A supervisory board that commissions coaching for its chief executive has already taken a decision. The only useful question is which one.
The request arrives with great courtesy. A call from the chair, a reference to the annual evaluation, a sentence about wanting to invest in someone the board rates highly. There is a budget line, already approved, and often a suggested shape (six sessions, sometimes ten) with a quiet preference that the work conclude before the year-end review. Everything in the framing is developmental. And somewhere in the second or third minute I find out whether this board wants its chief executive to grow, or wants a record that growth was offered.
I ask it directly, and it does not always go down well.
The two-tier board is not an administrative variation
Most of what is written about coaching chief executives comes out of the Anglo-American unitary board, and it does not transfer. There, the executives and the non-executives sit in one body, at one table, under one shared duty. The people who will assess the chief executive are also his colleagues; he is in the room while the room forms its view of him, and he can read a face and correct a misunderstanding. He is being judged, but he is judged by people sitting beside him.
In the Netherlands, in Germany, across most of continental Europe, the architecture is different in a way that changes the psychology entirely. The Raad van Bestuur manages. The Raad van Commissarissen supervises and advises, and where the structure regime applies it also appoints and dismisses the members of the executive board. Two bodies, two memberships, two sets of duties. Nobody sits in both. The chief executive attends the supervisory board by invitation and convention rather than by right: he presents, he answers, he is thanked. Then he leaves, and the most consequential part of the meeting begins after the door closes behind him.
Everyone in Dutch corporate life knows this. Few have thought about what it does to the man on the other side of the door.
The board holds the mandate and the chief executive is the client
Here is the conflict, stated plainly, because pretending it is not there is how these engagements go wrong.
The supervisory board commissions the work, signs the engagement letter and approves the invoice. It also holds the power to end the chief executive’s tenure. And the work is worth nothing unless that same chief executive can be genuinely unguarded: can say that he no longer believes in the strategy he defended eloquently three months ago, that he suspects one of his own executive board colleagues is working quietly against him, that some part of him wants to be released from the whole thing. None of those sentences can be spoken into a room that reports.
So the first thing I say, in the first meeting, with the chief executive present rather than in a private call beforehand, is that the party paying is not the client. The mandate belongs to the board. The work belongs to him. If those two facts cannot be held apart in writing and in practice, there is no engagement, only an expensive appearance of one.
Coaching as investment and coaching as documentation are different products
The tells are consistent enough that I now listen for them deliberately.
Coaching commissioned as investment is vague about outcomes and specific about support. The board is not certain what the work should address, and says so. The timeline is open. The chief executive knew about it before I did and has opinions about it, sometimes irritable ones, which is a good sign. The chair says some version of tell us what you need.
Coaching commissioned as documentation is specific about outcomes and vague about support. There is a list of behaviours to be corrected, carefully phrased. There is a schedule that terminates conveniently near an evaluation. There is a request, usually apologetic, for something in writing: a progress note to the remuneration committee, nothing formal, just a sense of how it is going. And sooner or later a particular phrase arrives, delivered as reassurance: we want to be able to say we have given him every chance.
The tell beneath all the others is simpler. If a supervisory board can tell me something about its chief executive that it has not been willing to tell him, the coaching is not the intervention. The telling is.
One clarification before I go further: the chief executive in these pages is a composite, and I write him as he. The pattern is not male-only.
A composite, assembled from several engagements and deliberately unidentifiable: a chair explains that the executive is technically outstanding but has lost the room, and that two supervisory directors have privately said they cannot see him leading the next phase. He asks whether coaching might help. I ask what the chief executive has been told. The answer is that the last evaluation noted communication as a development point. That gap, between what the board believes and what the man has been permitted to hear, is the problem in that company, and no programme of mine closes it.
I will not be the instrument of a managed exit
When a supervisory board has already lost confidence in its chief executive, coaching is not support. It is procedure wearing the clothes of support.
The motive is rarely cynical. The people involved are decent and conflict-averse in the ordinary human way, and removing a chief executive here is slow, public and expensive: notice terms, a shareholders’ meeting to manage, a works council that will have views, a successor who does not yet exist. Coaching feels humane and buys time. It also builds a file. Few boards consciously intend that, but the file is there afterwards all the same.
