Executive team coaching

Executive team coaching is structured work with the seven or eight people round your leadership table. Dominic Monkhouse coaches the founder-CEO first, then the team.

What is executive team coaching?

Someone from outside sits in your leadership meetings and watches what the room actually does. Not what it says it does. Then runs 1:1s with every leader, and coaches the team through the conversations they have been quietly avoiding for months.

You will recognise at least one of these:

• The annual planning offsite where the operations director nods, then quietly does what they were going to do anyway.
• The executive meeting after a missed quarter where everyone in the room knows what the issue is and nobody names it.
• The hire decision where you accept a B-player at director level because you have run out of patience with the search.

This is not training. There are no slides and nobody gets a certificate. The work happens in your meetings, on your decisions, with your actual team.

It is also not 1:1 executive coaching repackaged. A coach who has only worked with individuals will start fixing each leader. But the work is usually between people. How Sarah and Tom disagree in front of you. How Priya goes quiet when the CFO speaks. How the whole room looks at you the moment a decision gets hard.

Our position: coaching the team without coaching the founder-CEO first is surface-level work. We coach the CEO first.

Which kind of coaching do you need?

The category is a mess, and it is worth being blunt about why. Executive team coaching, CEO mentoring, executive coaching and leadership offsites all get sold as though they fix the same thing.

They don’t.

Format	Best fit	First useful outcome	What it is not
Executive team coaching	A decision your team should own has come back to your inbox in the last 30 days.	The team names the issue in the room and leaves with one accountable owner.	Not a motivational away day or training module.
CEO mentoring	You need a private operator-to-operator sounding board before the team layer is ready.	You decide what stays with you: senior hires, capital, vision, new markets, product bets.	Not team repair work once the leadership group is already underperforming together.
Executive coaching	One senior leader needs help with behaviour, transition, confidence or performance.	That leader gets clearer about their role and the behaviour blocking them.	Not a fix for the way the whole team avoids conflict.
Leadership offsite or training day	You need a reset, shared language or a short decision sprint.	The team leaves with a clearer plan and a handful of decisions.	Not repeated coaching through the weekly and quarterly rhythm where behaviour actually changes.

Who we work with

Founder-CEOs of UK businesses somewhere in the 30 to 250 people range. You built it. Your team grew up inside it.

Most of your leaders started out doing the work. They were good at it, so you promoted them. Now they manage instead, and almost none of them have ever sat on a leadership team that functioned without the founder in the room.

Meanwhile you are running the biggest company you have ever run, for the first time, with no one to ask.

The pattern is consistent. You promoted your first commercial hire to Head of Sales because she was the best closer. You promoted your earliest engineer to CTO because the codebase was in his head. You promoted a strong delivery lead to Operations Director because he held everything together during the last crunch. None of them have ever been on a leadership team that ran without you. The role you are still carrying, the one your team should own and you should not, is what decides whether you become the CEO doing only the strategic work no one else can, or stay an operator inside your own company forever.

We do not work with FTSE-250 ExCos. We do not run residential coaching for partner-track lawyers. We do not coach big-company general managers preparing for board roles.

Different patterns. Different constraints. Different work entirely.

Fewer than 30 people, and the leadership team layer often has not formed yet. You probably need 1:1 CEO mentoring first.

More than 250, and you likely already have an internal L&D function and an HR partner. We are not a fit there either. See the full coaching and mentoring offering for something closer to your shape.

What waiting another year usually costs

The cost of waiting twelve months is rarely calculated. It is the second senior hire who quietly checks out and leaves with twelve months of context. It is the strategic decision your team avoided that your competitor has already made. It is the year of your life you spent in meetings the team should have run themselves. Wait past the point the team is the constraint and you pay this bill twice. Once in lost momentum. Once in the eventual rebuild.

Is executive team coaching the right format for you?

Use this when the team is real enough to carry decisions, but not yet direct enough to carry them without you standing over the top.

You can spot it easily enough. Authority, conflict and judgement keep routing back through the founder-CEO. Through you.

• A decision the team should own comes back to you after the meeting.
• The real disagreement happens before the meeting, after the meeting, or over Slack. Not in the room.
• The team says it wants accountability, then waits for you to enforce it.
• Individual coaching would help one leader, but the bigger issue is how the team behaves together.

If the company is still pre-team, CEO mentoring is usually the first step. If it is one senior person causing the friction, individual executive coaching may be the cleaner tool. But if the team is formed and the same pattern repeats every single week, coach the team in the room where the actual work happens.

Why listen to Dominic Monkhouse on executive team coaching

Before Dominic Monkhouse ever coached a leadership team, he built six of them himself.

At Rackspace UK, he was Managing Director from 2000. Started with four people and zero revenue. Built the original UK leadership team as the business scaled to £30m by 2007.

The dot-com crash tested every assumption he had. He came out the other side knowing his own behaviour as MD was the constraint, long before the team ever was.

At IT Lab, Managing Director from 2007 to 2008, he inherited a leadership team and three months of cash. He took the price up by 50%. Then he rebuilt the leadership team from there.

At Peer 1 Hosting UK from 2009, he was Managing Director and employee number one, with zero revenue behind him. Peer 1 funded the UK launch. He built that leadership team from nothing.

He has coached more than 200 UK founder-CEOs since founding Monkhouse & Company. Twelve client exits so far, including Wirehive, ClearVision and QCS. Others are simply still going, running businesses twice the size they were when we started.

He has not spent the last twenty years as an HR consultant teaching the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. He has spent them running businesses. That is the only reason to listen to any of this.

