Published: July 2026 · By the Stratos Coaching Team — Certified Executive Coach (CEC)
The blunt version of the question senior leaders keep asking each other — is this actually worth the money? — answered honestly, with the community sentiment and the sourced evidence side by side.
The honest consensus across these communities is that it depends almost entirely on the coach and your readiness. When the fit is right, leaders describe it as one of the highest-leverage investments of their careers — and the research backs them up, with a median organizational return of 7:1. A weak coach with no defined outcome, though, is money wasted.
By the time someone is weighing a coach, they are usually a VP, SVP, or new C-suite leader who is very good at evaluating investments — and executive coaching resists easy evaluation. There is no fixed price, no guaranteed output, and no shortage of people happy to take a senior leader's money. So they do what careful buyers do: they go looking for candid peer accounts before they commit.
A recurring pattern in those discussions is that the strongest opinions sit at both extremes. Some leaders call coaching the single most useful thing they did in a transition; others call it an expensive conversation that went nowhere. The interesting part is not the split — it is that the two camps consistently describe different setups. That is the real answer hiding inside the debate.
When people describe coaching that paid off, the details rhyme. They had a concrete situation — a promotion into a bigger mandate, a board they suddenly had to influence, a team that had lost confidence in them — and they worked with someone who had navigated that exact altitude before. The value they name is rarely soft. It is a specific decision made better, a relationship repaired, a first 90 days that did not derail.
That is consistent with how coaching works at the senior level: the leverage comes from compressing expensive learning. A VP who avoids one bad reorg, or lands one board presentation that would otherwise have stalled a strategy, has already recovered the fee. Our guide to coaching for VPs and SVPs and our evidence-based benefits page unpack where that leverage actually lives.
Anecdotes are where these threads start; data is where the argument should end. The most-cited study is the ICF Global Coaching Client Study, run with PricewaterhouseCoopers, which found that 86 percent of companies tracking it recouped at least their investment, with a median company return of 7:1 and an individual return of 3.44:1.
Zoom out and the category is not fringe: the ICF Global Coaching Study estimated the profession generated roughly $4.6 billion in annual revenue, with more than 100,000 practitioners worldwide — a market that size does not persist on placebo. For a fuller treatment, our ROI reference and statistics page collect the numbers with their sources, and our cost guide shows what you are weighing that return against.
The disappointed accounts deserve equal airtime, because they are instructive. Three conditions come up again and again. First, no defined outcome — the engagement was open-ended "development" with nothing to measure, so nobody could tell whether it worked. Second, a mismatch in experience — the coach had never operated at the level of the problem, so the advice stayed generic. Third, a leader who was not actually ready to change, treating sessions as a venting slot rather than work.
None of these is an indictment of coaching. They are an indictment of buying it carelessly. The same threads that contain the horror stories usually contain the fix in the next comment: get specific about the outcome, and get specific about who is delivering it.
If you want coaching to be worth it, three moves do most of the work. Define the outcome you are actually buying — a transition navigated, a behavior changed, a set of conversations landed. Choose a coach who has held a seat at or above your altitude, because relevant operating experience is what turns advice into judgment. And agree up front on how you will both know it worked.
Do those three things and you are no longer gambling on the category; you are managing an investment with a defined return. That is the difference between the leaders who call coaching transformative and the ones who call it a waste — and it is almost entirely within your control before you sign.
The honest consensus is that it depends on the coach and your readiness. With the right fit, leaders describe it as one of the best investments of their careers; the research shows a median 7:1 organizational return. A weak coach with no defined outcome is money wasted.
The evidence says yes when it is set up well — 86% of companies in the ICF/PwC study recouped at least their investment. See the sourced ROI evidence and statistics.
When there is no clear outcome, the coach lacks relevant senior experience, or the leader is not ready to change. The "waste of money" stories almost always describe one of these three.
Define the outcome, choose a coach who has operated at your altitude, and agree on how progress is measured. Weigh the likely return against the real cost of executive coaching.
Explore related guides: executive coaching cost · executive coaching ROI · benefits of coaching · the statistics · VP & SVP coaching
Stratos Coaching provides executive coaching for VPs, SVPs, and C-suite leaders. stratoscoaching.com
The clearest way to answer the question is a specific conversation about your actual transition. Stratos Coaching works with VPs, SVPs, and C-suite leaders — with coaches who have held the seat — and the first strategy call is free. You will leave with a defined outcome and an honest read on whether coaching is the right investment right now.