What Executive Coaching Can't Fix

Coaching accelerates people. It doesn't repair them. Corporations keep confusing the two. 

Michael went quiet in the middle of a sentence.

We were deep into a coaching session, talking through an upcoming quarterly review, when his face changed. When he spoke again, it was through tears. There were things happening in his life, he said. Trauma he didn't feel comfortable talking about. It was disrupting him badly, he was afraid it was bleeding into his work, and he didn'tknow what to do about it.

I did the only useful things available. I gave him room to cry and to say what he needed to say. Which wasn't much, honestly. He really didn't want to share the details. I told him I would never pry, and that if he ever felt comfortable sharing what was behind the emotion, I would be there. And I told him something every executive coach should be able to say out loud: I'm not a therapist. I'm not qualified as one.

I spent 26 years in corporate leadership, including as CFO of Microsoft North America, and I've spent nearly adecade coaching senior executives at large and small organizations. Moments like that one have taught me more about my profession than anything else. And one of the most important lessons is what coaching can't fix.

The Session The Corporation Never Saw

What happened next? Nothing the company could see.

My confidentiality policy is strict. I never share what a client tells me with anyone, including HR or the client's manager, unless the client expressly asks me to. Michael never asked. So the corporation kept paying for coaching while the thing actually disrupting their executive the most sat outside the engagement's scope. I helped him as far as coaching is equipped, and the only two who knew the intervention was misaligned were the two of us on the calls.

Nobody misbehaved in that story. Not the client, the sponsor or the coach. That's what makes it worth writing about: the problem is structural, and it starts with misunderstanding what coaching is.

Coaching Was Never Meant To Fix People

Corporations routinely hand coaches what I think of as repair tickets. There's an executive who, if only we could fix the temper, the insecurity, the sharp elbows, would be great. Hire a coach.

But coaching was never designed for fixing. The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as a partnership that inspires clients to "maximize their personal and professional potential." Optimization, not remediation. Coaching helps capable people see themselves clearly and make real progress on strengths as well as growth areas. In my practice, that means stakeholder interviews, candid feedback and the slow work of behavior change. I've written about what that looks like when it works.

It can't reach deep-seated psychological wounds. When a client's struggles are rooted in trauma or suffering that belongs in clinical hands, coaching is the wrong approach. And a coach who pretends otherwise is a hazard. Psychologist Steven Berglas wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2002 that coaches without psychological training can make an executive's situation worse by working on symptoms whose roots they don't understand, and that companies should consider psychotherapeutic help when difficulties are stubborn or severe. Two decades on, judging by the repair tickets, that caution mostly hasn't landed.

The therapy boundary is the starkest example, but the repair-ticket mistake has siblings. Coaching can't fix the executive who performs engagement while wanting to change nothing. It can't fix the client who commits and recommits but never actually shows up. It can't fix a problem that lives outside the person, like an abusive boss relationship or a role that's simply the wrong fit. And it can't fix a values mismatch between an executive and a company. Coaching can surface the mismatch, but the remedy is a decision, not a development plan.

The Diagnostic Problem Nobody Owns

When misaligned engagements wind down, everyone walks away a bit disappointed: the corporation in the results, sometimes the client too. The uncomfortable truth is that it's no one's fault. Not the client's, the coach's or the profession's. It's the predictable outcome of prescribing before diagnosing.

I have real sympathy for the people doing the prescribing. HR leaders and managers are often unable to see what'sactually needed, because the real need lives in personal territory they shouldn't access and aren't qualified to assess. Berglas argued for a psychological evaluation before coaching begins. Maybe. But US law leans the other way: under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the EEOC allows employers to require a medical examination of an employee, which can include psychological evaluations, only when job-related and consistent with business necessity. To be fair, I'm not sure the diagnosis can ever fully belong to the corporation. Important aspects may sit outside any employer's purview. I don't know who should own it, and after a decade inside these engagements, I'm suspicious of anyone who claims to.

A few honest questions before an engagement starts would prevent most of the mismatches I've seen, though.

The Question To Ask Before Hiring A Coach

If you're thinking of sponsoring coaching for one of your leaders, or considering it for yourself, ask this first: is this a development problem, or something else wearing a development problem's clothes? A rough test: a development problem shows up in stakeholder feedback, stays specific to work and has a nameable trigger, like a promotion or new scope. The other kind follows the person across contexts and years and doesn't budge under behavior tools. A skilled coach helps you make the call. In practice, that's an intake that asks how long the pattern has existed, where else it shows up and what's been tried, and a coach willing to recommend a therapist and walk away from the fee. Sometimes the most valuable thing a coach can say in the first conversation is "This isn't a coaching challenge."

And if you're an executive carrying something heavy into your work, hear the second half of what I told Michael. Wanting help isn't a weakness. But choosing the wrong help, or letting your company choose the wrong help, is a mistake. A coach can stand beside you. But for some wounds, only a therapist can do the real work.

Your go-do this week: pick one coaching engagement you're thinking of sponsoring, or the one you're considering foryourself, and write down in a single sentence the problem that needs solving. If your sentence starts with "fix," stop. You're holding a repair ticket. Coaching develops people. It has never once fixed one.

The opening vignette is a composite drawn from multiple engagements. Details have been changed to protect privacy.