Executive coaching for
managing directors and boards

What is executive coaching?

Executive coaching is intensive one-to-one support for leaders at senior and top level. It is not training, not a seminar and not therapy, but a process of reflection and development that starts directly from your situation, your goals and your impact.

The difference from other development formats lies in the starting point. A seminar brings content and looks for participants. Coaching brings nothing but method and attention – you bring the content. That is precisely why it works where standard answers no longer reach: decisions under uncertainty, role conflicts, constellations you cannot discuss with anyone inside your own organisation.

As an executive coach I work with managing directors, executive board members, divisional heads, HR leaders and supervisory boards across Germany and the DACH region – in corporate structures as much as in owner-managed mid-sized companies. The focus is on durable impact: clear decisions, assured leadership, results that hold.

Typical reasons for coaching

My coaching is for experienced leaders who are already successful and want to become more effective still. The most common starting points:

• Role change and the first 100 days – stepping into a managing director or board position, moving from expert to leadership responsibility, taking on a substantially larger remit.
• Leading through transformation – restructuring, post-merger integration, culture change, workforce reduction. Situations where you have to represent decisions you did not make alone.
• Impact and leadership presence – appearing before boards, handling visibility, blind spots in your own leadership behaviour, the question of why messages are not landing.
• Conflict at the top – tension within the executive team, difficult constellations with shareholders or supervisory boards, political dynamics in a matrix organisation.
• Succession in a family business – handing over and taking on, clarifying roles across generations, the relationship between family, ownership and company.
• Self-leadership and strain – decision-making under pressure, permanent availability, the boundary between role and person.

Process and format

Every engagement starts with a free first conversation of roughly 30 to 45 minutes. It clarifies two things: what is genuinely at stake – and whether the chemistry works. Effective coaching requires trust, and trust cannot be commissioned. If the fit is not there, I say so and refer on where useful.

Goal clarification follows: what should be recognisably different at the end? These markers are recorded in writing and reviewed along the way. Coaching without a verifiable goal is a discussion circle, not a development process.

Confidentiality and the three-way contract

In most engagements the organisation commissions and pays for the coaching while the work happens with the individual leader. This constellation is the single most common reason coaching fails – when it is not cleanly resolved.

A three-way conversation between sponsor, client and coach therefore comes first. It establishes bindingly what the organisation expects, what goals the client is pursuing, and what will be reported back at the end. The rule is: goals are transparent, content is not. What is discussed in sessions stays between us. A closing conversation with the organisation takes place only if the client wants it – and then together with them. There are no reports, no assessments and no corridor briefings.

My approach

I work systemically and from a resource orientation: your behaviour is not viewed in isolation but in the context of the structures, expectations and dynamics you move within. Much of what looks like a personal deficit turns out, on closer inspection, to be a logical response to a feature of the system – an unclear division of responsibility, a contradictory mandate, an unresolved conflict one level up.

My work combines commercial thinking – I hold a degree in business administration and worked in finance – with over 15 years of accompanying leaders. I know the isolation of responsibility, the dynamics of boardrooms and the reality of transformation from practice, not from the literature. Numbers are not foreign territory: where a leadership question hangs on a business model, we talk about the business model.

What you will not get: ready-made answers, personality tests as an end in themselves, models that fit every problem. What you will get: uncomfortable questions, honest feedback, and a space in which you can think out loud without consequences.

Coaching, consulting, training, therapy

The terms are used loosely in the market. For orientation:

• Consulting delivers solutions. The consultant knows something you do not and passes it on.
• Training builds skills in groups along a curriculum.
• Coaching develops your own solution. The coach brings method and outside perspective, not content.
• Therapy addresses conditions with clinical relevance and belongs with licensed professionals.

In practice a concern sometimes shifts the boundary. Where it becomes clear that therapeutic support is indicated, I say so and refer on. And where a question simply calls for expertise, I provide it rather than withholding it for the sake of methodological purity.

Coaching across Germany and the DACH region

I work throughout Germany. Sessions take place at your premises, at a neutral venue near you, or online – travel is part of the normal scope and not treated as a separate issue. Many engagements run in blended form: opening and closing in person, sessions in between online, simply because that fits a full calendar better.

Alongside Germany I take engagements in Austria and Switzerland. Experience from both leadership cultures feeds into the work – particularly useful where German organisations work with Swiss or Austrian units and the differing decision logics are underestimated. For engagements focused on the Swiss market, see albath-consulting.ch.

When coaching is not the right answer

Not every concern belongs in one-to-one coaching. Where the question is whether a person is suited to a role, you need diagnostics – that is what an assessment centre is for. Where an entire leadership circle needs to go through the same development, a leadership development programme is the more effective and cheaper format. And where a team does not work together, coaching its members one after another helps little.

We clarify this in the first conversation. It happens regularly that a different format emerges from the one originally requested.