like your CFO who is in crisis or leading huge transformation is going to need different coaching from an unruly product leader who’s in early development years. And when you’re going to a firm and you haven’t specified the differences, and it’s really hard to do that when you have mass employee populations, then you can tend to miss the mark. So I think when it comes to senior executive development, you want to have a handful of firms in your back pocket who can target specific interventions for your most senior leaders.

And a lot of times those interventions will include things like conflict, high-performing team, ability to navigate M&A and strategic planning alongside the executive team, like leading, I already said change and transformation. So these are some of the things that if you’re using a more generic, broader targeting coaching firm, they’re not going to be able to plug in and deliver true change alongside your more senior leaders. So you need to have a few of those advisory and coaching firms in your back pocket who you know pretty well and who have the right talent, who can go be in the room and hold the room in those nuanced situations and with your strongest leaders inside your organization.

Systemic Insight, Succession, and Strategic Partnership

Maggie Gough

Yeah, I’m hearing two things. One, you talked earlier kind of about the academic organization that’s got a specific framework and a methodology they’re going to work through. And so if you’ve got then an executive and the challenge that they’re sitting with is more complex and nuanced, all of a sudden that framework doesn’t quite apply, but you’ve got a coach that’s trying to keep rooting you back into it and maybe an executive that’s getting frustrated.

And then the other aspect of this is you mentioned have a couple of these firms in your back pocket. And what I heard in that too is it’s a good idea to start developing relationships with some of these people.

Get on the phone, ask your colleagues who they worked with, because especially for us, we develop business through relationships. It is highly relational. And so we also want to get to know you and make sure that if we’re going to partner with you on an engagement, that we’re all entering the expressway at the right speed at the right time and partnering well.

So the relationships matter in this work.

Tegan Trovato

Absolutely agree.

Maggie Gough

Moving on to the team development. You mentioned team coaching earlier. Tell us what is leadership team coaching and then why talent leaders often pick kind of like a boxed method and where that fails.

Tegan Trovato

I’m so humble as we talk about this because 15 years ago, when I was leading internal talent development, I bought the box stuff. The box stuff is, here’s how we do teams. These are the three things we teach teams.

We can plug it in right away. We, as you know, Maggie, and for listeners who haven’t already heard me say this, like we take a very bespoke approach to teams where we get in with the teams, do a bunch of discovery and consulting first to understand their history, what it is they’re trying to achieve together, how they’re going to measure it. And then we reset the team.

That was super generic. I’m sure we have another episode we can link about our team intervention, but it’s extremely tailored to the team. Now we have a macro framework that we follow that is kind of standard for all team health, but the connectivity in that is super specific to the team’s deliverables.

When you’re trying to buy team coaching for multiple types of teams across your org, it makes sense that they have often genericized the team intervention because then they can plug any team, any coach in, anybody can run it. It should work somewhat for any team. That is not going to work for your senior executive teams and senior executives will be so mad if you waste days of their time with something like that.

But we tend towards that in talent development inside of companies because once again, we haven’t had the privilege or investment from our organization to be given the experience of team coaching, high quality team coaching. So we are buying things one dimensionally again. So if I’m a talent development leader and I have to bring in a vendor, I need to be able to explain why I chose that vendor.

And if the vendor explains their stuff really simply, then it’s easy for the talent development leader to turn around and explain. So they pick things like that because they’re predictable, they look clean and stable, there’s a nice one pager that promises what a team is going to look like and be like afterwards. And we know statistically, most of those interventions fail.

They feel good because you got the team together and they want to be together, but then there’s really no behavior measure, behavior change, or productivity, or performance change in the team over time. But I mean, again, I say this empathetically because it’s hard. It’s hard to prove.

And then you’re also trying to find a deal. You’re also trying to like, you don’t have much of a budget. So you need how much can we deliver more with the least amount of money?

And you do end up buying a particular quality product when you’re forced into that box. But look, executive teams are messy, political, overloaded. They don’t need to waste their time on something philosophical as a team.

