Sponsored, not supervised
For people, talent and HR teams funding coaching for a leader whose scope has widened. The organisation sets the purpose. The room stays closed. Both of those need to be true for the money to be well spent.
01 The three-way contract
Everyone should know what they receive
The sponsor
- Agreement on the purpose of the engagement
- Confirmation that sessions took place
- Participation in scheduled review points
- Invoicing and contracting documentation
The leader
- Full confidentiality of session content
- Ownership of objectives and of any notes
- The ability to end the engagement
- A named boundary if the work drifts out of scope
Nobody
- Session transcripts or recordings
- Assessments of the leader's performance
- Behavioural scores or personality profiling
- Anything usable in a performance process
02 Appropriate use
When to fund this
The clearest case is a leader whose responsibility has genuinely widened: a promotion into a broader function, an acquisition that doubled the org, a founder now managing managers, where the organisation would like that transition to be thought about rather than survived.
It is a poor instrument for compliance, for signalling investment without intent, or for producing evidence about an individual. If the underlying need is structural, such as an unclear mandate, an unresolvable reporting line, or an unfunded remit, coaching will surface it but will not fix it, and we will say that plainly at contracting.
03 Procurement & practicalities
The questions buyers ask first
- Can coaching be used to fix a performance issue?
- Not as a substitute for a performance process. Coaching can support a leader who is stretched by a genuinely wider remit; it cannot be a deniable route to managing someone out, and any engagement framed that way will be declined.
- What reporting will we receive?
- Attendance and progress against the objectives agreed at contracting, discussed at scheduled review points with the leader present. No content, no ratings, no written character assessment.
- How many leaders can be supported at once?
- Capacity is finite and depends on current engagements. We will give a straight answer about availability at first contact rather than accept work that cannot be held properly.
- How is the work priced?
- By engagement, after a scoping conversation, confirmed in a written proposal. No rate card, package or discount structure is published here because it would not reflect an actual agreement.
Direct line for sponsors
enquiries@lintelpractice.com