Executive Coaching - Who Does The Leader Go to for Advice?

The more senior you become, the fewer people you can talk to openly.

Your employees expect you to have answers. Your colleagues have their own perspectives. Your CEO has expectations. Your Board has priorities. And there are some conversations that simply aren’t appropriate to have with people inside your organisation.

Yet senior leaders still experience uncertainty.

You still have difficult decisions to make, relationships that aren’t working as well as they should, conversations you would rather not have and moments when you wonder whether you’re approaching something in the right way.

Sometimes you don’t need someone to give you the answer.

You need somewhere confidential to think.

Executive coaching with the Australasian Leadership Institute provides senior leaders with an independent and confidential environment to challenge assumptions, explore difficult situations, prepare for important conversations and become more effective in the way they lead.

Where Leaders Go For Advice.

You Spend Your Working Life Helping Other People Solve Their Problems

Where Do You Go With Yours?

Leadership can become surprisingly isolating as responsibility increases.

When you’re managing a team, there are usually people around you who understand the detail of what you’re dealing with.

At executive level, that changes.

Information becomes more sensitive. Decisions have greater consequences. Relationships become more complex. Organisational politics become more significant and the number of people with whom you can speak completely openly becomes smaller.

You may not need another opinion from someone inside the organisation.

You may need an independent perspective from someone who understands leadership but has no personal stake in the decision you make.

That’s one of the most valuable roles executive coaching can play.

Executive Coaching Isn’t About Someone Telling You How to Lead

If you’ve reached senior leadership, you already have considerable knowledge and experience.

You don’t need someone sitting opposite you pretending they have all the answers.

Effective executive coaching creates something different.

It gives you space to slow down and examine what’s actually happening.

To test your assumptions.

To consider perspectives you may have overlooked.

To identify what is within your control.

To challenge the story you may be telling yourself about a situation.

And sometimes to hear a question that makes you reconsider the problem entirely.

A good executive coach shouldn’t simply agree with you.

They should help you think better.

What Are You Dealing With Right Now?

You don’t need to have a defined leadership-development objective before starting executive coaching.

Sometimes the starting point is simply something happening at work that you need to think through.

You may have recently stepped into an executive role and discovered that leading at this level is very different from leading a department.

Perhaps you’re dealing with a difficult CEO, Board member, colleague or stakeholder.

You may need to have a conversation where the consequences of getting it wrong are significant.

Perhaps you’ve received feedback that has challenged the way you see yourself as a leader.

You might be leading organisational change, restructuring a team or dealing with resistance to an important decision.

Maybe you’re preparing for a CEO or senior executive interview.

Perhaps you’re struggling with confidence or experiencing self-doubt despite having considerable evidence that you’re capable.

You may be considering your next career move.

Or perhaps nothing is obviously wrong.

You simply know that you are capable of becoming a better leader.

We can start there.

A Confidential Thinking Partner

One of the most valuable aspects of executive coaching is independence.

Your coach isn’t your manager.

They don’t report to you.

They aren’t competing with you.

They aren’t involved in the politics of your organisation and they don’t have a personal interest in which option you choose.

That creates a different kind of conversation.

You can say what you’re actually thinking.

You can explore ideas before they are fully formed.

You can admit uncertainty without worrying about how it might be perceived.

You can examine mistakes without needing to defend them.

And you can challenge your own thinking before someone else has to.

Confidentiality creates the space for candour.

Candour creates the opportunity for better thinking.

Three Ways We Can Work Together

Different situations require different levels of support.

That’s why executive coaching with the Australasian Leadership Institute doesn’t begin by assuming everyone needs exactly the same programme.

Executive Strategy Session

When You Have Something Specific You Need to Work Through

Sometimes you don’t need an ongoing coaching programme.

You have something happening now.

An important decision.

A difficult conversation.

A challenging relationship.

A presentation to the Board.

A problem with your executive team.

An interview.

A piece of feedback you don’t know what to do with.

Or a situation where you’ve reached the point of thinking:

“I’m not sure what I should do next.”

An Executive Strategy Session provides a confidential conversation focused entirely on that situation.

The objective is to help you understand what’s happening, challenge your assumptions, explore your options and leave with greater clarity about what you are going to do next.

Executive Coaching Programme

When You Want to Become a More Effective Leader

For senior leaders wanting sustained development, executive coaching can take place over a series of individual sessions.

The focus is determined by you and the challenges you’re experiencing.

Depending on your role and objectives, coaching may explore areas such as:

leadership style and impact;

executive presence;

emotional intelligence;

strategic thinking;

confidence and self-doubt;

leading other leaders;

delegation and accountability;

influencing senior stakeholders;

managing upwards;

difficult conversations;

decision-making;

organisational politics;

leading through change;

building high-performing executive teams;

career development;

and preparing for greater executive responsibility.

