Why CEOs need a business coach (and why I didn’t think I’d ever be one)

Let me start with a confession. For years, I thought “business coaching” sounded… a bit happy-clappy. Like something you did when you’d run out of real problems and needed a new identity. Flipcharts. Nodding. Feelings. A room full of people saying things like “What would future-you do?”

And then I became a coach.

Not because I had some grand calling. Mostly because I realised consulting involved doing loads of work, and I don’t do work.

(That line usually gets a laugh. It’s also painfully true.)

But once you’ve watched coaching actually change outcomes – not just moods – you can’t unsee it.

You can’t watch a CEO get unstuck, build a leadership team that finally functions, and stop being the bottleneck… and then go back to pretending the CEO role is something you just “figure out”.

Because being a CEO is a weird job.

You’re expected to be strategic, decisive, calm, commercially sharp, emotionally intelligent… and still be the person everyone stares at when something goes wrong. Your calendar fills up. Your inbox multiplies. Your thinking time gets mugged in broad daylight.

And in most companies, the CEO is the only person who doesn’t have anyone responsible for helping them get better at the job. Everyone else gets personal development opportunities all the time.

Salespeople get training. Managers get development programmes. Senior teams get executive coaching. Teams get facilitation and frameworks and offsites and feedback loops.

The CEO gets… more meetings. No training. No guidance. No help building the new skills the role demands.

So yes: CEO coaching is important.

Not because you’re broken. Not because you need a hug. Because the cost of blind spots, fuzzy thinking and slow decisions at the top is enormous – and it compounds.

I’ve been using coaches since 1995 (before it was fashionable)

I’ve been working with coaches since 1995.

My first sales director role was at a company called Meditel. My coach was a former manager from Glaxo. Old-school, experienced, no nonsense. And I can still remember some of the conversations. Not because they were “inspiring”. Because they were useful. He was full of knowledge – things that actually worked, not just theory or ideas.

That’s what good coaching is: practical help, at the moment you need it, from someone with the expertise to see what you can’t.

I’ve also had mentors who changed my life in very unglamorous ways.

David Fish – a director at Littlewoods – used to invite me round for Sunday lunch every week when I was in Liverpool. No agenda. No big speech. No formal ‘coaching sessions’. Just listening, challenging me, and helping me think. That was mentoring at its best.

Then there was Ken Austin at Glaxo, a really experienced coach. He taught me how to build a team, despite us driving each other mad. I’d wake up at 3am in a cold sweat if I was due to spend the day with Ken… but I learned. And I got better.

That’s the bit people miss: good coaching doesn’t always feel “nice”.

Sometimes it feels like being seen a bit too clearly.

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The moment you “make it”… and the job quietly gets harder

There are moments as a founder-CEO where you think, Right. We’ve made it.

You hire a big-name leader.
You hit a revenue milestone.
You sign the customer you used to daydream about.
You move into a proper office.
You go from “scrappy start-up” to “real company”.
You’re a success, right?

And then… nothing gets easier.

In fact, that’s often when it starts to get heavy.

Because once you’re into that 50+ employees zone, most business owners find the game changes. Hustle stops working. “Everyone just muck in” turns into confusion and duplication. Your early magic trick – you being in everything – turns into the constraint that limits growth.

At that stage, most CEOs struggle because they’re trying to run a bigger company using the same behaviours that worked when it was smaller.

And that’s where coaching comes in: it helps you evolve faster than the company is forcing you to.

Why I stopped doing non-exec work (because it drove me mad)

After Peer 1, I did what looked like the sensible thing: I became a non-exec.

It’s a very respectable role. You turn up once a month, sit in a board meeting, ask some good questions, give a bit of advice, and “mark the homework”.

And I hated it.

Not because the companies were bad – they were great. But because I wanted to actually help the entrepreneurs and founders who ran them change things outside the meeting. There’s no time in a board meeting to coach someone properly. Not really. You can comment on what’s happening, but you can’t install structure.

So I made a decision.

I wanted to work with founder-CEOs and actually help them build the systems and leadership team that make the company scale.

I joined an organisation called Shirlaws because I wanted to learn and get sharper. I learned loads: coaching in pairs, getting feedback in real time, watching other coaches work. I loved getting multiple perspectives on what I was doing and sharing my thoughts on what others were doing.

But I didn’t love their tools.

So I went back to what I trust: Scaling Up / Rockefeller Habits and the sort of frameworks that give you a shared language, a cadence, and a way to turn talk into execution.

That’s where coaching stops being “a chat” and becomes a proven methodology.

The “this isn’t fluffy” moment: One conversation, a completely different career

Let me tell you the story that really converted me.

A founder asked me to coach someone on their team one-to-one. The brief was blunt: “He’s got potential but he’s failing to deliver. If you can fix him, brilliant. If not, we’ll move him on.”

I expected a 20-minute call. It turned into a three-hour conversation.

The problem wasn’t intelligence. It wasn’t even skill. It was behaviour.

He couldn’t have difficult conversations.

So he was quietly doing other people’s work instead of managing them. Four days a week fixing stuff. One day a week doing his own job – and failing at it because he was only doing it 20% of the time.

Occasionally he’d snap, tell someone they were rubbish… and then still do their work for them anyway. Absolute carnage. And it was all happening under the CEO’s nose, because it looked like “hard work”.

