The brief usually arrives in a neutral register. A people director wants coaching for a partner, a director or a chief executive who is “under a lot of pressure at the moment”. The person is capable, well regarded and still delivering. What’s changed is harder to name: decisions that used to be quick are taking longer, the temper is shorter, the judgement a little less reliable than it was. Nobody is saying burnout. Everybody is thinking about it.
I get a lot of these, and I’ve come to think the standard coaching response is often too narrow.
What sustained pressure does
Senior jobs have always been exposed: everyone can see you, mistakes are expensive, and there are stretches when the demands don’t let up for months. That isn’t new. What the last few years have added is the sense that the stretch never ends. Mental Health UK’s 2025 Burnout Report, a YouGov survey of 4,400 UK adults, found that nine in ten had felt high or extreme pressure at some point in the past year, a third felt it always or often, and one in five had needed time off because of it. Senior people aren’t immune. In my experience they’re just less likely to take the time off.
The effect on leadership is specific and well documented. A 2025 review of 25 studies on sleep loss and decision-making found that short sleep reliably impairs judgement and pushes people towards riskier choices, with the effect strongest on exactly the kind of uncertain decisions senior leaders make all day. In practice it looks like a managing partner deciding things in the car park because there’s no capacity left for the meeting, a chief executive whose team has learned to bring things before eleven, a director who has stopped reading the second page. The organisation experiences it as a leadership problem. It is, but not the kind a conversation about delegation fixes.
Where coaching reaches, and where it doesn’t
Coaching works; the evidence on that is settled. The two main reviews of workplace coaching, Theeboom and colleagues in 2014 and Jones, Woods and Guillaume in 2016, both find meaningful effects on performance, coping and wellbeing. But the studies measure coaching on people who are, broadly, functioning. When someone is running on sustained strain, a conversation about goals, influence and impact is reaching a person whose capacity to act on it has quietly eroded. The coach who sticks to the performance script is working on the wrong layer.
This is where training outside coaching helps, and I’ll be precise about how. Before I coached I trained in humanistic counselling and Gestalt psychotherapy, and later took a master’s in clinical nutrition. None of that turns the coaching room into a consulting room; it isn’t one, and I keep it that way. What the training does is let me take in the whole of the person in front of me rather than just the job: how they’re thinking and deciding, how they’re getting on with the people around them, and what sleep, recovery and physical load are doing to both. Most of the time the coaching stays firmly on the leadership. Sometimes the most useful thing that can happen in a first session is for the person to hear that the problem isn’t their leadership at all, and that the last eighteen months deserve some attention before anything else does.
What the coaching does instead
The first job is to separate three things that have become tangled: the demands of the role, the habits the person has built to meet them, and the physical state they’re meeting them in. They feel like one problem. They aren’t, and each needs a different response. A role that has grown beyond one person needs a conversation with the organisation, not a resilience plan. A habit of carrying everything needs practice at putting things down, with someone noticing when it creeps back. A body that hasn’t slept properly in a year needs that taken seriously before anything else will stick.
Once those are apart, ordinary coaching does what it’s good at: reflection, challenge, practical commitments, and space between sessions to try something. The person stays in charge throughout. I don’t create dependency; the point is that they leave better equipped to run themselves, which is also the test of whether the work has done anything. And if something belongs with a doctor or a therapist rather than a coach, I say so and help them find it.
The aim, theirs rather than mine, is usually the same: to be back to working well and able to keep it up, rather than holding on. When that happens the difference shows in the organisation long before it shows in anyone’s engagement survey. How an engagement runs, and what a sponsor can expect on confidentiality, is on the executive coaching page.