Coaching Isn’t Remedial. It’s Your Assurance Policy for New Executive Appointments.
Most organisations spend $400k–$600k hiring a senior leader.
What they don’t invest in as deliberately is the landing.
The first few months — when authority is still being interpreted, and expectations are forming.
The cost of getting that wrong isn’t just money.
It’s time, drift, and sometimes talent.
Expectation vs reality:
On paper, the hire makes sense.
Track record. Presence. Credibility.
Everyone expects traction to follow.
In reality, the problem isn’t competence.
It’s that the system hasn’t yet decided what this leader can do.
Here’s what starts happening instead.
Team members are more careful.
They stop sharing unfinished ideas in the room.Peers watch quietly.
They start leading in parallel rather than challenging openly.Escalation shifts.
Either everything gets pushed up, or nothing does.
None of it looks serious enough to address.
But the system starts managing exposure.
And once people start managing exposure around a leader —
The narrative is already forming, even if nobody has said a word.
And the leader feels it too.
They’re trying to move, but the terrain is unfamiliar.
They’re reading faces, silences, and side conversations.
They’re making decisions without sufficient context or feedback.
It’s not that the executive is failing.
It’s that the system is holding its breath.
That holding-breath phase is where:
Intent gets misunderstood.
Small signals get over-weighted.
Trust becomes conditional.
Confidence thins in ways that are hard to measure.
The misread:
Most organisations assume a strong hire has certainty of landing.
They expect that capability will compensate for the missing orientation.
But in senior appointments, success is decided in a narrower window:
how quickly the leader lands, builds credibility, and creates momentum — before interpretations harden.
By the time concerns become visible and discussable, workarounds are already in place — and the organisation is already paying for the drift.
I’ve lived this from the inside.
In one of my executive transitions, delivery wasn’t the issue. Visibility wasn’t the issue.
The issue was the system's politeness.
I could feel it — even though nobody said it out loud.
People were watching.
Would I land here?
Or would I quietly fail?
In that kind of environment, a narrative forms fast — even in silence.
What was needed wasn’t more time.
It was support while the transition was still malleable.
What I learned (and what now sits at the centre of my work) is this::
Leaders don’t falter only because they misstep.
They falter because intent gets misunderstood —
and nobody intervenes early enough to correct the narrative.
This is the ‘value window’:
After an executive enters and before patterns harden.
And this is where coaching actually matters.
Not as motivation.
Not as a correction.
But to protect the investment — without waiting for friction.
What does intervention look like?
If you want a senior hire to land well, the intervention isn’t more onboarding.
It is:
Mandate precision (what success really means, and who gets to define it).
Assessment debriefing (not just for selection, but for self-awareness under pressure).
Signal debriefing (what’s being read as intent, and what’s just noise).
Stakeholder alignment before polite distance becomes the norm
Decision rights clarity so the system doesn’t freeze while everyone waits
Without that, leaders are left to integrate publicly while expectations are forming privately.
And the cost isn’t only financial.
It shows up as:
Stalled priorities.
Leadership time redirected to recovery.
Avoidable attrition.
Questions worth sitting with — if you’re accountable for leadership continuity:
Where is risk showing up around the leader, before results shift?
At what point do people stop offering clarity and start managing exposure?
What are you currently expecting “capability” to compensate for — that the system hasn’t made clear yet?
That’s what integration support ensures in high-stakes appointments.
Not a leader’s competence.
The system’s ability to let that competence land.