I decline these engagements, not on grounds of taste but because of what they do to the person at the centre of them. He opens up in good faith to a stranger the board has chosen, believing the room is his, while the decision about his future has already been taken elsewhere. The exit happens anyway, months later and more expensively, with the added injury that he was studied while he was being dismantled. And something quieter breaks: the next time anyone offers him a confidential room, he will know what those rooms are for.
What I offer instead is one of two things. I will help the chair prepare and hold the conversation the board has been avoiding, not to soften it, but to make it clear and survivable. Or I will work with the chief executive afterwards, engaged and paid by him personally, with no line back to the board at all. That second option is frequently where the real work of a career gets done. It is simply not what the board came to buy.
The reporting line has to be built before the first session
Most of what goes wrong is decided in the contracting, which is why the terms are written where all three parties can see them. The way an engagement is constructed at the outset determines what is possible inside it eighteen months later.
Three facts travel back to the supervisory board and no others: that the engagement has begun, that it continues at the agreed rhythm, and that it has ended. No themes, no content, no adjectives, and in particular nothing about progress; progress is an assessment, assessment is a different product with a different ethic, and a board that wants one should commission it openly from someone else rather than smuggle it out of a coaching room.
The objectives are set by the chief executive. The board may state once, at the start and in his presence, what it hopes the work will serve. Then it stops, permanently. If the board wants an account of his development, he writes it himself, to the chair or the remuneration committee, and I see it only if he chooses to show me. He may end the engagement at any time without explaining himself, and that ending is reportable as nothing more than the word ended.
Then one rule that prevents most of the rest: there is no conversation about the chief executive in which the chief executive is not present. The chair will telephone, usually with genuine concern and something he thinks I ought to know, and my answer is that I would be glad to meet the two of them together. Held without exception, that sentence protects the work better than any confidentiality clause ever drafted. Boards that understand how power actually moves around a boardroom accept it quickly; they see that they are being protected too, from knowing things they would then be obliged to act upon.
If a supervisory board cannot accept those terms, the refusal is not an obstacle to the engagement. It is information about what the engagement was for.
The loneliness of the two-tier chief executive has no natural remedy
Look at where this person actually stands. Below him sit the members of the executive board, colleagues in law and subordinates in practice: he shapes their objectives, he has a hand in their remuneration, he will influence which of them is considered when his own succession is discussed. Nothing said to him at that table is entirely free. Above him sits the supervisory board, which assesses him, sets his pay and holds his appointment. Nothing he says to that body is free either. He has no peers in either direction. Unlike his counterpart in a unitary board, he cannot sit among his governors and be one of them for an hour.
The chair is the closest thing to a confidant the structure permits, and the chair also leads his evaluation and would, if it came to it, ask for his resignation. Most chief executives understand this and calibrate accordingly. They become extremely good at one register: measured, prepared, unbothered, three moves ahead. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth year a number of them find they can no longer locate the other version of themselves, and that the register has quietly become the personality. The founder who has accepted a supervisory board over a company he built carries a sharper form of this again, for reasons I have set out in writing about what makes handing over so hard for the person who started it.
This is the need a properly constructed engagement meets. Not the correction of a behaviour flagged in an evaluation. One room, unpoliced, in which a man governed by a body he can never belong to thinks out loud without calculating the consequence of every sentence.
The best time to commission this is when nothing is wrong
Timing carries meaning inside a two-tier structure, and everybody reads it. Coaching that arrives in the first months of an appointment is understood throughout the organisation as confidence. The same coaching arriving in month thirty, shortly after a difficult evaluation, is understood as a verdict, by the chief executive, by his executive board colleagues, and eventually by everyone else, because these things never stay quiet.
The boards that handle this well build it into the appointment itself and set the reporting terms then, calmly, while nothing is at stake in them. That is also the honest version of the case a board makes for the expenditure: not repair, but the recognition that the person carrying the heaviest single load in the organisation has been given nowhere to put it.
A supervisory board that commissions coaching is not buying a report, and should not want one. It is buying one hour in which its chief executive does not have to be the chief executive. The moment that hour has a window into the board, it stops being that hour. No amount of goodwill in the engagement letter will put it back.