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Six Signs It May Be Time to Consider Executive Coaching

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Very few leaders wake up one morning and decide they need a coach. It's usually something that builds quietly over months or possibly a feeling that the way you've always worked is no longer quite enough for the role you're in now. Recognising that is a sign of good judgement rather than weakness, and there's plenty that can help, from a trusted peer to a good mentor to a candid conversation with your CEO or board. Coaching is one of the options, and these are the six signs that may help you decide if it might be worth exploring.

Your career feels as though it's stalled

You've delivered results, earned respect and carried more than your fair share, yet the next step never seems to arrive. In my experience, when progress plateaus it's rarely down to capability. More often it's a matter of perspective, positioning or a habit that served you well earlier in your career and now holds you back without you noticing. Feedback from people you trust can shed some light on this, and coaching gives you dedicated time to look at it properly and shape a plan for moving forward.

You're overwhelmed by the weight of responsibility

If your days are filled with decisions only you seem able to make, and you're finishing the week more depleted than accomplished, something probably needs to shift. Sometimes the answer is a better team structure or a change in priorities, and sometimes it's about how you delegate and how you handle pressure. Coaching helps you work out which it is, so your energy goes into the work that genuinely moves the business forward.

Decisions are taking longer than they should

Perhaps you find yourself going back over choices you'd once have made with ease, or holding off because the stakes feel so high. A thinking partner who understands commercial pressure can help you test your reasoning, spot the assumptions you're making and reach a decision you're comfortable standing behind. Talking it through with a colleague can work well too, though it isn't always possible when the decision involves the people you work with.

Your team dynamics feel strained

Tension in a team can be subtle at first, showing up as guarded conversations, slower collaboration or a sense that people aren't quite saying what they mean. A mentor who's been through something similar can offer perspective, and coaching adds to that by helping you understand your own part in the dynamic, communicate with greater clarity and address conflict early, so people feel able to do their best work.

You're leading through significant change

Whether it's a restructure, a merger, a new market or a change in your own role, periods of transition ask a great deal of leaders, because you're expected to steady everyone else while making sense of it yourself. Good habits around rest and exercise help enormously, as do people around you who'll be honest with you. Coaching offers a space to plan how you'll bring people with you, manage the pace of change and keep morale up when it would be easy for it to slip.

You simply want more from your leadership and your life

Sometimes there's no crisis at all, just a sense that you're capable of more or that you'd like your work to feel more fulfilling. That's a perfectly good reason to invest in yourself, and many of the leaders I work with tell me they wish they'd started sooner. The benefits tend to reach well beyond the boardroom, into how you spend your time and energy outside of work too.

I work with leaders online which makes it much easier to fit meaningful support around a busy diary, and every conversation is shaped around your goals and your pace. If you recognise yourself in any of these signs, you don't have to work it out alone.

�� Ready to explore executive coaching? Connect with Caroline for a personalised session today.

The Confidence Comes After

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 16:01:05 GMT

At 22 I joined one of the world's largest retailers as a Graduate Area Manager, made Director at 25, Group Director at 30, and Managing Director at 39, running a $450m business with 850 people in it.

People ask how that happened and I understand why, because laid out like that it looks a great deal like a plan. It wasn't, but there were habits and choices that kept repeating, and with enough distance behind me I can finally see them clearly enough to talk about them.

Six things that actually made the difference

1. I worked extremely hard.

I'll say this plainly, because I don't think it's optional and I also don't think it's the whole story. I put in the hours, I gave up weekends, evenings and a good deal of my social life, and in return I built a reputation for delivering, which people noticed.

It wasn't sustainable forever and it isn't the part I'd tell anyone to copy without thinking carefully about it first, but there's genuinely no substitute for being the person who does what they said they'd do.

2. I said yes before I felt ready.

Every promotion I ever took came before I believed I was qualified for it, without a single exception, and I learned to work things out on the way up rather than before I started. That isn't recklessness so much as an understanding that "ready" was never a state I was going to arrive at, because it's a story you tell yourself afterwards, once it's gone well.

3. I did the things that frightened me.

Board presentations, international meetings and multimillion-dollar supplier negotiations, all of which I felt the fear about each time and did anyway. That's where confidence actually comes from, not from knowing but from doing.

