Services / Leadership coaching
Executive coaching and leadership development for higher education
Coaching for presidents, cabinets, deans, and emerging leaders, delivered by credentialed coaches who have also held the seat.
What the work is
Higher education leadership is a job most people arrive at sideways. A strong faculty member becomes a chair, a chair becomes a dean, and at no point does anyone teach the political and managerial craft the next role actually requires. The gap shows up as conflict avoidance, unclear accountability, and cabinets that agree in the room and defect in the hallway.
Our coaches are credentialed through the International Coach Federation and, in most cases, have held provost, president, dean, or CIO roles themselves. That combination matters: the coaching methodology is rigorous, and the person using it already understands shared governance, tenure, accreditation, and the specific loneliness of a president reporting to an elected board.
Formats range from confidential 1:1 work with a single executive to whole-cabinet team coaching and multi-session cohorts for department chairs and emerging leaders.
- Executive 1:1 coaching
- Cabinet and leadership team coaching
- Department chair institutes
- New-leader onboarding, 90/180/365
- 360 reviews and leadership assessments
- Succession planning and bench development
- Retreat design and facilitation
- Career transition and interim support
How a coaching engagement runs
Matching first, because the wrong coach wastes six months of an executive calendar.
Match
A scoping conversation, then two or three candidate coaches. The client picks. No engagement starts without chemistry confirmed.
Assess
Depending on scope: a 360, a validated instrument such as Hogan or LEA, stakeholder interviews, or a team assessment with a before-and-after measure.
Coach
Typically biweekly sessions over six to twelve months, with agreed development goals and confidential notes held by the coach.
Sustain
A close-out review with the sponsor on progress against goals, plus the practices and structures that keep the gains after coaching ends.
Who leads this work
A sample of the coaching bench. We match to the executive, not to availability.
Who do you coach?
Presidents and chancellors, cabinet-level vice presidents, deans, department chairs, and high-potential emerging leaders. We also coach full leadership teams as a unit, which is a different engagement than coaching the members individually.
Are your coaches credentialed?
Yes. Our coaching bench includes International Coach Federation Professional Certified Coaches and board-certified coaches, with certifications across Hogan, Leadership Effectiveness Analysis 360, Everything DiSC, and Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team. Our bench also includes licensed psychologists.
Is coaching confidential?
The content of sessions is confidential between coach and client. The sponsor receives progress against the development goals agreed at the start, not a transcript. We are explicit about that boundary with everyone before the first session.
What is the difference between 1:1 and cohort coaching?
1:1 work goes deep on one leader’s specific situation. Cohort work develops a shared leadership language across a group and builds peer relationships that outlast the program, at a lower cost per participant. Institutions building a leadership pipeline usually want both.
Tell us what you’re facing.
Most engagements start with a thirty-minute call and no deck.
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