CEO Coaching: sparring for the people who have the final say.

Loneliness at the top is not a cliché

The leadership team expects direction, the owners expect results, the supervisory board expects composure. Any doubt you voice in one of those circles is interpreted immediately — as weakness, as a signal, as grounds for questions. So you keep it to yourself. In CEO coaching that effect disappears: I am not part of your organisation, I do not judge you, and I have no stake in the outcome of your decision — only in its quality.

What we work on

• Decisions with consequences: selling, acquiring, a site, key people — sharpening the question, playing the options through honestly, understanding your own hesitation.
• Owners and supervisory board: managing expectations, withstanding conflict between shareholders, stating your position clearly without escalating.
• The first 100 days: what to settle first in a new role and what can wait. Whom you need, whom you listen to, where you commit.
• Building the leadership team: who belongs at the table, who no longer does, how you say so — and how you lead people who were peers yesterday.
• Your own impact: how the organisation reads you, and whether that matches the reading you intend.

Sparring, not mentoring

Mentoring means someone with more experience tells you what they would do in your place. That can be valuable, but it has a weakness — it is their solution for their company in their time. Sparring works the other way round. You are the expert on your company; I ask the questions nobody asks in daily business, hold on to the contradictions and bring in perspectives that are not accessible from where you sit.

My 33 years as managing director and Group CTO ensure those questions land — not that I know your answers. I built a company myself, sold it, and then reported inside group structures. I know what a shareholders’ meeting feels like when more than numbers are at stake.

What CEO coaching looks like

We start with a first conversation in which you assess whether you want to work with me — and I assess whether I can be useful to you. What usually follows is a package of five to ten sessions of 50 to 90 minutes, every two to four weeks, in Vienna, in Leopoldsdorf near Vienna, or by video. Each session typically prepares one concrete decision or one concrete conversation; at the next one we look at what came of it.

Coaching can also be deliberately short: one decision, a few sessions, done. The general framework is described on the Executive Coaching page.

Confidential — including towards your own company

For CEOs, the company they run is usually the one paying. That changes nothing: the content stays between us, and there are no reports to shareholders, supervisory board or HR unless you explicitly want otherwise. What the company knows is the agreed goal and scope — nothing more.

If your topic is less about you as a person and more about how the executive team works together, leadership team supervision is the better format. And if you need someone to close a gap operationally rather than ask questions: interim management.