4. I focused on people, not only performance.

I cared about my teams, I listened to them, I developed them and I made a point of celebrating what they achieved, which built trust. Trust is what makes people want to work for you again, and to tell other people that they would, and careers are made in that second part far more often than anyone admits.

5. I spoke up.

I had a view and I leaned into healthy debate, and I didn't simply agree with people more senior than me even when agreeing would have been considerably easier and more comfortable. Respectful challenge got me noticed, and silence never would have.

6. I learned to lead through others.

You can't scale by doing, you can only scale by building capability in other people, and that's the point at which leadership becomes real rather than performative. It's also the single hardest transition most senior leaders ever make.

The thing I'd add now, that I couldn't see then

If I'd written that list at 39 I'd have stopped there, and it would have been a good list. It's still true. But I've spent the years since sitting with senior leaders who did all six of those things, arrived somewhere significant, and then found something waiting for them that they hadn't expected.

Everything on that list was picked up rather than chosen.

I didn't decide to work at that intensity, I absorbed it from an environment where it was completely normal, and it worked, so over time it simply became who I was. I didn't decide to be the person who challenges upward either, because I did it once, it went well, and it turned into a habit long before I'd ever examined it.

None of that's a failure, it's simply how almost everyone ends up leading. You find out what works under pressure and then you keep doing it.

The problem is what happens later, because the habits that got you promoted at 25 aren't automatically the ones that should still be running you at 45, when the job is different and so are the stakes and so, frankly, is your life. Nobody ever tells you to go back and check.

Three states, not two

Most people assume there are two kinds of leader, the ones who've been trained and the ones who haven't, but I think there are three.

The first is picked up , where you learned it by watching, absorbing and surviving, which describes most leaders most of the time. The second is trained , where you were taught a way of doing it, and I was, because ALDI takes leadership development more seriously than almost any business I've come across and I'm very much a product of that. The third is designed , where you went back over the whole thing and decided, deliberately, what you actually want to keep.

Trained is not the same as chosen, and that distinction took me years to see clearly. It's the reason I do this work now.

So what do you do with this if you're on the way up?

If you're an emerging leader reading that six-point list and wondering how to get ahead, the honest answer is that the list still holds, so do the hard thing, say yes early, speak up, and build the people around you.

But add one thing to it that I didn't have, which is that every so often you stop and ask yourself which of the things you're doing you actually chose, and which you simply absorbed because they worked once. Keep the ones that still serve you, and let go of the ones running on evidence you gathered a decade ago.

That's a five-minute question you can ask yourself twice a year, and it's worth more than most leadership programmes.

And if you're waiting to feel ready

You'll be waiting a very long time, because confidence doesn't arrive first and then grant you permission to act. You act, it goes rather better than you feared, and the confidence assembles itself afterwards out of the evidence!

That's the whole mechanism, and it has never once worked the other way round for anyone I've met.

Say yes.

Twenty Years at ALDI Ruined My Tolerance for Most Corporate Advice

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 02:00:01 GMT

Twenty years at ALDI ruined my tolerance for most corporate advice

Not because I'm difficult, but because I spent two decades watching what actually moves a business and what only looks like it does, and once you've seen the difference clearly enough you can't go back to not seeing it.

The thing I noticed took me a long time to put into words, and it comes down to this: corporate language is almost never neutral, and it tells you quite precisely where a decision is being avoided. "Let's take this offline", "we need to socialise this first" and "can we circle back and pressure-test the thinking" all mean the same thing once you strip them back, which is that we're not deciding this today.

What it teaches you when you don't have the luxury

There was never room for any of that at ALDI, where we had four people doing the work of twelve and made decisions in hours rather than weeks, with everything stripped back to the customer, the numbers and the execution. No endless decks, and no pretending that complexity was the same thing as strategy.

That environment taught me four things I've never since had reason to revise.

The first is that speed beats perfection, because a good decision on Tuesday is worth more than a perfect one three weeks later, and those three weeks cost you something real even though the cost never appears on any report.

The second is that most decisions are reversible, so you may as well make them and move on. The small number that genuinely aren't reversible deserve every bit of care you can give them, which is precisely why you shouldn't be spending that care on the ones that are.

The third is that clarity is a competitive advantage rather than a communication style, and businesses that are clear will consistently outrun businesses that are clever.

