What Makes a Good Executive Coach

An executive coach is a trained professional who works one-on-one with a leader over a defined period, typically three to twelve months, to help them see their own patterns, make more deliberate decisions, and lead more effectively. That is worth distinguishing from three things coaching is often confused with. A consultant gives advice based on their expertise. A mentor shares knowledge from their own experience in a similar role. A therapist provides clinical treatment for psychological conditions.

Coaching does none of those things. A coach asks questions that help the leader think more clearly, then holds the leader accountable to the commitments they make to themselves. The second part of that sentence matters enormously, and most people overlook it. Coaching is also an unregulated industry. Anyone can print business cards tomorrow that read "Executive Coach." No license is required, no minimum training, no oversight body. That is precisely why the question of what makes a good executive coach is worth answering carefully.

TL;DR

• Most articles answer this with a trait list. The real differentiator is a coach's inner discipline, not their methodology.

• ICF credentials signal a baseline of training and ethics, but credential level alone does not predict coaching quality.

• Coaching presence, the quality of attention a coach brings to the room, is what clients most often cite as decisive.

• A functioning accountability structure happens between sessions, not just during them. That is where behavioral change takes hold.

• HR leaders and executives ask different questions when evaluating a coach, but both are ultimately evaluating fit and trust.

• With 29 years of MCC-level coaching experience, I can tell you: the coaches who produce lasting change are the ones who have done their own work.

Why a Trait List Misses the Point

The listicle version of this question produces answers like: deep listening, emotional intelligence, years of experience, strategic thinking, and the ability to ask incisive questions. Those qualities are real. The problem is they describe what good coaching looks like from the outside, and they offer no explanation for why two coaches with identical backgrounds produce wildly different results with similar clients.

What the typical answers get right

Deep listening and emotional intelligence matter. Experience matters. A coach who has never navigated organizational complexity will struggle to hold a C-suite leader's reality without flinching. The standard qualities the field points to are genuinely present in good coaches, and I would not argue otherwise.

When I think about the coaches on my team at Leading with Heart, the ones who produce the strongest client outcomes do exhibit these qualities consistently. The issue is that a trait inventory does not explain the mechanism. It describes the flower without describing the roots.

What the trait list leaves out

What the list cannot account for is the coach's interior life. Specifically, whether the coach has done enough of their own self-examination to coach without projection. A coach who has not worked through their own relationship with authority will unconsciously collude with a leader who deflects feedback.

A coach who is anxious about conflict will soften observations that need to land clearly. The coaching session will feel productive. The leader will leave feeling good about themselves. And six months later, the patterns will be exactly where they started. In 29 years of this work, I have seen that gap more times than I can count, and it is rarely visible in a credential or a résumé.

What ICF Credentials Actually Tell You

A credential from the International Coaching Federation tells you that a coach has completed a minimum number of training hours, logged a minimum number of coaching hours under supervision, and agreed to abide by a code of ethics. That is meaningful. The 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study found that 73% of coaches report their clients expect them to hold a credential.

A separate ICF consumer awareness study found that clients who worked with credentialed coaches were 28% more satisfied with their coaching experience than those who did not. The credential matters. It just does not tell you everything.

The three ICF credential levels explained

The ICF offers three credential levels, each requiring progressively more training and coaching hours.

Credential	Training Hours Required	Coaching Hours Required	Approximate Share of ICF Credentialed Coaches
ACC (Associate Certified Coach)	60+	100+	Majority
PCC (Professional Certified Coach)	125+	500+	Significant minority
MCC (Master Certified Coach)	200+	2,500+	Under 5%

The MCC is the highest credential the ICF offers. It requires 2,500 hours of documented coaching practice, submission of recorded sessions evaluated against a rigorous set of competencies, and mentoring from another MCC. Fewer than 5% of credentialed coaches worldwide hold it.

The hours alone represent years of sustained, serious practice. I earned my MCC after more than two decades in the field, and the preparation process changed how I coach, because it required me to examine my own technique at a level most practitioners never reach.

What to ask beyond the credential

Credential verified, now go deeper. Ask a prospective coach whether they have ongoing supervision from a qualified coaching supervisor, which is distinct from peer consultation or informal check-ins. Ask when they last received coaching themselves. A coach who has not been coached recently is operating on memory rather than practice. Ask them to describe the last time a coaching engagement did not go the way they hoped, and what they learned from it. The quality of the answer to that last question tells you more about the coach than the letters after their name.

Coaching Presence Is Not a Soft Skill

Coaching presence is the capacity to be fully attentive to the person in front of you with no agenda running in the background. It is not warmth, though warmth can be part of it. It requires genuine empathic attunement to the leader's experience, but it goes beyond sympathy or rapport. Presence is discipline. It is the result of a coach quieting their own interior noise long enough to hear what the leader is actually saying, as opposed to what the coach expects them to say based on the coaching framework they are running.

