Executive coaching for leaders accountable for both people and business

Coaching that starts in your actual situation

This is not therapy and not life coaching. It is a confidential space where you get help to see your own situation more clearly, make the choices you keep postponing, and turn them into action. We keep the conversations down to earth and anchored in what is actually happening in your business.

That is why the coaching often takes place at your own workplace, or as part of a wider leadership or organisational programme rather than as a detached activity. Our experience is that what is discussed in one place only changes something if it is practised in another.

Who uses executive coaching?

• CEOs and executive team members who lack a confidential sparring partner with no agenda of their own.
• Directors and senior managers accountable for operations, people and financial results.
• Members of a management team where collaboration or decisiveness is the real problem.
• Newly appointed leaders who have moved from professional expertise into leadership.
• Leaders in the middle of a change, a restructuring or significant pressure.

What we work on

• Personal leadership: your patterns, your strengths and the situations where you fall short.
• Prioritisation and decisions — including the unpopular ones.
• Difficult conversations, feedback and conflict handling.
• Leading change, and leading the resistance change always meets.
• Communication upwards, downwards and across, including leading at a distance.
• Your own role in executing the strategy.

From reflection to action

1. 1ClarificationAn introductory conversation about what is at stake and what you want out of the process.
2. 2Shared pictureWe build a common picture of the situation — if useful with a JTI profile as a shared language.
3. 3The workConversations at a fixed interval, working on the concrete situations you are in.
4. 4ActionEvery conversation ends with something you do differently before the next one.
5. 5Follow-upWe look at what actually changed — for you, for your people and for the operation.

Where strategy and personal leadership meet

Most strategies do not stall because of the analysis, but because leaders do not change what they do. Executive coaching is therefore closest to execution: what you prioritise, what you follow up on, what you accept and what you do not accept.

It is the same logic we work from in organisational development: the leader, the business, the organisation, the action — and finally the result.

Coaching under change and pressure

Leadership is easiest when things are calm. The value of a confidential sparring partner shows when they are not: during restructuring, in periods of high tempo, in conflicts inside the management team, or when the results are not arriving. We have worked with leadership under demanding conditions for many years and use that experience directly in the conversations.

Mads Cronquist as executive coach

The coaching is delivered by Mads Cronquist, who has 35 years of practical experience delivering leadership and organisational development — as an operational leader, HR manager, project manager and business developer, in Denmark and internationally, including leadership under severe pressure. He was project manager for the Danish Mobile Hospital during the war in Bosnia. He is trained in business psychology and certified in JTI.

He has written more than 50 articles and a book about leadership, which won the prestigious CSR Communication Award from Børsen.

In practice this means the conversations hold both the personal and the commercial. You can talk about your own reactions and about a budget in the same meeting.

How a coaching programme can be built

• An introductory conversation to find out whether the match is right.
• Typically five to eight conversations of one and a half to two hours.
• At your place, at ours or online — ideally combined with observation in your own working day.
• Coaching as part of a leadership programme, where 1:1 conversations support what the group trains together.
• An agreed, fixed level of confidentiality, also when the company pays.

Experience from real programmes

Individual coaching has for many years been a fixed part of our leadership programmes at Jobindex and Umbraco among others, where leaders are coached 1:1 between modules — often at their own workplace. We have also helped leaders learn to hold a coaching conversation with their own employees.

Frequently asked questions

Is executive coaching the same as life coaching?

No. We work on business terms: your leadership, your decisions, your organisation and your business. The personal comes into play when it matters for how you lead.

How many conversations are needed?

A typical programme is five to eight conversations. Some want a single session ahead of a specific situation, others a fixed rhythm across a year.

Are the conversations confidential when the company pays?

Yes. We agree the level of confidentiality up front, and the content of the conversations is not passed on without your knowledge.

Can coaching be combined with a leadership programme?

Yes, and that is often the strongest option. 1:1 coaching between modules is a fixed part of the leadership programmes we build.