The fourth is the one I still use most often, which is that if you can't explain your strategy in three sentences you don't have a strategy. You have a document.

What's actually sitting underneath the jargon

I want to be careful here, because this could easily read as a complaint about language and it isn't. The language is only ever a symptom, and what it tends to be a symptom of is one of three things.

Sometimes it's fear of accountability, because a decision that's never formally made is a decision nobody formally owns, and there's nothing to answer for later. Sometimes it's confusion dressed up as collaboration, where getting more people into the room feels like rigour when it's really the diffusion of a call somebody senior would rather not make on their own. And sometimes it's busy work presented as progress, where the deck gets built, the workshop gets run and the meeting recurs in everybody's calendar while every person involved works genuinely hard and nothing whatsoever moves.

I've watched capable people get buried under processes that served nobody, and I've sat in rooms where everyone nodded along to advice that sounded intelligent and changed absolutely nothing.

The part that's actually yours

This is the point where it stops being an observation about businesses in general and becomes a question about you, because two of the five things a senior leader is always setting show up directly in it.

The first is Decisions, and the question underneath it is: what still reaches me that shouldn't? Every decision that lands on your desk unnecessarily slows your team down twice over, once while it waits for you, and once because the person who should have made it never got the chance to.

The second is Pace, where the question is: what pressure am I transmitting? A leader who's visibly frustrated by delay tends to get speed from the people around them, whereas a leader who's visibly frustrated by mistakes gets caution instead, and caution turns into more meetings, which in turn turns into more careful language. The way your team talks to you is very often your own risk tolerance reflected back at you.

Most leaders never chose either of those deliberately. They inherited them from the first good boss they had, or the first bad one, or from whatever happened to get rewarded in the year they were promoted, and none of that is a criticism because it's how almost everyone ends up leading.

It's also why asking people to drop the jargon so rarely works. The words were never the problem, and changing them does nothing at all to the setting that produced them

Three things you could do this week

None of these needs anybody's permission.

Write your strategy in three sentences, not the deck version but the version you'd say out loud to a new starter in the lift. If you can't do it, that's great to know and fix first.

Look back at your last ten decisions, mark the ones that shouldn't have reached you, and then ask yourself honestly why they did. It usually comes down to one of two answers, which are that the person below you isn't clear they have the call, or that they're perfectly clear and don't trust you to back them if it goes wrong.

And the next time you hear one of those ‘corporate language’ phrases in a meeting, resist the urge to correct it and ask instead, plainly and with no edge in your voice, what decision are we actually avoiding here. Asked well, it's the most useful question available to you in most meetings.

One caveat

I've made all of this sound rather simpler than it is, because some complexity is genuinely real, and some decisions really do need more people, more time and more thought before anybody commits to them. The skill lies in telling those apart from the ones that are merely uncomfortable, and if you're honest with yourself you can usually feel the difference some time before you can articulate it.

The tightening in your jaw when somebody says "let's socialise this" is data worth trusting

Stop Performing Leadership. Start Practising It.

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 05:31:50 GMT

If I could speak to myself at 30, newly promoted into the senior role I'd badly wanted and utterly desperate to prove I deserved it, I'd say one thing, which is that you don't have to prove you belong.

I wouldn't have listened, and that's fine. I'd say it anyway.

What I was actually doing

I spent years trying to look polished, certain, and across absolutely everything. If somebody asked a question I couldn't answer I felt it as exposure rather than as a completely normal feature of a large job, and I prepared for meetings not so that I could think well in them but so that I wouldn't be caught out in them. I said yes to things I should have questioned, because questioning felt uncomfortably close to admitting I hadn't understood.

I thought leadership meant having all the answers, and it doesn't. It means asking better questions, listening properly, and being able to say "I'm not sure, let's find out" without treating those words as a confession.

Why this is a presence problem rather than a confidence one

Most people assume this is a confidence issue and I understand why, because it certainly feels like confidence. But confidence is an internal weather system and you can't instruct it, whereas presence is a setting, and settings can be chosen.

The question underneath ‘presence’ is simply what version of me do people get. If the answer is a polished one, mostly, but they can't quite predict which day, then people will manage you. They'll time their approaches, and they'll bring you problems only once those problems have been tidied up, which means they'll bring them late. If the answer is the same one consistently, including the version that says I don't know, then people bring you things early, and early problems are the cheap ones.

