Executive & leadership team coaching · Minneapolis
Coaching for the seat you just took.
Every coach here held a senior operating seat before they coached anyone. Your sponsor gets progress. You get confidentiality. Nobody has to choose between the two.
Start with a chemistry call — thirty minutes, free, no sponsor present
All seven coaches →
Marguerite Okonjo-FellOperators who inherited a system, not a startICF MCC
David FerranteThe year after the deal closesICF PCC
Priya RaghunathanTeams that are individually excellent and collectively slowICF PCC
Coleman WrightLeaders being watched for the next seatICF PCC
Sofía Delgado-ReyesThe people chief who has no one to talk toICF PCC
Anders LindqvistThe first hundred and twenty daysICF ACC
01The moment you are in
People rarely arrive here wanting “development”.
They arrive because something specific has changed shape. Find yours — each one leads to what we would actually do about it, and which coach would do it.
02How an engagement runs
The Wolcott Arc, and the four things you keep
Coaching that works is boringly concrete. Here is the whole shape of it, in the order it happens, with the artifacts that come out of each part.
Week 0
Chemistry call
30 minutes, free, no sponsor in the room. Up to three coaches. You choose, not us.
Week 1
Three-way contracting
Coachee, sponsor and coach agree the shifts and the reporting line.
Weeks 2–4
Stakeholder Read
8–12 confidential interviews, themed and de-identified, read back to you first.
Months 1–6
Working sessions
Fortnightly, 90 minutes, in the North Loop or on video. Between-session contact included.
Month 3–4
Mid-point review
A three-way session against the Working Contract. Adjust or stop — both are allowed.
Month 6–9
Impact readout & close
A closing stakeholder pulse, a sponsor readout, and a plan you keep running alone.
Artifact
Stakeholder Read
8–12 interviews, themed, de-identified
Artifact
Working Contract
Three-way, one page, signed
Artifact
Behaviour Ledger
2–3 observable shifts, reviewed every session
Artifact
Impact Readout
Mid-point + close, themes only
03The coaches
Seven coaches. Every one of them ran something first.
A CFO who led two integrations. A VP of engineering who scaled a function from nineteen to a hundred and forty. A chief people officer, a general manager, a country manager, a director of talent, and an operations SVP who founded the practice because her own three coaches could not follow her problem.
ICF MCC
Marguerite Okonjo-Fell
Founding partner & head of coaching
Before coachingSVP Operations, an 11,000-staff Midwest health system
ICF PCC
David Ferrante
Partner
Before coachingCFO of a public industrial distributor; led two post-deal integrations
ICF PCC
Priya Raghunathan
Senior coach · lead, team practice
Before coachingVP Engineering at a logistics software company (140 engineers)
ICF PCC
Coleman Wright
Senior coach
Before coachingGeneral Manager, consumer packaged goods — fourteen years of P&L
ICF PCC
Sofía Delgado-Reyes
Coach
Before coachingChief People Officer, a 4,000-room hospitality group
ICF ACC
Anders Lindqvist
Coach · transitions practice
Before coachingCountry Manager, Nordics, for a medical devices manufacturer
ICF ACC
Ruth Baptiste
Coach · cohort programmes
Before coachingDirector of Talent at a regional bank
04Signature tool
Which of the seven should you meet?
Chemistry is real, and it is not a euphemism for liking someone. Some leaders need a coach who will sit in silence; some need one who will interrupt. Answer five questions and we will shortlist three — then you meet all three, free, before anything is signed.
You choose the coach. We never assign one. And if it is not right, you can change once in the first two months, at no cost and with no explanation required.
Coach Match
Five questions. It shortlists three of our seven coaches and tells you why each one. Nothing is submitted and nobody is emailed.
I thought I needed strategy help. What I needed was to stop answering questions that were not addressed to me.VP Operations, industrial distribution — after six months
05The boundary
What your sponsor sees, written down before you start
The most common reason a leader holds back in coaching is a belief about reporting that is almost never true. So we state it in the three-way contracting session, out loud, with the sponsor in the room.
What the sponsor receives
Agreed with you, in advance
What the sponsor never receives
Whatever the pressure
The only two exceptions, stated honestly: A risk of serious harm to you or to another person. Legal compulsion — a court order or a regulatory obligation we cannot lawfully resist. Neither has arisen in fourteen years, and if either did you would hear it from your coach before anybody heard it from us.
06Signature tool
Everyone in this market hides their fees. Here is a calculator instead.
Build the shape of the engagement you are considering and see the whole cost, the session count and exactly how many times your sponsor is in the room. No email gate, no “contact us for pricing”.
Engagement Designer
Build the shape of an engagement and see the fee, the session count and the sponsor touchpoints. The arithmetic is the same one we would put in a proposal.
07Case dossiers
Three engagements, in enough detail to judge them
Anonymised at the organisation level, quoted by the sponsor who commissioned the work rather than the leader who received it — which is the honest way round.
Dossier 01 — Logistics & distribution
Two commercial teams, one leader, eleven months
A $2.1bn specialty distributor · Executive coaching (SVP) + leadership team coaching
The acquisition closed in March. By June the combined commercial organisation was making every significant decision twice, and the SVP running it was trusted completely by neither half.
Dossier 02 — Healthcare
A first-time Chief Nursing Officer, arriving after a bad exit
A 900-bed health system · New-leader transitions (First 120 Days) with Stakeholder Read
She was internally promoted into a role whose previous holder had been removed in circumstances everybody knew about and nobody would describe.
Dossier 03 — Technology & software
A founder who knew he was the constraint
A Series-D logistics software company · Founder to CEO + leadership team coaching
Two hundred and forty people, a new institutional board, and a founder who was still personally approving pricing exceptions.
08Team practice
A leadership team is a system, not a group of people who like each other
Most teams that call us describe a trust problem. It is usually a jurisdiction problem: nobody is sure who decides, so consensus is reached in the room and quietly re-opened on Wednesday.
- We sit in two of your actual meetings before designing anything
- Decision rights get written down and published before any trust work
- Every member gets a private 1:1 thread with a different coach
- The team drafts its own operating agreement — we do not hand you one
09The practice, in numbers
Small on purpose, and we turn work down
Roughly one enquiry in five we decline — usually because what has been described is a structural problem wearing a coaching costume, and saying so early is cheaper for everyone.
10Insights
Written by the coaches, about the parts nobody explains
What your sponsor actually sees
The single most common reason a leader holds back in coaching is a belief about reporting that is almost never true. Here is the boundary, written down.
The change you make in week three is the one you pay for in month seven
New leaders are under enormous pressure to demonstrate. Most of them demonstrate too early, visibly, and with thin information.
Why your leadership team agrees in the room and not on Monday
Teams that cannot disagree in the meeting will disagree everywhere else. The fix is almost never a trust exercise.
The library
Everything we have written
- What your sponsor actually sees
- The change you make in week three is the one you pay for in month seven
- Why your leadership team agrees in the room and not on Monday
- Integration plans track systems. Nobody plans for two leadership teams.
- How to choose a coach, and what a chemistry call is for
Chemistry call
Start with a conversation, not a contract
Thirty minutes with up to three coaches, free, with no sponsor in the room. You choose who you work with — we never assign.