So we built a plan:

He went back to the ten people he’d annoyed the most, owned it, apologised, and ran Stop–Start–Continue with each of them. Proper adult conversations. No HR theatre. No anonymous forms. Just accountability and clarity. A complete change to his management style.

A few months later, people said to me: “What have you done to him? He’s a different human.”

He got promoted twice. Then, later, when he moved companies, he hired me again.

That’s when I thought: Right. This work actually changes lives.

And again – zoom out.

If a few hours of focused coaching can turn one person around like that, imagine what consistent coaching can do for the CEO.

The real reasons CEOs need coaches (not the brochure reasons)

Your blind spots are expensive

Everyone’s got them. The difference is whether you spot them early, or they bite you later. Your team might be able to see what yours are, but they won’t always tell you. A good CEO coach is a mirror: not a fan, not a critic, someone who helps you close the gap between intent and impact.

Leadership is lonely in a very specific way

You can’t say everything to your team (they need confidence), your board (they’re judging performance), or your peers (half are posturing). So you carry it. A coach gives you a confidential place to think out loud – no politics, no pretending.

Under pressure, you default to habit

Most founders don’t get more strategic when things heat up. They get more hands-on, more reactive, more “just send it to me”. It might save the day once, but it trains the business to need you. A coach spots the loop and keeps you honest: are you building a company that scales, or one that needs you as the operating system?

Your leadership team won’t fix itself

You can have brilliant individuals and still have a leadership team that doesn’t function. They co-exist, protect turf, avoid conflict – and everything comes back to you. An external coach can facilitate the hard conversations and create the conditions for trust, clarity and proper execution.

Which brings me to…

Why I like teams that hate each other

My first solo client, Gerry Tombs, didn’t hire me to be a Scaling Up coach. He hired me to run Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team with his leadership team. They’d tried it with another coach first, but the team basically decided they didn’t like that guy. (When a leadership team hates the coach, that’s usually a clue. Either the coach is crap… or they’re telling the truth badly.)

Here’s the bit that makes me sound slightly unhinged:

I really like working with leadership teams that hate each other.

Because that’s where it matters.

When a team is genuinely dysfunctional, you can feel it in the room. The side-eyes. The sarcasm. The “I’m fine” energy. People showing up physically but opting out mentally.

And the CEO is stuck.

They can’t sit their team down and say: “Right, you lot are a mess, and I might be part of the problem” without it becoming a political minefield.

That’s where a coach can make a crucial difference: creating a situation where the truth can be said, trust can be rebuilt, and the team can start behaving like a team again.

What coaching has changed (the bit people actually care about)

When coaching works, it shows up in very specific ways:

• The CEO stops being the bottleneck for decision making.
• The leadership team stops “playing meetings” and starts executing.
• The company gets a rhythm: defined priorities, accountability, follow-through.
• People stop doing everything and start doing the right things.
• Hard conversations happen sooner.
• The CEO gets their head – and their diary – back.

And yes, sometimes it’s even more direct than that:

A single coaching intervention saves a key leader, turns around performance, prevents a costly departure, or stops a bad hire from quietly destroying six months.

Which is why the “is coaching worth it?” question is usually the wrong one.

The real question is: what is it costing you not to have it?

Because the CEO role is leverage. When the CEO improves, the whole organisation improves. When the CEO stays stuck, the whole organisation pays for it.

Most business coaching is mediocre

This industry is unregulated. Which means anyone can call themselves a coach.

Some coaches are brilliant. Some are well-meaning and ineffective. Some have never built anything and still want to teach you how to scale.

My view is blunt: most business coaches are mediocre. They’ve never really been winners. They wouldn’t know how to win if their lives depended on it. So you either improvise in public, or you find the right support.

And if you’re a CEO who genuinely wants to build something world class, you need to be picky when it comes to choosing that support.

What to look for in a CEO coach (so you don’t waste your time)

Given the importance of a good coach, you can’t afford to choose badly. Here’s what I’d look for:

Someone who understands the job

Not theoretically. Not from a book. From lived experience of running things where the pressure is real.

Someone with tools, not just questions

Questions are good. Frameworks are better when you need to move fast, because you can actually implement them. You want a coach with a method – a process to create clarity, focus and accountability without building a bureaucracy museum.

Someone who tells you the truth

Not a bully. Not a people-pleaser. Someone who can challenge you without making it weird.

Someone who will say “no”

I’ve turned down work because I didn’t believe I could help, or I didn’t want to be associated with the industry. If I don’t think I can add value, then I’ll say so rather than just take the money and bumble along in an industry I don’t understand or a business I don’t care about.

A coach who says yes to everyone is a warning sign that they aren’t fussed about the quality they are able to bring to the relationship.

The real goal: a business that gives you your life back

This is where I’ll end it.

I don’t think founders need coaching so they can become some serene monk who never swears and loves meetings. Trust me, if you work with me, you’ll probably end up swearing a lot more than you f**king used to.

I think CEOs need coaching so they can:

• build a company that runs without them being the glue
• stop firefighting and start leading
• develop a leadership team that actually functions
• enhance the way they make decisions with more clarity and confidence
• scale the business without losing themselves in it

More joy. Better work. Beyond profit.

And if you’re serious about building something that lasts – and you don’t want to do it alone – a CEO coach can make all the difference.

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Written by business coach and leadership coaching expert Dominic Monkhouse. You can order your free copy of his new book, Mind Your F**king Business here.