That's the commercial argument for dropping the performance, and it's a considerably stronger argument than "you'll feel better." Although you will feel better.

=Separating what you do from what you're worth

The other thing I'd tell ‘younger me’ is harder, and it's to separate your self-worth from your performance.

At 30 I couldn't have told you where the job stopped and I started, so a bad month didn't feel like a bad month, it felt like evidence.

But you are more than your KPIs. That sentence sounds like something on a poster in an HR corridor and I still mean it exactly as written, because if your sense of who you are moves up and down with a number that's partly determined by the weather, the exchange rate and a competitor's promotional calendar, then you've tied yourself to something that was never yours to control in the first place.

The leaders I know who are steadiest under pressure are not the ones who care least. They're the ones who care enormously about the work and have some ground to stand on that isn't the work.

The thing nobody tells you at 30

What makes all of this so hard to see at the time is that performing works, and that's the trap. It got me promoted, because looking certain, being across the detail and never visibly wobbling are genuinely rewarded, especially early on, so the performance isn't irrational at all. It's a strategy that pays.

It just stops paying at some point.

Somewhere between running a function and running a business, the job quietly changes from demonstrating competence to creating the conditions in which other people can be competent, and you can't do the second thing while still doing the first, because there isn't enough of you.

Most senior leaders I meet are still running a strategy that was optimised for a role they left years ago, and not because they're slow. Because it worked, and nothing ever forced them to go back and check.

What I'd actually ask you to consider

Not to be more vulnerable, and I'm certainly not asking you to open up in a leadership team meeting (unless you want to!). Something a good deal smaller than that.

The next time you don't know the answer, say so once, plainly, without the qualifying sentence you'd normally attach to soften it, and then watch what happens. What tends to happen is nothing bad, and something quite useful, because somebody else fills the gap, the conversation gets more honest, and you collect a small piece of evidence that the thing you've been protecting against doesn't actually occur.

Gather enough of those and the performance starts to look like an enormous amount of effort for very little return.

The moment I stopped performing leadership and started practising it, the job got easier and I got better at it, both at once. I'd recommend it, and I only wish it hadn't taken me quite so long.

Senior Leadership Isn't Lonely Because of People. It's Lonely Because of Accountability.

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:07 GMT

The hardest part of senior leadership was never the workload, and for me it was always the business of carrying decisions I couldn't fully share with anybody.

At senior level you're expected to decide with imperfect information, competing priorities and real consequences for people, for performance and for reputation. That's the job, and nobody hides it from you when you take it. What nobody mentions is where the doubt is supposed to go afterwards.

You can consult, and you still can't hand it over

You can workshop it with your team and sense-check it with peers, and you should do both, but the call still sits with you, and the further up you go the fewer places there are to put the second-guessing.

Your team can't carry it, because they need you steady, and telling them you're unsure about the restructure you've just announced does them no favours at all. Your peers are partly competitors, and even the good ones are quietly managing their own version of the same thing. Your boss wants to see judgement rather than the working out. Your partner at home loves you but wasn't in the room and can't hold the commercial detail.

So it goes nowhere, and it sits. So whilst you may look confident on the outside, on the inside it often feels like responsibility with no release valve.

This is not a capability problem

I want to be very clear about this, because most senior leaders assume the opposite. If you're carrying this, it doesn't mean you're struggling with the role, it means you're human, in a job that asks a great deal of you and offers almost no space in which to process any of it.

The leaders I coach are, without exception, good at what they do, and that's precisely why they're where they are. What was missing was never skill, it was somewhere to think.

The gap nobody warns you about

There's a gap that opens up in senior roles and almost nobody names it, which is that you have more consequential decisions than at any previous point in your career and less protected thinking time than at any previous point in your career. Those two lines cross somewhere around the level you're at now, and they don't uncross afterwards.

That's the gap, and it has nothing to do with intelligence, resolve or experience. It's a structural absence of protected space in which to actually choose, which matters more than it sounds, because when there's no space to choose the pressure chooses for you.

