Executive Coaching
One-to-one coaching for founders, CEOs, and senior executives at a threshold: a new role, a company that has outgrown the way it is led, a success that no longer feels like the point.
Good at what you do. That’s rarely the question.
Most of the leaders I coach have mastered the outer game. The questions that bring them to me are different ones: what their success is for, what it is costing them, and what the next stage asks of them that the last one didn’t.
They are founders and CEOs in a scale-up or a transition; senior executives facing an identity shift, a succession, or burnout; partners and managing directors in professional services rethinking their next chapter; and leaders who feel the pull toward a different way of leading.
You may recognize this.
- The calendar is full, and the decision that matters most keeps moving to next week.
- You make the right call in the room and replay it at night.
- What made you successful has started to get in the way, and you can see it before anyone says it.
- You’re stepping into a role you wanted for years, and you can’t yet say who it asks you to become.
- The company gets your best hours. The people closest to you get what’s left.
- Everyone around you needs an answer from you, and there’s no one you can think out loud with.
Three kinds of attention in one conversation.
The work usually starts with something concrete: a decision, a conflict, a role, a pattern you keep running into. From there it goes where it needs to.
Strategic sparring. I have sat on both sides of the table: as a strategy consultant advising leadership teams, and as a founder and interim COO and CTO who had to live with the decisions. We can work on the actual decision, the board paper, the organization chart, not only on how you feel about them.
Somatic work. Polyvagal-informed practice to regulate your nervous system, keep your clarity under pressure, and lead from calm rather than reactivity. Informed by Internal Family Systems.
Dialectical reflection. Holding two truths without collapsing them: growth and care, speed and depth, the company and the life. The aim is not a compromise but a synthesis you can act on.
When expertise gets cheap.
Many of the leaders I coach built their careers on knowing more than the people around them. AI is making that kind of knowing cheap, and that raises questions that belong in coaching rather than in an IT project. What does your authority rest on when anyone on your team can get a competent analysis in a minute? Which parts of your work do you want to keep doing yourself? And how do you decide when the machine’s answer is plausible and your instinct disagrees?
I build with AI myself, so we can talk about it concretely. The coaching stays about you: your judgment, your role, and what you want your work to be for.
How it works
- Length
- Three, six, or twelve months, or as needed
- Rhythm
- Sessions of 90 minutes every two to three weeks, with short check-ins between when a decision can’t wait
- Where
- Berlin in person, or by video
- Beginning
- A first conversation, then a longer opening session in which we agree what the coaching is for
- Ending
- When you can do on your own what we did together. We name the signs at the start.
- When your company pays
- We agree the goals with your sponsor at the start. What we discuss in sessions stays between us.
What changes
Decisions you can stand behind. A nervous system that holds under pressure. A clearer sense of what your leadership is for, and the courage to act on it.
The next stage asks something different of you. Let’s find out what.
or write to lennart@lennarthennig.com