What Happens Between Executive Coaching Sessions?
Published August 26, 2026 · By the Stratos Coaching Team — Certified Executive Coach (CEC)
You meet your coach for ninety minutes a month. The other ninety-nine percent of your working hours is where the engagement is won or lost, and most buyers never ask what happens there.
What happens between executive coaching sessions?
Between executive coaching sessions, the leader runs fieldwork: practicing one specific target behavior in real meetings, collecting monthly ratings from about five colleagues who see them work, and logging what triggered the old habit. Sessions set the plan. The weeks in between are where behavior actually changes and gets measured.
What does a leader actually do between executive coaching sessions?
At Stratos Coaching every engagement is built so the leader leaves each session with one behavior to practice, situations to practice it in, and a way to find out whether anyone noticed. The practice is unglamorous. An SVP working on holding the room picks the Thursday operating review, the one where she historically jumps in at minute four, and works on staying quiet until the presenter finishes. Alongside it runs a log: what happened, what the trigger was, what she will try next time.
Before a high-stakes moment the sequence inverts. The work becomes rehearsal in the session, with the leader saying the actual words rather than describing them, and the weeks after become execution. Our guide to what a six-month executive coaching engagement includes covers the cadence around this fieldwork.
How does the target behavior get chosen?
The Center for Executive Coaching (CEC) curriculum, which our lead coach holds, is precise here. The target must be stated as something to do, not something to stop doing, in the CEC’s words, “so that it can be observed and measured.” “Interrupt less” cannot be counted. “Let people finish” can.
Senior leaders resist the narrowness. They arrive with six things to fix and find it absurd to spend a quarter on one. The CEC answer is the pearl necklace: a single behavior is one pearl in a necklace, and picking up the pearl picks up the necklace. Broad traits like perfectionism are conclusions others draw. The behaviors underneath them can be worked.
The other CEC tool that lives entirely between sessions is the Triple A sequence: become Aware of the trigger, Avert the pull to react automatically, then choose an Alternative. There is no trigger in a coaching session. It runs on a Tuesday, in the meeting where the trigger is. Our Altitude Framework rests on the same premise.
Who tells you whether the new behavior is actually landing?
Not the coach. The coach is not in your operating review. The people in it are. In the CEC behavioral method, leader and coach select around five supporters positioned to observe the behavior, at roughly twenty minutes a month each, and the leader asks each of them monthly, on a scale of one to five, how often they saw it.
The conversation happens live, never email, because a rating typed into a form loses the qualifier that follows it. Scores are tracked against an explicit bar: three consecutive months averaging a four or five. One good month is a good month. Three in a row is a habit.
Nowhere to hide, which is what converts a soft engagement into a measured one. We go further in how to know if executive coaching is working. For VPs and SVPs the observers are usually peers rather than reports, so selection matters as much as cadence, which is where our VP and SVP coaching engagements begin. Our overview of executive coaching services sets out what else a full engagement contains.
What does this level of between-session structure cost?
It is rarely a separate line item. It is bundled into the engagement, which is why quotes that look alike on paper differ so much in what you get. Executive coaching runs $300 to $1,000+ per session, with a full engagement over six to twelve months landing between $7,500 and $30,000. A formal 360 process to set the initial target adds $2,000 to $7,000.
Two engagements at the same headline price can be very different products. One is twelve conversations. The other adds a defined target behavior, a briefed observer group, a monthly measurement cycle, and a coach who reads the log first. The market picture is in our guide to the cost of executive coaching, and why executive coaching quotes vary explains what firms are pricing.
In a business case, the between-session design is the part worth defending, because it produces the evidence. Our executive coaching cost by engagement type breakdown sets out ranges by format.
Does between-session work actually change results?