They need to be solving their problems with the coach in the room, getting it done. And there is not a box off the shelf model that can do that. That’s just the short story.

So once again, this is probably a good example of have your plug and play vendors that are delivering mass solutions for you, but then you’re going to have these one-off things that need a lot more nuanced solutioning, right? So I think that that team level trap is tricky when you’re buying a team coaching product.

Maggie Gough

It makes sense. So let’s dive into another layer of this, which is succession planning. So when you’ve gotten this kind of one size fits all coaching where you’re having this coaching at scale, you don’t have a partner in that work who’s looking at the organization and can see the gaps and knows the talent in the different roles and the different layers and can start being a partner at that level too.

So talk to us about the value of having a partner in executive development who then can view the organization globally and begin to really assess succession planning.

Tegan Trovato

You know, there are organizations and some of them are listening and some of them have been our clients who are really large and they have internal experts on executive development and succession planning. It’s their full-time jobs. Now we have to, if you think about that being a 40-hour plus week job, that’s a really big company we’re talking about.

Most organizations do not have the privilege and the budget to have that level of internal expertise. So you ideally have a partner, an external firm who can help you think about succession planning strategically. And it is so challenging when you’re maybe the only person in your org who has to think about all the development of all the levels of employees to then also have the authority to sit with the CEO and say, have you and the board worked on your succession plan and what’s the profile for the succession CEO and how can we help develop that in the organization?

And then talent profiles for your other key roles, COO, CFO, chief of product, whatever those key roles are in your organization, they ideally all have an ideal profile and a development plan associated for their next in line who has also been identified. The way I just said it out loud, I’m like, what a luxury. Like that probably sounds like such a luxury to folks.

But what most of us don’t realize is that there is number one, a CEO shortage and two, we’re starting to see a shortage of C-suite talent across industries, across roles. So if orgs are not thinking about succession planning, they are just constantly behind the eight ball on talent because people are coming and going in those seats faster than they ever have. And a talent development leader cannot create sound development or hire great vendors and partners without an understanding of what the organization needs three to five years for every role.

Maggie Gough

And I’ll say for listeners too, this is another topic where we have another episode coming up. So be sure to stay tuned for that in a couple of months. Let’s think about this too from another, so we’re thinking about a partner who can look at your organization globally and think through all of these dynamics.

But another one of the dynamics that we often pick up, and this is one where when I talked about data earlier, this is some of the data that comes back for us that we’re able to identify. But we’re talking about systemic patterns and having a partner who’s thinking globally about your organization alongside your executive team who can start identifying and naming and co-creating solutions for some of these systemic issues.

Tegan Trovato

So where a good firm like us will have an opportunity to collect data is when we really have a talent development leader or sponsor who is looking across the organization as a talent development is a constant thing we’re doing. When we have execs who come to us and they’re like, we have a problem leader, we need coaching for this one person. We understand that that’s not an organization who is inclined to their systemic patterns, right?

So when we have six or more execs in coaching or senior leaders in coaching at a time, we are able to solicit data and feedback, both qualitative and quantitative, that helps us start to understand what’s going on systemically across the enterprise. So I’ll give you a real client example. We have several leaders for a big bank who are in coaching right now, and their CEO was just appointed and their CEO is leading, you know, preparing to implement a major change strategy.

It’s gorgeous. He’s invested very intelligently in how he wants to lead this change, and he’s got his next in line leaders clear on what that change is. Those are the ones in coaching.

Those next in line leaders have already reported back through the data collection mechanisms we have that they feel their exec team is super aligned and clear on what that change is. So that’s a big thumbs up. And also that exec team needs to know like, hey, you’re doing a good job.

People know what’s coming. They understand. What they may have missed without some data collection from us is that those next in line leaders, those EVPs are getting pulled into the weeds while the transformation is getting launched and they are not able to get to the strategy stuff.

Well, they’re not getting to the strategy stuff. Who is? Nobody.

