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Executive coaching does not have to take a year. Packing the work into a tighter schedule can produce faster results, and in some cases better ones. The key is shrinking the gap between trying a new behavior and getting corrected.
In endurance sports, cyclists who packed hard workouts into a tighter schedule improved aerobic fitness by 4.6% in four weeks, while cyclists doing similar training spread out did not improve significantly. In training medical residents, teams corrected the moment they made a mistake delivered a lifesaving treatment 63 seconds faster than teams that waited until the end of the course for feedback.
Executive coaching researchers have rarely tested what happens when the work stays the same but the schedule accelerates. Psychotherapy researchers have, and the results are striking.
A study of 21,488 counseling clients, tracked from 1996 to 2015, found that people seen weekly recovered faster than people seen every two weeks. The final amount of improvement was about the same. The weekly clients just got there sooner.
A study in the British Journal of Psychiatry assigned 200 adults to either weekly or twice-weekly therapy sessions. The twice-weekly patients showed bigger symptom improvements at six months and responded faster. They were also far less likely to quit, with 16 dropping out versus 32 in the weekly groups.
And in a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry, a seven-day intensive version of cognitive therapy for PTSD went head to head with the same therapy delivered weekly over three months. At the 14-week mark, 73% of the intensive group had recovered, versus 77% of the standard group. A process that normally takes three months worked nearly as well in a week.
Executives are not therapy patients, and coaching is not therapy. But these studies answer a critical question for time-pressed senior executives: What happens when you shrink the gap between sessions? The answer is faster results.
In a Leadership IQ assessment of 1,207 executives, slow decision-making emerged as the biggest executive weakness.
Now picture how that gets coached on a monthly schedule. The executive has a session and resolves to make faster decisions. Then they go back to work. Over the next few weeks, they sit through dozens of meetings requiring a decision. But time and again, the old habits win; they ask for more time to decide, engage in analysis paralysis, postpone and equivocate. By the next time they meet with their executive coach, they have reinforced their bad habits dozens of times. And they may not even remember the specifics of all the decisions they have postponed, so their executive coach does not have the specifics with which to hold them accountable.
Shrink the interval between executive coaching sessions to one week, and the dynamic radically changes. The executive tries a specific new behavior in Monday's staff meeting, and by the following Monday they are reviewing exactly what happened while the details are still fresh enough to fix. It is the same executive working on the same behavior. The difference is how many times the old bad habits get reinforced before anybody corrects it.
Just moving faster is not enough, because a weekly conversation with no structure is just a more frequent chat. If you want executive coaching results in 12 weeks instead of 12 months, here are four ingredients that make a compressed engagement work.
In Leadership IQ's Leadership Blind Spots study, only 16% of bosses who had been told about a blind spot actually changed. Simply telling an executive about the areas where they need to improve rarely works. In an accelerated coaching process, you do not have months to chip away at defenses to achieve a glimmer of self-awareness.
The faster route is to have the executive dissect their own record. If the executive needs to work on making faster decisions, for example, the first session has them walk through the last five decisions that stalled, along with the reason they gave for each one at the time. When most of those reasons sound like "we need more input" or "let's give it another quarter," there is nobody to argue with, because those are the executive's own words.
That skips the step where defensiveness usually eats up weeks. And the exercise speeds up everything after it, too. Those stalling phrases become the triggers for the If-Then rules in the next step, and the list becomes the baseline every weekly review gets measured against. Instead of spending a month building the case, the executive can leave the first session with a new behavior to try that same week.
An If-Then rule is a decision you make ahead of time about exactly what you will do when a specific moment arrives. In simple terms, you commit that if a specific thing happens, then you will use a specific response. Instead of counting on willpower in the heat of the moment, the moment itself becomes the reminder.
"Make faster decisions" is not a good enough plan. Instead, use an If-Then rule like, "IF I hear myself say 'let's get more input,' THEN I'll name the specific unanswered question and set a deadline for making the decision before the meeting ends." The trigger is one of the executive's own stalling phrases, pulled straight from that first session.
Keep it to one or two rules at a time, because an executive juggling five new rules usually follows none of them. And expect to rewrite them. The first version of a rule often has a trigger that is too vague to notice in the moment, and a weekly review catches that after a few meetings instead of a few months.
A meta-analysis of 138 studies with 19,951 participants found that monitoring progress improved goal attainment, and the effect got stronger when progress was physically recorded or publicly reported.
The recording can be simple. After any meeting where a decision was on the table, jot down how many times your stalling phrase came up and how many times you used your If-Then rule. Also record the deadline for making the decision and, once it is made, the actual completion date. Share that record with your executive coach each week so you can see whether following the rule is helping you make decisions on time. If you are faithfully assigning owners and deadlines but those deadlines keep slipping, your coach needs to examine what is still getting in the way. When you compare one week with another, look at the proportion of opportunities where you followed through. Using the rule twice out of two opportunities is progress over using it twice out of ten. That gives each session something specific to work on while the details are still fresh.
If an executive coaching engagement starts with a baseline, it should end by revisiting it. The simplest version is to run the first-session exercise again in week 12. Pull the most recent decisions and the reason given for each delay, then put that list next to the one from week one. "I feel like I'm deciding faster" is nice to hear. But "I stalled on four of my first five decisions and one of my last five" is evidence. It is also worth looking at the weekly tallies from the final month. If the rule was getting used less in weeks 10 and 11 than in weeks 6 and 7, that is an early warning the new behavior has not settled yet.
None of this means that executive coaching that is less intense, and with a more relaxed pacing, cannot possibly work. But you would do well to ask yourself and your executive coach this question: How many days will pass between trying something new and reviewing what happened?
If the honest answer is "about a month," that is oodles of meetings and situations where old habits get rehearsed before anyone checks and corrects your behavior. Depending on the intensity of the issue, and the urgency you feel to change, that delay might represent too great a risk to your career success.
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