We help C-suite executives make sure their vision and value show up in how they lead.

The first few months in a new C-suite role can be one of the most visible and high-pressure times in your career.

With scrutiny by the Board, investors, customers and peers, you are on the spot to make critical decisions before you’ve had a chance to really learn as much as you’d like to about the organization.

Your team is forming opinions about whether you're the leader they want to follow.

All this means that the first impression you make in those early conversations, decisions, and interactions sets a perception that can take a long time to shift if it forms incorrectly.

The executives who establish themselves most effectively do so by being deliberate about how their vision, values, and approach to leadership show up from the very first day.

Coaching gives you dedicated time and a thought partner to build a clear entry plan, think through the executive team dynamics you're walking into, work through the organizational questions you're navigating, and develop your leadership game plan before the pace of the role takes over.

Executive coaching is different from other types of coaching because it focuses on the executive’s work world.

Beyond that, within executive coaching, there are many different approaches to executive coaching, so not all executive coaching is the same.

Some executive coaching focuses on stress management; some on interpersonal styles (often using personality assessments); some on your leadership, and some on specific approaches to management like Entrepreneurial Operating System (EoS).

In our case, executive coaching addresses those things when relevant, but primarily focuses on helping you build and execute a clear vision and strategy for your work, your team, your approach to technology including AI, your profile within the organization and with customers, and the impact you have as a leader.

The transition into a first C-suite role is one of the most significant shifts an executive makes in their career. Your exceptional functional skills (like finance or marketing) that got you promoted to the C-suite are genuinely valuable, but they're not sufficient on their own at this level.

At the C-suite level, you're no longer evaluated primarily on functional expertise or execution. You're evaluated on your vision, your strategic judgment, your ability to influence people who don't report to you, and your capacity to operate effectively in the boardroom, with investors, and across a peer group of other senior leaders who are also figuring out whether you belong in the room.

At the C-suite level, you also operate with very little official performance feedback, and in a situation where no one else creates strategy for you to follow, but you have to create it for others.

Most executives make this transition by trial and error, which works eventually but may bring some reputational damage if not managed well.

Coaching gives you a structured framework for understanding what's actually being evaluated at this level, and a thought partner to work through the specific dynamics of your organization and your role. This can compress your learning curve significantly and help you show up with the confidence and clarity that your role requires from the start.

Think of a founder, CEO or C-suite role as a high-wire act: you hold a lot of risk, you’re balancing a lot at once, you’ve got a lot of eyes on you, and you need a lot of focus and planning to pull it all off.

Typically, C-suite leaders don’t have senior-level sounding boards where they can truly think through strategy and leadership topics in a safe space. Board members, investors, and peers all have an agenda. Team members want to feel like you are confident about your direction. Outsiders don’t have the context to help you.

A good C-suite executive coach has seen hundreds of other leaders struggle with similar questions to the ones you face, and can bring you best practices for managing through uncertainty.

A good executive coach is someone you can be fully candid with, who has the experience and pattern recognition to help you think through what you're facing, and who has no agenda other than helping you succeed.

Executive coaching is designed to help you build your own executive operating system that gives you confidence, even in a new role or industry. This operating system brings together what you already know with a vision for what you're trying to create, and gives you a solid foundation for the actions you take.

In addition, coaching focuses not only on you but on the larger organizational context you’re in. You likely have one or more difficult peers, and one or more difficult employees. You may have a complex Board dynamic, or, if you’re not CEO, you may not have the best relationship with that person.

Coaching gives you a safe sounding board to figure out how to approach the various personalities in your organization in a way that gets you buy-in and builds coalitions around your leadership.

If you’re a C-suite executive and you’re feeling left out of key decisions or under-recognized for what you’re delivering, the cause is almost never an unfixable performance problem.

More often it's that the people around you, which could be the board, the CEO, or your peers, are having to do the work of figuring out the value of what you are delivering.

You may be working very hard and making great progress with your function (or the company if you are CEO), but the overall impact of your work may be getting lost. You may not be communicating about the value you’re delivering in the way that others can understand it - which is a little like handing someone a plate at a buffet and asking them to make their own meal. The ingredients may all be there, but you may be putting the work of assembling your value narrative on someone else.

Coaching helps you make your impact visible, connecting what you're doing explicitly to outcomes, strategy, and a forward-looking vision, so that the people who need to see your value can see it clearly without having to connect the dots themselves.

By coaching executives to make a few key shifts, we have seen people significantly recover their reputations and start being included in inner-circle discussions and get recognized for what they're actually delivering.

Most executive coaches are trained to lean back and wait for the executive to self-assess and pick an area for self-development, which then gets explored in a non-directive back-and-forth between coach and client.

While there may be situations in which that approach can be extremely helpful, our model leans forward.

We bring to the C-suite executive models for interpersonal success, organizational impact, frameworks for making difficult decisions, and an overarching model for how an executive can elevate themselves within a C-suite role.

Every one of our clients who has had an executive coach in the past has remarked that this is nothing like the coaching they've previously had, because the kind of coaching we do contains more business strategy, personal strategy, vision-building, and value creation than other models of traditional executive coaching.

While many executives hire us as their executive coaching partner, we think of what we do as executive value coaching, a different and more comprehensive category of coaching entirely.

Executive coaching at CXO Directions includes training on our structured model of executive value creation, which gives you a clear framework for elevating how your impact and vision are perceived across your organization.

From there, we work together to build a vision for your work and your team that earns genuine buy-in from the people around you, and systematically work through the different elements of your role to elevate what you're delivering and how it's being understood.

We address both what you're building and how others are perceiving your ability and impact, because both matter and neither works without the other.

As for the mechanics: we meet on a regular cadence determined after an initial exploratory call, and you have retainer-based access to your coach throughout the week for the moments that don't wait for a scheduled session.

Executive coaching at CXO Directions starts at $5,000 and is scoped based on the complexity of the work, your specific goals, and the cadence that makes sense for your situation. Pricing is discussed during an initial consultation.

Yes. All executive coaching at CXO Directions is conducted virtually, which allows us to work with C-suite executives nationwide regardless of location. For clients in the Boston area, occasional in-person working sessions are available, but the engagement is designed to be fully effective remotely.

Our services are available only for executives who currently live and work in the United States. We are not set up to manage international executive coaching engagements at this time.