The hidden cost of waiting.
Chapter 3.
The cost of late coaching is the cost of the runway you did not build.
Senior leaders who hire a coach for the first time when they are already in trouble pay one bill — the cost of the engagement. Senior leaders who hire a coach early pay the same bill, but they buy a different instrument. The early coaching is not preventative. It is constructive. It builds the runway the late coaching is trying to extend.
Three case studies follow. Each is a real leader. Names and identifying details have been changed. The numbers are exact.
Case A — A Director who hired a coach two years before the SBU Head step. The engagement ran for the first six months of the runway. It surfaced two behavioural patterns the Director would have tripped over inside the SBU role — a tendency to over-consult before deciding, and a quiet avoidance of peer-level conflict. Both were fixable inside the six-month window. Twelve months after the engagement closed, the Director was promoted to SBU Head. Eighteen months after that, the SBU was the second-largest in the company by revenue. The cost of the coaching engagement was 1.4% of the Director's annualised compensation in the year of the engagement. The compensation step-up over the four years that followed was 280%.
Case B — A VP who hired a coach in month three of a stalled SBU Head role. The engagement ran for nine months. The first three were spent stabilising. The next six were spent rebuilding stakeholder relationships that had deteriorated during the stall. The VP kept the SBU Head role and was eventually promoted, but the promotion arrived eighteen months later than it would have arrived for an early-coaching equivalent. The cost of the coaching engagement was the same as Case A in absolute terms. The compensation step-up over the four years that followed was 110%.
Case C — An SVP who hired a coach four months before being managed out. The engagement was unable to do the work it would have done two years earlier. The behavioural patterns that led to the exit had compounded into a pattern of stakeholder distrust that no six-month engagement could rebuild. The SVP exited the company with severance, joined another company in a smaller role, and is now thriving in the smaller role. The coaching engagement was the right intervention. It arrived too late.
The three cases are not unusual. They are the modal distribution of when senior leaders engage coaching, in the proportion I see in working practice. Roughly one in four senior leaders hires a coach early. Roughly half hire a coach in the middle of a stall. Roughly one in four hires a coach when the exit is already inevitable.
The math at the back of the book runs the calculation in detail. The summary is simple. Early coaching is the cheapest leadership development a senior leader will ever buy. Late coaching is the most expensive.
The discomfort of this chapter is intentional. Most readers will recognise themselves in Case B or Case C. The recognition is the data. What you do with the data is the question.
Are you in the early window, the middle window, or the late window of your current role?