The most direct evidence is the oldest, and it is worth reading carefully rather than as a headline. In a 1997 study in Public Personnel Management, Olivero, Bane, and Kopelman followed 31 managers in a public agency through a management training program, then gave them eight weeks of one-to-one coaching. Training alone raised productivity by 22.4 percent. Training followed by the coaching period raised it by 88 percent (ERIC record).
The caveats are real: 31 people, one agency, no control group, self-generated measures. Quoting 88 percent as a law of coaching oversells it. What matters is what those eight weeks held: goal setting, practice, feedback, supervisory involvement, and evaluation of results. That is structured fieldwork with observation built in.
For scale, the 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study, run with PricewaterhouseCoopers across 127 countries, put global coaching revenue at $5.34 billion, up 17 percent since 2023, with 122,974 practitioners. A market that size holds a wide range of delivery models, which is why you ask about method rather than assume one exists.
What people ask about between-session coaching work on Reddit and in peer forums
Is the between-session work just homework a coach assigns to look rigorous?
Fair suspicion, and the test is whether it generates data the coach acts on. Fieldwork nobody reviews is homework. Fieldwork tied to observer ratings tracked monthly against a stated bar is measurement.
How much time does this take on top of an already full week?
Less than people expect, because the practice happens inside meetings already on the calendar. The additive time is the observer conversations, roughly twenty minutes per supporter per month. For five supporters that is under two hours.
Key Takeaways
- The engagement is decided between sessions. Sessions set the target and review the evidence.
- One behavior at a time: a single behavior is a pearl in a necklace, and working it pulls the pattern with it.
- The target behavior is stated as something to do, not something to stop doing, so it can be observed and counted.
- About five supporters rate it monthly on a one to five scale, in live conversation. The bar is three consecutive months averaging four to five.
- Before you buy, ask any firm four things: how the target behavior will be stated, who observes it and how they are briefed, what the measurement cadence and bar are, and who reads the leader’s log before each session.
Frequently asked questions
What happens between executive coaching sessions?
The leader practices one target behavior in real meetings, logs what happened and what triggered old patterns, and collects monthly ratings from colleagues who observe the behavior directly. The coach reviews that material first, so the session works on evidence rather than recollection.
How many people give feedback during an executive coaching engagement?
Around five supporters is standard in the behavioral method taught by the Center for Executive Coaching. Each is asked once a month, in live conversation rather than by email, to rate on a scale of one to five how often they observed the behavior. The goal is three consecutive months averaging four to five.
How much does an executive coaching engagement with this structure cost?
Executive coaching runs $300 to $1,000+ per session, with full engagements over six to twelve months typically between $7,500 and $30,000. A formal 360 process adds roughly $2,000 to $7,000. Between-session structure is usually bundled, not priced separately.
Do executives on Reddit and in peer forums think the between-session work is worth the time?
The candid consensus is that it is worth it when the work produces data someone acts on, and a waste when it is unreviewed homework. The cited time cost is under two hours a month.
Want to know what your months would actually look like?
Stratos Coaching works 1:1 with VPs, SVPs, and C-suite executives, and with Directors stepping into VP roles. Our coaches have held the seats, with 25+ years of enterprise leadership including SVP and C-suite roles in Fortune 500 companies. Every engagement begins with a free 30-minute conversation, where we walk you through the target, the observers, and the cadence.
Sources cited in this article
- Olivero, G., Bane, K. D., & Kopelman, R. E. (1997). Executive Coaching as a Transfer of Training Tool: Effects on Productivity in a Public Agency, Public Personnel Management, 26(4). Journal record.
- International Coaching Federation & PricewaterhouseCoopers. 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study ($5.34 billion global revenue, up 17 percent since 2023; 122,974 practitioners).
- Center for Executive Coaching, Certified Executive Coach (CEC) curriculum: the behavioral method, the target-behavior rule, the pearl necklace principle, the supporter feedback loop, and the Triple A framework.
Published by Stratos Coaching under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). When citing, attribute to “Stratos Coaching” with a link to stratoscoaching.com.