The objective isn’t to create a completely different version of you.

It’s to help you understand what already works, identify what may be limiting your effectiveness and expand the range of leadership behaviours available to you.

Preparing for CEO and Executive Roles

Moving into executive leadership requires more than simply doing a larger version of your previous job.

The expectations change.

You are increasingly required to think beyond your own function, understand the organisation as a whole, influence across complex stakeholder relationships and demonstrate strategic rather than purely operational leadership.

Executive coaching can support leaders preparing for this transition.

It can also help senior leaders preparing for CEO and executive interviews.

At this level, interview preparation isn’t simply about predicting questions and rehearsing answers.

Boards and selection panels want to understand how you think.

What do you believe leadership means?

How do you make difficult decisions?

How do you build culture?

How do you deal with disagreement?

How do you balance immediate performance with long-term organisational needs?

How do you lead people who are themselves experienced leaders?

Coaching provides an opportunity to clarify your leadership philosophy, examine the evidence from your career and become more confident articulating the kind of executive leader you are capable of becoming.

Executive Coaching for Organisations

Supporting the Leaders You Want to Keep and Develop

Executive coaching can also be commissioned by organisations as part of leadership development, succession planning or support for a senior employee moving into greater responsibility.

Perhaps you’ve recently promoted someone into an executive role.

You may have a high-performing senior manager who has the potential to take the next step.

An executive may have received feedback identifying particular development areas.

Perhaps organisational change has significantly increased the complexity of someone’s role.

Or you may simply recognise that one of your most important leaders would benefit from having access to an experienced, independent coach.

Where coaching is sponsored by an organisation, we can work with the leader and sponsoring organisation to establish appropriate development objectives while maintaining the confidentiality necessary for an effective coaching relationship.

The organisation can support the development without sitting inside the coaching conversation.

Senior Leadership Requires Different Skills

What gets someone promoted isn’t always what makes them successful at the next level.

Many executives reach senior positions because they are exceptionally good at something.

They understand their profession.

They deliver.

They solve problems.

They take responsibility.

These strengths matter.

But as responsibility increases, leadership increasingly becomes less about what you personally can do and more about what you can enable other people to do.

Your impact becomes increasingly dependent on your ability to influence, create clarity, develop other leaders, make good decisions with incomplete information and understand how your behaviour affects the wider organisation.

That transition can be difficult precisely because the behaviours that created previous success can sometimes become the behaviours that limit future success.

Executive coaching creates the opportunity to examine that transition deliberately.

Why Work With Mark Wager?

Leadership Experience Matters

Executive coaching requires more than knowledge of coaching techniques.

Senior leaders need someone who understands the realities of leadership.

Mark Wager is the Chief Leadership Coach at the Australasian Leadership Institute and brings more than three decades of leadership experience to his work with senior leaders and executives.

His approach combines established research in leadership, psychology and human behaviour with practical experience of the challenges leaders face in real organisations.

Mark has worked with leaders from organisations including the New Zealand Defence Force, Ministry of Justice, Department of Internal Affairs, ACC, Fisher & Paykel, St John, Red Cross, Barnardos, Weta Workshop, UNICEF and Amnesty International.

His coaching approach is practical, evidence-based and personal.

You won’t simply be told what you want to hear.

You will be listened to, challenged when appropriate and helped to examine the situation from perspectives you may not have previously considered.

Because the purpose of coaching isn’t to make every conversation comfortable.

It’s to make the conversation useful.

Executive Coaching That Fits Around Executive Life

Executive coaching is available throughout New Zealand and internationally via Zoom, allowing sessions to take place regardless of where you are based.

In-person coaching in Auckland can also be arranged where appropriate.

Sessions are individual and confidential.

The frequency and duration of the coaching relationship can be determined by what you need rather than forcing every leader into exactly the same structure.

For some leaders, the requirement may be a single Executive Strategy Session focused on an immediate issue.

For others, a series of coaching conversations provides the continuity needed for deeper leadership development.

The starting point is the problem you want to solve, not the package we want to sell.

You Don’t Need to Know Whether You Need an Executive Coach

Sometimes all you know is that something isn’t quite working.

You have a decision you keep revisiting.

A conversation you’re avoiding.

A relationship that’s taking too much of your energy.

A new role that’s stretching you.

An interview you want to prepare properly for.

Or perhaps you’re successful but increasingly conscious that the leadership challenges ahead of you will require something different from those you’ve already overcome.

You don’t need to diagnose the problem before contacting me.

Tell me what’s happening.

We can start with a confidential conversation and determine whether executive coaching would be useful.

Who Does the Leader Go to for Advice?

You spend much of your working life being the person other people come to for answers.

Sometimes leadership requires having somewhere you can go with the questions.

Talk to Mark About What’s Happening

Executive Coaching with the Australasian Leadership Institute

Where Leaders Go For Advice