You revert to defaults. The way you handled the last difficult conversation becomes the way you handle this one, because there was no moment in the week where deciding was even possible. Your standards drift by increments you'd never have approved of individually, and you transmit an urgency you never intended to transmit. It can be really hard to catch these subtle moments and decisions.

What the drift actually looks like

It can be one rushed decision, one difficult conversation postponed because the timing never quite felt right. One more problem solved personally instead of delegated, because solving it yourself takes eleven minutes and coaching somebody else through it takes an hour you genuinely don't have. One more week spent reacting rather than thinking.

Six months of that and you're leading in a way you never chose. Simply on autopilot.

And your team is learning how to lead by watching you, not from what you say about leadership but from what you do at four o'clock on a rough Thursday.

Naming it is the first useful thing

I said in the original version of this piece on LinkedIn that naming it matters more than pretending it isn't there, and I still think that's the most important line.

There is a particular kind of relief in discovering that the thing you assumed was a private inadequacy is actually a structural feature of the job you hold. Most of the senior leaders I speak to have never said any of this out loud to another person. Not once. They assume everyone else has it handled.

They don't. You are describing the standard condition of the role.

What you can do about it

There are three things worth trying, in increasing order of effort.

The first is to say it to one person, not in order to solve it but simply to stop it being a secret. The relief is wildly disproportionate to the effort involved, and it's the only item on this list that costs you nothing.

The second is to protect one hour and then defend it the way you'd defend a board meeting. What am I actually optimising for, what am I avoiding, and what did I decide by default this month. Most leaders find this hour is the first thing to go when things get busy, which is exactly backwards.

The third is to get a thinking partner who has been in the room, meaning somebody with no stake in your organisation's politics, no agenda about your next move, and enough commercial experience that you don't spend the first twenty minutes explaining the context.

That last one is the work I do, so read it with appropriate scepticism! The underlying point stands regardless of who you get it from, which is that the doubt needs somewhere to go, and the higher you climb the more deliberately you have to build that somewhere, because it will not appear on its own.

The part worth remembering

The loneliness of senior leadership isn't about people, and most of the leaders I know are surrounded by people they genuinely like. It's about accountability, and about being the one place where it stops.

That's real, it's not a sign that anything has gone wrong, and it's far more common than the polished exteriors around you would ever suggest.

You're not the only one in the building carrying it. You're just the only one who knows you are.

Twenty Years, Twenty Lessons: the Five Things They All Come Back To

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 02:07:15 GMT

Twenty Years, Twenty Lessons: the Five Things They All Come Back To

I joined ALDI at 22 and left twenty years later as Managing Director in Australia, and most of what I know about leading I learned somewhere in between, usually by getting it wrong first.

A while ago I wrote down the twenty lessons that stuck. People liked the list when I shared it on LinkedIn and I understand why, because lists are satisfying in a way that arguments never quite manage. But a list isn't a way of leading, it's twenty things to remember, which means it can also be twenty things to forget.

Sorted properly, those twenty lessons collapse into five, and not five more things to remember either. They're five things you're already deciding as a leader, every single day, whether you've ever thought about them or not. I call them the Five Settings™, and they are Attention, Standards, Decisions, Pace and Presence.

Setting one: Attention

Ask yourself: What do I look at? Because whatever that is quietly becomes what your team works on.

Serving the customer comes first, internal or external, whatever your role happens to be, and never losing sight of what they actually need is the one thing that still holds when everything else around you is in flux.

Keeping it simple matters more than most leaders allow for, which means questioning complexity wherever it appears and saying no to good ideas when they take you off track. Saying no to bad ideas is easy and nobody needs coaching for it, whereas saying no to genuinely good ideas that just aren't yours to do this year is the actual skill, and it's considerably harder than it sounds.

And whether it's a people problem or a process one, always get to the root cause rather than putting a band-aid over it, because a patched problem doesn't disappear. It returns later, larger, and usually at the worst possible moment.

Your team works on what you ask about, not on what you announced at the offsite. If you ask about the numbers every Monday and about your people once a quarter, you've told them exactly what matters, whatever the values on the wall happen to say.

Setting two: Standards

Ask yourself: What do I accept? Because whatever you accept quietly becomes normal.

Hold yourself and your team to high standards and be excellent, not aspirationally but actually. Let people know where they stand, because certainty and clarity build confidence whereas ambiguity does precisely the opposite, and people will fill a vacuum with the worst available interpretation every time.