I have sat across from leaders in the middle of significant transitions, new CEO roles, organizational restructurings, team crises, and the pattern I see most clearly is this: the leaders who make the biggest leaps in those moments are the ones whose coach was fully in the room with them. Not managing the session, not steering toward a predetermined insight, but genuinely curious about what this particular person, in this particular situation, actually needed to see. The Harvard Business Review's research on executive coaching identified the coach-executive relationship as one of the primary factors in coaching success, ahead of the coach's specific methodology. That finding matches what I have observed across hundreds of engagements. The quality of attention in the room is the variable that is hardest to fake and easiest to feel.

When I work with a leader who is struggling to understand why their team does not trust them, the temptation for any coach is to move quickly toward solutions. To draw on frameworks, offer observations, name the dynamic, and feel competent doing it. The coach who stays curious longer, who asks one more question before offering any reflection, is the coach who helps the leader find their own answer. The leader's own answer is the one they will actually act on.

How a Good Coach Builds Accountability Between Sessions

A good coaching engagement does not live only in the sessions. The behavioral change happens in the space between conversations, in the moments when the leader is in a difficult meeting and remembers something they committed to trying differently. A functioning accountability structure is what makes that possible.

What accountability structure looks like in practice

In the engagements I run through our executive coaching practice, accountability structure typically includes three elements. First, the leader leaves each session with a clear behavioral commitment, something specific they intend to do or try before the next conversation. Second, there is a mechanism for reflection between sessions, often a prompt or a brief journaling practice, that asks the leader to notice when the pattern they are working on shows up. Third, the next session opens with a review of what happened, what the leader tried, what worked, and what did not. That sequence sounds simple. It is harder to maintain than it sounds, because it requires the coach to hold the leader to what they said they would do, even when the leader arrives with a new agenda item that feels more pressing.

The difference between accountability and pressure

Accountability in coaching and pressure are two different things. Pressure says: you said you would do this, why did you not? Accountability says: you said this mattered to you, let's understand what got in the way. That distinction requires the coach to approach the conversation with genuine curiosity and no judgment about the outcome. It also requires trust, which is built over time through consistency.

A coach who holds accountability with humility, staying focused on the leader's growth rather than on being right, creates conditions where the leader is willing to be honest about their failures. That honesty is where the most useful coaching happens. Leaders whose coaches hold this kind of structure report significantly higher goal achievement than those in engagements that lack it, a finding consistent with CCL's research on leadership development effectiveness.

What HR Leaders Should Look for When Selecting a Coach

HR leaders evaluating a coach for a senior executive are making a different kind of decision than the executive making a choice for themselves. The HR leader is also responsible to the organization, to the executive, and in many cases to the program's consistency across multiple leaders simultaneously.

Beyond the résumé: evaluating coach fit for an executive

The most important step is the chemistry session, a brief conversation between the coach and the prospective client before any engagement begins. This is a mutual assessment of whether the relationship has the conditions to work. HR leaders should observe, where possible, or ask the executive directly afterward: did you feel genuinely heard? Were you challenged in a way that felt respectful? Did the coach ask more questions than they made statements? Those three observations predict more about the engagement's effectiveness than any biography.

Confidentiality is the other critical variable. Ask the coach directly how they handle stakeholder reporting. A good coach will have a clear, consistent policy: they report on themes and progress without disclosing the content of sessions. If the answer is vague, that is a meaningful signal. You also want to know how the coach handles a situation where the executive's behavior is genuinely problematic, and whether they would raise that with HR or with the executive directly. This is an area where many organizations do not ask clearly enough, and where misaligned expectations create damage later.

Questions HR leaders should ask a coaching firm

When working with a coaching firm rather than an independent coach, the vetting moves to the firm's systems. Ask how coaches are selected and trained within the firm. Ask how quality is maintained across multiple simultaneous engagements. Ask what happens if an engagement is not working and the executive wants a different coach. Ask how progress is tracked and what data the firm provides to the organization. Our enterprise coaching governance practice is built around exactly these questions, because organizations that manage large coaching programs need consistency and visibility, not just individual coach quality.

What to Look for If You Are the Executive Being Coached

If you are the leader considering coaching for yourself, the evaluation is more personal, and your instincts are more useful than any checklist. The question is whether, after an initial conversation with a prospective coach, you feel more curious about yourself than when you started.

A good coach asks questions you carry with you. Questions that are still sitting with you two days later, because they named something you have not quite been able to articulate. If you sit with a prospective coach for an hour and leave feeling that you heard a lot of good ideas, the coach may be a skilled consultant. If you leave with a question you want to spend time with, you may have found a good coach.

You should also notice whether you felt judged. A good coach holds your situation with genuine care and no agenda about what you should conclude. You can disagree with your coach. You can push back. A coach who needs you to arrive at a particular insight is steering you toward their preferred answer rather than coaching you toward your own. That is a meaningful distinction once you have experienced both sides of it. The coach's own humility, their willingness to not know, is what creates the space for you to figure out what you actually think.

