Essays on the psychology of senior leadership, from a board-certified psychiatrist and executive coach. Written for the executives who carry weight they rarely get to set down.
The term covers everything from a weekly phone call with a retired CEO to a structured clinical engagement. Here is a precise definition, and the boundaries that make it useful.
Read the essay →Most coaches are trained to improve performance. A clinician is trained to notice when the performance problem is a symptom. That difference decides whether months of work land on the right target.
The three are routinely confused, and the confusion is expensive. A simple test tells them apart: who is the expert on the problem, and who is the subject of the work.
The industry quotes returns of five to seven times the fee. The studies behind those figures would not survive a medical journal. Here is how to evaluate coaching without either the hype or the cynicism.
Leaders considering coaching rarely know what the hour actually contains. Here is the shape of a serious engagement from the first conversation to the last, with nothing mysterious left in it.
Three months, six, twelve, or indefinitely: the length of an engagement should follow from the problem, not from a package. Here is what actually determines it.
Most leaders engage a coach a year or two later than they should have, after the pattern has cost something. These are the signals that it is time, and the cases where it is not.
When the organization pays, the leader, the sponsor, and the coach each have different ideas about what is owed to whom. The engagement works only when that is settled in writing before the first session.
The 360 is the most common assessment in executive coaching and the most misread. It measures how a leader lands, not who they are, and the gap between the two is where the work lives.
Most of my practice now happens by video, and the outcomes have not suffered. But something is different, and it is worth being precise about what.
Most chief executives treat the board as an audience or a threat. Neither produces a relationship that holds when the company hits real difficulty. Here is what does.
A leadership team without visible conflict is rarely harmonious. More often, disagreement has simply moved somewhere the chief executive can no longer see it.
Most leaders know what they need to say. What stops them is what the conversation does to their own nervous system, and that is the part almost no one prepares for.
Delegation advice treats the problem as a matter of technique. For most senior leaders it is a matter of what letting go feels like, and that is where the work has to happen.
The move from vice president to the C-suite is not a bigger version of the job you have. It is a different job, and the people who make it usually start doing that job before they hold the title.
The first-time CEO usually prepares for the strategy and the operating load. What catches most of them off guard is how differently the world behaves toward the person at the top.
Executive presence is usually described as a matter of polish. In my experience it has much more to do with what is happening inside a leader when the room becomes difficult.
Most change efforts are designed as if people were components to be reconfigured. Change is a psychological event before it is an operational one.
For senior leaders, the problem is seldom time at home. It is presence, and the people closest to them absorb its absence long before the executive notices.
Many executives feel stuck not because they have failed but because they have arrived. The goal that organized a career is gone, and something has gone quiet.
Executive coaching rates range from a few hundred dollars an hour to several thousand. Here is what sits behind those numbers and how a senior leader should evaluate the spend.
The research on executive coaching is more encouraging than skeptics assume and weaker than the industry implies. What matters most is what predicts a good outcome.
Directors are trained to read results. Very few are trained to read the person producing them, and the gap between the two is where most leadership failures incubate.
The fusion of founder and company produces the conviction that builds something from nothing. It also produces a specific and predictable set of failures.
High standards and perfectionism look identical from the outside and function completely differently from the inside. The distinction determines whether the trait builds a career or slowly dismantles one.
Organizations prepare leaders for the mechanics of a workforce reduction and almost never for what conducting one does to the person who has to do it.
Most executives who drink are not in trouble. Almost all of them are paying a performance cost they have not measured, because the mechanism is invisible from the inside.
Many senior leaders reach the C-suite with undiagnosed ADHD, carried there by intelligence and compensation. The scaffolding usually fails at a predictable point.
Grief is a physiological event with measurable effects on cognition, and organizations schedule three days for it. What senior leaders need to know about leading through loss.
Coaching confidentiality is a professional commitment, not a legal privilege. The difference matters most in exactly the situations where a leader most needs to speak freely.
What executive burnout looks like beneath the surface, and why the earliest signs are physiological and cognitive long before they become behavioral.
Why the isolation that comes with the top job is not a personality issue but a structural and clinical risk with real consequences for judgment and health.
An honest account of how executive coaching and therapy differ, where they overlap, and how to tell which one your situation actually calls for.
The neuroscience of why a leader's tenth good decision is harder than their first, and what senior leaders can do to protect the quality of their judgment.
Why the sleep most executives treat as expendable is, clinically, the single most reliable lever for sharper judgment and steadier leadership.
Resilience is not the ability to absorb unlimited strain without complaint. The leaders who treat it that way are the ones most likely to break.
Imposter feelings rarely disappear with success; they often sharpen. A clinician's guide to understanding and working with them at the highest levels.
The first 90 days of an executive role reward structured observation over early action, and a clinical lens shows leaders how to read the system before changing it.
High-functioning anxiety drives the behaviors organizations reward, which is exactly why it goes unrecognized and unaddressed in senior leaders.
A scoreable evaluation instrument for senior leaders: fifteen criteria across five sections, five automatic disqualifiers, and the six questions that separate a prepared practitioner from a persuasive one.
A free, confidential 30-minute consultation with Dr. Collier to talk through what you are facing and whether coaching fits.