You'll make mistakes, so own them and come with a solution, since the owning is what earns you the right to expect the same from everybody else. Don't let people down, don't cancel meetings, and do what you said you'd do when you said you'd do it. That last one sounds small and it isn't, because it's the entire foundation on which people decide whether to believe anything else you tell them.

And don't be a dick! That one is pretty self-explanatory.

Your standard is not what you announced. It is the worst thing you have walked past, and everybody on your team knows what that is. Most of them could tell you the date.

Setting three: Decisions

Ask yourself: What still reaches me that shouldn't? Because the answer sets the speed of your team and the strength of your bench.

Empower your people, which mostly means not taking back the responsibility you hired them for in the first place, and then leave them to get on with their jobs without interfering. Those two are close enough that I nearly cut one of them, but the difference between delegating a task and actually letting go of it is where most leaders come unstuck, so it earns saying twice.

Never shirk your own responsibility either, and make the calls that genuinely are yours promptly, because empowerment isn't abdication and everything below you stalls while it waits.

When you're stuck, go to your peers first rather than straight to your boss. It builds your network, it develops your judgement, and it means the problems that do reach upward are the ones that genuinely need to.

Every decision that lands on your desk unnecessarily costs you twice over, once while it waits for you, and once because the person who should have made it didn't get the chance to grow from it.

Setting four: Pace

Ask yourself: What pressure am I transmitting? Because that determines whether your team can think, and whether they can tell you the truth.

Have a system and a process for everything, because it removes stress for everybody involved. Structure isn't bureaucracy, it's the thing that lets people stop improvising and start thinking.

Work really hard, because there's no substitute for it, though it's worth remembering that working hard and transmitting urgency are two entirely different things and only one of them is any use to the people around you.

Stay calm and considered in meetings, and channel a graceful swan. That one took me years to get anywhere near right, and it's probably the most valuable single habit on the whole list.

People can't think clearly and manage your mood at the same time, and whichever of those you make more urgent is the one they'll do.

Setting five: Presence

Ask yourself: What version of me do people get? Because that determines whether problems reach you early or late.

Get to know your people well, including what drives them, what motivates them and what matters to them, because everyone's reason for being there is different and assuming you already know is the fastest possible way to get it wrong.

Be kind, always, since people remember how you made them feel long after they've forgotten what you actually decided. Celebrate the wins as a team and give credit where it's due, constantly, because it costs nothing at all and it compounds.

Speak to everyone with the same respect you'd use with the CEO, whatever their title, because people are always watching how you treat those who can do nothing for you and it tells them more about you than any of your decisions ever will.

And have an opinion, along with the courage to share it respectfully, especially upward. Silence gets you nothing.

This is the most expensive setting to leave unchosen. If people can't predict which version of you they'll get on any given day, they'll bring you problems late, and late problems are the expensive ones.

Why sorting the list matters

Twenty lessons is a lot to follow, whereas five decisions is manageable, and you're already making all five of them right now, today, in whatever meeting you have after this one. You set them by what you ask about, what you walk past, what you keep on your own desk, what mood you carry into a room, and who you turn out to be on a rough Thursday afternoon.

So the question isn't whether you have settings, because you do. The question is whether you ever chose them.

Most leaders didn't. They picked them up from a good boss, or a bad one, or from whatever happened to get rewarded in the year they were promoted, and that isn't a failing so much as a description of how nearly everyone ends up leading.

Leading by default does not mean leading badly. It means leading in a way you never chose.

What to do with this

Take the five headings and answer each question honestly, not with what you'd like to be true but with what's actually true this month.

What do I look at? What do I accept? What still reaches me that shouldn't? What pressure do I transmit? What version of me do people get?

Then pick the one where the gap between what you intended and what's actually happening is widest, which isn't necessarily the one that seems most broken, because the widest gap is where the change is available to you.

Change that one thing.

Those twenty years shaped the leader, and the coach, that I am today, and I'm grateful for every hard conversation and every person who helped me grow along the way.

Looking back, the lessons were never in the strategy sessions or the KPIs. They were in the everyday moments with people, in the choices I made, and in the mistakes I owned. They were the settings, really, and I just didn't have a name for them at the time.