Baseline
A psychological capital measure and a short organizational network read on the leader's own sphere. Not a personality profile — a picture of the conditions they are actually operating in, and where their influence does and does not reach.
Most executive coaching starts with a personality instrument and a conversation. This starts with data about the organization you are actually leading.
A senior leader who has been handed something structurally larger than their track record. A newly promoted executive whose competence got them the job and whose competence is not the thing being tested any more. A functional leader who now has to change how work moves across boundaries they do not control.
Often, right now, that change is an AI deployment. Sometimes it is a merger, a restructure, or a growth curve the organization outran. The underlying problem is the same: the leader is being asked to redesign something while standing inside it.
Typical engagements run six months. Clients are usually directors, vice presidents and C-suite leaders at Utah organizations between two hundred and two thousand people, and program and functional leaders in the defense and aerospace corridor.
A psychological capital measure and a short organizational network read on the leader's own sphere. Not a personality profile — a picture of the conditions they are actually operating in, and where their influence does and does not reach.
Twice-monthly sessions against a small number of concrete objectives drawn from the baseline. Between sessions, real experiments in the real organization, with the evidence brought back and examined.
The same instruments, run again. Direction of travel on measured constructs, not a satisfaction survey. If nothing moved, that is a finding, and you should know it rather than feel it.
Measures: psychological capital (PsyCap) after Luthans and colleagues, and organizational network analysis after Cross and Parker. Both are validated instruments with published reliability data. Adaptive space, after Uhl-Bien and Arena, is a structured assessment rather than a validated instrument — no such instrument exists in general use, and you should be told that rather than sold it. Each is assessed in full in the evidence file: psychological capital and complexity leadership and adaptive space. Full citations also in The 6%.
There is no proprietary four-quadrant model here. Where the field already has measures with decades of peer-reviewed work behind them, inventing a new one would be marketing rather than science. And where the field does not have one — which is more often than the leadership-development industry admits — inventing a model to fill the gap would be worse.
There is no packaged curriculum, because the diagnostic decides what the six months are about, and it is different every time.
And there is no promise that the coaching alone will fix a structural problem. If the assessment says the organization has nowhere for a new way of working to survive, coaching an individual leader harder will not change that. You will be told so, early, in writing.
Transformations rarely fail at the executive decision and rarely fail at the front line. They fail in the layer between — the directors and senior managers who have to translate a strategic commitment into changed work, usually without the authority to change anything outside their own function.
That layer is a team with measurable properties. How much psychological capital it holds, where the advice network runs and where it breaks, whether the group has any protected space to try something that competes with a quarterly number.
Team engagements combine a group diagnostic with facilitated sessions over three to six months, plus individual coaching for the two or three people the network map identifies as load-bearing. Those people are frequently not the most senior in the room.
Coaching is what this practice does most, and it is what most engagements turn out to need. But the measurement comes first for a reason, and occasionally it points somewhere else.
When that happens you will be told, in the first month, in writing. What follows is not a menu of services — it is the short list of things the diagnostic actually finds, and what each one requires instead.
Each of these draws on a distinct research literature, and the ones this practice uses are set out in the evidence file on the same terms as everything else — including where the evidence is thin. Two are worth reading before you commission anything: what the meta-analyses actually say about executive coaching, and why a 360 is a weaker opening move than it looks.
A single practitioner offering five disciplines should make you suspicious, and it should. The honest version is this: the diagnostic is the product, the coaching is what it most often prescribes, and the rest is what happens when it prescribes something else. If a finding needs more hands than one person has, you will be told that too.
Thirty minutes, no deck. If the diagnostics are wrong for your situation you will be told that in the call rather than three weeks into a scoping exercise.