The methods behind the coaching

Probably the most certified business coach in the UK. Definitely the most committed to keeping it current.

None of that matters unless it changes what happens in the room. The work draws on operating systems and diagnostic tools built for one job, helping a leadership team make better decisions with less dependence on the founder-CEO.

• Scaling Up. Quarterly rhythm, priorities, accountability and execution discipline.
• Metronomics. CEO plus team cadence, functional accountability and growth-system discipline.
• Table Group. Trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results inside the leadership team.
• Gallup. Strengths language for spotting contribution, overplay and blind spots.
• 6 Conditions. Team effectiveness diagnostics, not personality noise.
• Kolbe. Conative working style, useful when the team confuses intent with operating mode.

None of this is about collecting badges. It is about choosing the right instrument for the constraint sat in front of the team.

Outcomes you can expect

By 90 days, the team has had one conversation they would otherwise have ducked. By six months, the leaders who will not make the next stage are obvious to the room. They know it too. You have made the calls.

By twelve months, the team runs two-day strategic offsites and weekly operating cadences without you driving every single decision.

By month six you should see at least four of these eight observable changes:

1. The CEO 1:1 stops being where decisions get unblocked. They get unblocked in the team meeting.
2. The leadership team challenges the CEO at least twice in any team meeting.
3. The Head of Sales walks into quarterly business reviews with the numbers, not with the excuses.
4. The CFO disagrees with the Head of Sales in the room, not after it.
5. The Operations Director stops escalating decisions that should be theirs.
6. New-leader hires get evaluated by the team, not just the CEO.
7. The CEO leaves a leadership meeting having spoken less than 30% of the time.
8. The team runs its own offsite without the CEO setting the agenda.

Revenue growth is not on that list. Revenue is influenced by twenty things, and team coaching is only one of them. The list above is what we stake the engagement on.

If this is the team you want twelve months from now, book a 45-minute call.

When team coaching is the wrong answer

Two patterns we will tell you to walk away from at discovery:

1. The CEO wants the team coached but won’t be coached. This will not work. It will burn the team’s trust, surface every grievance, and leave the CEO unaffected. We will say so on the call and not take the engagement.
2. There isn’t a leadership team yet, just a label. If decisions still mostly route over the CEO’s desk and the “team” is a forum that does not actually decide anything, the company is still pre-team. The work is to design the operating cadence and confirm the right roles. CEO mentoring or fractional COO support is more useful first.

The cheapest hour you can buy from us is the one where we say “not yet.”

Key takeaways

• Executive team coaching for the seven or eight people round the table in a UK business of 30 to 250 people.
• The founder-CEO gets coached first. Coaching the team without the CEO is surface-level work.
• 12-month engagement. Around 80% of clients carry on into year two.
• Dominic built six leadership teams himself before coaching them. 200+ founder-CEOs coached, 12 client exits.

Frequently asked questions about executive team coaching

How do I know whether we need team coaching or CEO mentoring?

If the decision pattern is still mostly yours, start with CEO mentoring. If the leadership team exists, meets every week, and still sends every difficult choice back to you, team coaching is usually the better place to start.

And if this is the wrong page for you, we will simply tell you on the call.

How long does executive team coaching take to show results?

The team should have one observably different conversation inside ninety days. By six months, the leaders who will not make the next stage are obvious to the room. They know it too. By twelve months, the team should be running its own operating cadence without the CEO driving every decision.

If those signals do not show at the milestones, the work is not landing, and we will tell you before you renew.

What if we already use Scaling Up, EOS, or OKRs?

Yes. The patterns we work on sit underneath any operating system you already run. How decisions actually get made in the room. How disagreement gets handled in front of the CEO. How the team reads each other the moment one of them goes quiet.

We are not selling you another framework on top of the one you already have.

If your framework is Scaling Up, you will watch Scaling Up sharpen. If it is EOS, the same thing happens. If you run on OKRs, the OKRs will finally start to mean something to the people setting them. We are coaching the team that runs whichever framework you already chose, not replacing it.

Will you coach individual leaders 1:1 as part of the engagement?

Yes. Spot coaching of individual leaders is included in every engagement, called in as needed across the 12 months. If a specific leader needs deeper sustained individual work, a confidence issue, a difficult succession, a high-stakes promotion, we scope that separately rather than water down the team work.

What happens if a leader leaves mid-engagement?

It happens. Often it is the engagement itself that surfaces the wrong fit in the first place. We run an onboarding call with the new joiner and help you build their onboarding plan. The team work carries straight on at the next session, and the new person simply joins it.

Who is the coach? Will it always be Dominic?

Yes. Dominic Monkhouse leads every engagement personally. He shares the coaching with Phil Rose, who may join sessions and either lead or assist. Between the two of them, they do all of the work.

We do not pool unnamed associates. We do not hand the room to juniors.

What if the team is remote-first or distributed across the UK?

Team sessions happen in person at The Management Lab in the New Forest, around 90 minutes from London. CEO 1:1s and spot coaching happen online. A lot of our clients are partly distributed across the UK anyway.

The team comes together for the kickoff and the three quarterly coaching days. That is the cadence, and we hold to it.

How do you measure whether the work is working?

We measure four things. A pre and post leadership-team 360, using the same instrument at start and end. A monthly count of decisions escalated to the CEO that should have been settled at the team level. Operating-rhythm health markers: meeting cadence, decision quality, pre-read discipline and time actually spent in meetings.

And we track the one or two business KPIs the CEO names at the start, usually drawn from EBITDA margin, net revenue retention, employee NPS, or cash conversion.