Finally, consider whether the engagement has direction. A coaching relationship with no clear arc, where every session starts from scratch, often produces interesting conversations without measurable growth. You should be able to name, after two or three months, what you have changed and how you know. That clarity is the coach's responsibility as much as yours. For more on what a well-structured engagement looks like, see how I approach executive coaching goals with new clients.

The Five Qualities That Hold Across Both Perspectives

Whether you are an HR leader matching a coach to an executive or a senior leader evaluating a coach for yourself, five qualities separate the coaches who produce lasting change from the ones who produce good conversations.

The first is purpose. A good coach holds the arc of the work across sessions and helps the leader stay connected to why the engagement exists. Sessions have direction, and the overall engagement has a destination the leader helped define.

The second is engagement. Full presence in the room, not session management from behind a framework, is what distinguishes a coach who is genuinely attentive from one who is technically competent. The leader feels the difference immediately, even if they cannot name it.

The third is empathy. Good coaches are attuned to what the leader is not saying, to the hesitation behind a confident statement, to the exhaustion underneath a well-practiced answer. This attunement requires accuracy, not agreement. You can read more about how I think about empathy as a leadership skill and why it belongs on both sides of the coaching relationship.

The fourth is understanding. A good coach holds the leader's full context without judgment. Organizational pressure, career history, the interpersonal dynamics that show up in how a leader runs a meeting, all of it is part of what a coach works with. Flattening complexity into a simple problem to solve is where a lot of mediocre coaching lives.

The fifth is humility. The coach's job is to be curious about this particular leader's growth, and humility is what keeps that curiosity alive across a twelve-month engagement. A coach who is coaching to demonstrate their own intelligence is not asking the question the leader most needs to hear.

These five qualities are not a checklist. They describe a way of being in the coaching relationship that either is or is not present. You can feel the difference within the first thirty minutes of working with a coach who has all of them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What qualities should I look for in an executive coach?

Look for a coach with verified ICF credentials, ideally PCC or MCC level, who can also demonstrate that they have invested in their own development through supervision and continued coaching. Beyond credentials, assess whether they ask more than they tell, whether they can articulate their approach clearly without resorting to jargon, and whether you feel genuinely heard in an initial conversation. The coach-client relationship is the primary vehicle of change in any engagement, so fit matters as much as credentials.

How do I know if my executive coach is effective?

After two to three months, you should be able to name at least one behavioral pattern you have changed and describe specifically how you know it has changed. Feedback from colleagues, changes in how meetings go, or shifts in how you handle pressure are all observable indicators. If you cannot name something concrete, raise it directly with your coach. A good coach will welcome that conversation and either help you identify the progress you have not been tracking, or adjust the engagement's focus.

What is the difference between a good coach and a great coach?

A good coach asks useful questions and helps leaders think more clearly. A great coach does that and also holds the full arc of the leader's development across the entire engagement, noticing patterns that span multiple sessions and naming what is underneath the presenting question. The difference often comes down to experience and the coach's own self-awareness. Great coaches know what they do not know, and they stay curious rather than defaulting to a formula.

Do executive coaches need to be ICF certified?

ICF certification is not legally required, but it is a meaningful signal. The 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study found that 73% of coaches report their clients expect them to hold a credential, and client satisfaction is measurably higher when working with credentialed coaches. More importantly, the process of earning a credential, particularly at the PCC or MCC level, requires a coach to examine their own practice in ways that produce better coaching. I would not hire an uncredentialed coach for an executive engagement unless they could demonstrate an equivalent rigor through some other means.

What does a good executive coaching session look like?

A good session opens with the leader setting the agenda, not the coach. The coach asks questions that help the leader examine their assumptions and arrive at their own conclusions. By the end, the leader has made at least one concrete commitment to something they intend to try before the next session. The leader leaves with more clarity than they had at the start, and often with a question they want to keep thinking about. The session should feel productive without feeling like a performance.

How long does executive coaching typically take to show results?

Most leaders begin to notice small behavioral shifts within the first six to eight weeks, particularly in how they approach difficult conversations or high-stakes decisions. More substantive changes, the kind that are visible to a leader's team and stakeholders, typically emerge between three and six months into an engagement. Most of the executive coaching engagements I lead run nine to twelve months, because that duration allows enough repetition for new behaviors to become habits rather than experiments. Shorter engagements can be useful for a specific, well-defined challenge, but rarely produce the depth of change that longer work does.

Dr. Jeff Kaplan is the founder and CEO of Leading with Heart, Inc., an executive coaching and leadership development firm based in Philadelphia. He holds a PhD in psychology and an MBA, and is one of fewer than 5% of coaches globally to hold the Master Certified Coach credential from the International Coaching Federation. He has been coaching senior leaders for 29 years.