Working with an executive team coach mostly looks like your regular meetings with one extra person in the room, asking the questions your team has agreed not to ask. There's a diagnostic up front, structured sessions to build specific muscles, and reinforcement in between. The real work happens on your actual decisions, with your actual people, at your actual stakes.
This is the article I wish more buyers read before the first call, because the gap between what CEOs picture and what happens is wide. Most picture an offsite. The good versions of this work look more like a year of better Tuesdays.
What happens in the first 90 days?
It starts with the coach learning your team better than your team knows itself, mostly through one-on-one interviews with every executive. This part is always revealing in the same way: the coach hears seven private versions of the team, and the versions don't match. Your CFO thinks the problem is the COO. The COO thinks it's how you run meetings. Two people independently mention a conflict you've never heard of. The diagnostic's job is to put one honest picture on the table where seven polite ones used to be.
Then the picture gets shared with the whole team, which is the first genuinely uncomfortable day of the engagement and usually the most valuable. Teams rarely see themselves described accurately and out loud. Some of what surfaces, everyone privately knew. Some of it lands like news.
From there the work gets sequenced. Whatever the presenting complaint was, slow decisions, turf wars, a strategy that won't execute, the actual work starts wherever the foundation is cracked, which is almost always earlier in the chain than the symptom.
What does the coach do in your actual meetings?
Sits in them, mostly. Watches the team operate on real decisions, and intervenes at specific moments.
The interventions are smaller than people expect. In one engagement, a leadership team spent twenty minutes building consensus around a hiring plan, and I stopped them with one observation: "Three people in this room haven't said a word, and two of them are the people who'd have to execute this." The plan that existed twenty minutes in did not survive contact with the people who'd been silent. The version that emerged an hour later did, because it was theirs.
That's the job in miniature. The team has patterns it can't see because it's inside them. The coach names the pattern at the moment it's running, when it's undeniable, instead of in a workshop three weeks later when it's theoretical.
Between sessions there's rhythm work: the team practices specific behaviors in its normal operating cadence, and the coach checks what held and what snapped back. Snapback is normal. Old patterns are load-bearing, and they don't give up after one good meeting.
What's expected of you and your team?
More than you're expecting, and the coach should tell you this before you sign anything.
The CEO is in every session, receiving feedback like everyone else, and goes first on the hard stuff. I've written elsewhere about why this is structural: the team's patterns organize around the most powerful person in the room, so the work has to include that person or it's theater. Expect to hear things about your own behavior that nobody has said to your face in years. That's a feature. It's also the part CEOs underestimate most.
The team commits real time. Sessions are typically a half-day to a full day every month or so, plus the behavior work in between. Teams that treat sessions as appointments to survive get appointment-level results.
And everyone tells the truth to the coach, which sounds obvious until month two, when the coach starts hearing the things people want relayed to the CEO without their fingerprints on them. A good coach refuses the courier job and pushes the conversation back into the room, because the room is where the muscle gets built. Trust first, so the truth is survivable. Then candor, so the truth gets said directly. Then ownership, so what's said turns into commitments people actually keep. That hiring-plan meeting was a candor intervention sitting on months of trust work, which is the Six Shifts operating the way it's supposed to: in your real meetings, one earned stage at a time.
How do you know it's working?
The early evidence is behavioral and shows up before any business number moves. Somebody disagrees with you in the meeting, visibly, and the sky stays up. A conflict between two executives gets resolved without you learning about it until afterward. Bad news arrives a month earlier than it used to.
The business evidence follows: decisions per meeting goes up, decisions revisited goes down, and the initiatives that used to stall start clearing the stage where they always died. By the back half of a real engagement, the question shifts from "is this working" to "why did we run the company the old way for so long."
And the last marker, the one that means it stuck: the team starts catching its own patterns without the coach in the room. The point of the work was always to become unnecessary.