So we were able to get on a call and say, and it’s anonymized because there’s enough leaders in coaching to say, hey, this job family is getting pulled into the weeds because that next layer of leader was not ready. So you’ve got your EVPs ready to lead change. But because that next layer wasn’t ready, they’re getting pulled down.

So what can you do at a group level or job family level for that next layer of leader to level them up quickly and then pull your strategists back out of the weeds to lead the systemic change? You would have thought those execs were going to fall out of their chairs. They were just like, oh my, thank you.

Like, this makes sense. We can work with this. And this costs them no more money.

But this is the ability of a good partner, right, to look across and see those systemic patterns.

Maggie Gough

And I’ll add anecdotally from this engagement that it was led by a talent executive who had in her back pocket several relationships that she had built over the years. And when that moment came, she knew which groups to call for specific needs and then pulled in multiple interventions from different firms based on the need. And so, again, that’s just a further brilliant case study in some of the things that we’ve already kind of pointed to.

Tegan Trovato

Also, may I say, that’s a talent development leader who had had an executive coach before. So she understood how to strategically deploy her partners, right?

Final Reflections: Elevating the Talent Development Seat

Maggie Gough

So let’s summarize this. So we’re talking about the difference between commodity coaching and transformational coaching. We’re talking about the trap of falling for flashy platforms, the need for bespoke approaches, the need for relationships in your back pocket so that you’re ready to go when you need them, the limitations of some of the off-the-shelf programming, and really, not that that’s bad, but it has a limit for certain audiences and where to position that service in your organization.

And we can talk about some of the systemic patterns. We’ve talked about some of the systemic patterns hidden across the individual engagements versus being able to look at the organization globally. So there’s a lot there, but it’s also a really important opportunity for talent executives who sometimes don’t always have the right seat at the table.

So these are some of the things to be thinking about to really advocate for the right services in the right way at the right time for executive development. What else would you add, Teagan, to close this out?

Tegan Trovato

You know, I just want to put a punctuation point on this person, this role inside of organizations. If you have talent development leaders internally who get this right to really understand how to have enough puzzle pieces in their box to put together a lot of just-in-time interventions for the organization, they are largely empowered to transform your organization while it is transforming. So organizations are transforming and constantly changing, but a good talent development leader knows how to deploy the right tools for an executive to maximize that business challenge as their growth.

And there are a lot of great talent development leaders and chief HR officers who understand how to do that. And I just think, if you’re a CEO or exec team member listening, to just leave this with an appreciation of the challenge, that those who are responsible for creating learning opportunities in your organization have. They are often not the keepers of the cash or the budget. They have to do a whole lot with very little.

And then we have really high expectations and expensive taste. So it’s a tough role. And so I think when you can have direct and kind conversations with your talent leaders about what you need, it’s a win for them.

They will appreciate it. And then likewise, if you’re a talent development leader listening, really getting your CEO engaged in executive development, educating them because most of them are not natural talent developers. I hate to say it, but they’re not.

They would own it or they don’t enjoy it. They don’t have the time. If you can help make them look good and help just take that lift off their plate, you will win.

You will be a trusted advisor on talent. So I would encourage you to really try to get that seat at the table on that topic and help them understand the business impacts of executive development. So there’s a lot of last parting words, Maggie, but it’s a rich topic.

Maggie Gough

Yeah, I think they were well said and I think that it really brings this home in a succinct way. So to that end, thank you all for listening and we’ll catch you on the next one.

Tegan Trovato

Thanks, Maggie. As you reflect on your own development, remember that senior leader growth is nuanced work. It requires partners who understand the realities of executive life, who can adapt their approach to the moment you’re in, and who can see both the individual and the system you operate within. Don’t settle for frameworks that oversimplify your challenges or partners who treat all executives the same.

Choose those who bring depth, experience, and the ability to help you think, decide, and lead at a higher altitude. When you choose well, your development becomes not just a personal win, but a strategic advantage for your entire organization.