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Gary Malcolm

One-to-one

Executive coaching

Confidential coaching for senior leaders, grounded in what running a business actually asks of the person running it: focused work on the role you hold, the organisation around it, and what both are demanding of you now.

Definition

What executive coaching is

Executive coaching is a confidential one-to-one working partnership between a senior leader and a coach. It creates room to think rigorously about matters that are hard to examine inside your own organisation: an expanded remit, a difficult stakeholder map, a performance expectation, a shift in what the role requires of you.

My view, from years on both sides: advice can solve the part of a problem that lives in the business. The part that lives in the leader, how they decide, what they avoid, who they trust, is not accessible to advice. At senior levels that is usually the part that matters.

Starting points

When leaders bring me in

Coaching earns its place when the situation is consequential and the thinking is hard to do alone. Typical starting points:

  • You have stepped into a larger role and the approach that got you here is no longer sufficient.
  • You lead a business or function through a transition: restructuring, new ownership, new strategy, new market conditions.
  • Your stakeholder environment has become genuinely difficult: a board, a regional headquarters, a founder, a matrix that pulls in different directions.
  • You are leading between local teams, regional leadership and a global headquarters, explaining each to the others.
  • You are leading across cultures, as an expatriate leader in APAC or a Vietnamese leader working with global counterparts.
  • The performance expectations on you have risen faster than your support has.
  • Something in how you lead is costing you, and you want to look at it honestly with someone who has no stake in the politics.

The shape of the work

How an engagement works

  1. It starts with a conversation

    We meet, without obligation, to discuss your situation and what you want from coaching. You should leave that conversation knowing whether I am the right coach for it. If I am not, I will say so.

  2. Contracting is explicit

    Confidentiality, goals, sponsor involvement where your organisation is paying, and how we will judge progress are agreed before the work starts, not assumed.

  3. The work is yours

    Sessions are structured thinking about your real decisions and relationships, between which you act. I bring coaching discipline and commercial judgement; the agenda, the insight and the action are yours.

  4. It ends

    Good coaching builds capability and then concludes. We review against what we contracted, and we finish when the work is done rather than letting it drift into open-ended dependency.

Distinctions

What it is not

Executive coaching gets conflated with adjacent services. The differences matter when you are deciding what to buy.

Not mentoring or advice

I run a business, and that reality informs the questions I ask. But you are not hiring my answers. You are hiring a disciplined process for reaching your own, better ones.

Not training

Training transfers known content to many people, and as a leader I bought plenty of it. It has its place. That place is not a senior leader working out how to lead through a specific, consequential situation.

Not therapy

Coaching works with a functioning leader on their professional effectiveness. Where something needs clinical support, a responsible coach says so and refers.

Further reading

How I think about this work:

All six essays

A short introduction

Short videos

  • The rise of common-sense leadership

    Psychological safety is common sense. If a leader cannot demonstrate basic respect, trust and fairness, the label will not fix it. 1:17

  • Executive, life and career coaching are not the same thing

    What separates executive coaching from the other two, and why the distinction matters before you buy. 2:08

Questions

Common questions

Is coaching confidential?
Yes. Confidentiality is contracted in writing at the start. Where your organisation sponsors the coaching, the sponsor agrees goals and receives progress reviews that you have seen; the content of sessions stays between us.
Do you coach in person or online?
Both. I am based in Vietnam and work with leaders across APAC in person and internationally online.
What does the MCC credential mean in practice?
Master Certified Coach is the highest credential level awarded by the International Coaching Federation. It is assessed on demonstrated coaching skill and sustained practice, not on coursework alone. For you it means the craft has been examined at the most demanding level the profession has.
How do organisations typically engage you?
Usually through HR, talent or the executive sponsor, with a three-way contracting conversation before the coaching starts. I am comfortable working within procurement and supplier processes.
How long does an engagement last?
Long enough to change behaviour, short enough to stay accountable. The span is agreed at contracting and reviewed against it rather than left open. Coaching that drifts into permanence has stopped working.
How are outcomes evaluated?
Against what was contracted at the start. Where a sponsor is involved, they receive progress reviews the leader has seen. The evidence is observable change in how the leader operates and the results that behaviour affects, not a satisfaction score.

Is this the right approach?

Bring the situation you are dealing with and I will tell you whether this is the right approach for it, whether another one fits better, or whether coaching is not what you need. The conversation is confidential and carries no obligation.

Arrange an introductory conversation