Executive committee coaching: giving your leadership team back its ability to decide together
Decisions reopened, trade-offs replayed, cross-functional topics with no owner: friction inside an executive committee has a human, operational and financial cost.
COROLLES® makes it visible, helps the team choose its collective priorities and measures the progress.
15 minutes per member · a 3 hour collective debrief · 3 actions followed for 3 months
per week
No commitment. You leave with a reading of your own situation.
Budget: it depends on three variables, the number of people assessed, the scope (the committee alone or a roll-out into the teams) and the length of the support after the debrief. We frame it in 30 minutes.
ESTELLE DENERVAUD
Chief Transformation Officer · COROLLES® facilitator · LeadToBloom
She is one of the people who will stand in front of your committee during the 3 hour debrief. You meet her before you decide.
Malek Bentouhami
Former Chief Data Officer ENGIE · COROLLES® facilitator · LeadToBloom
He is one of the people who will stand in front of your committee during the 3 hour debrief. You meet him before you decide.
LEADTOBLOOM COLLECTIVE
COROLLES® facilitators · LeadToBloom
Our collective is around a dozen people ready to work with your committee. You will meet one or several of them before you decide.
3h / 3 actions / 3 months
A 3 hour collective debrief, 3 actions decided by the committee, followed over 3 months.
15 min per member
50 systemic questions online. No individual interviews.
Never attributable
Answers are aggregated. Nobody sees who answered what, including you.
You may not have a people problem
A committee can bring together competent, loyal and committed directors and still lack the conditions that allow them to decide together, to say difficult things and to hold a shared course. Those conditions are what the diagnostic looks at.
01 · Decisions pushed back
Meetings follow one another and trade-offs are postponed from one session to the next.
02 · Protected perimeters
Each director defends their own perimeter, for lack of a genuinely shared view.
03 · Unspoken disagreements
The real issues stay off the table, until the moment they turn personal.
04 · Uneven ownership
Committee decisions are not relayed to the teams in the same way by everyone.
05 · Permanent urgency
Day to day pressure absorbs the structural topics and the cross-functional projects.
06 · Strategy without effect
The plan is written, it has not yet changed much in day to day practice.
Three of these six situations are enough to consume several hours a week per member. The diagnostic tells you which ones weigh most in your committee, and how differently its members experience them.
From a group of directors to a leadership collective
Three effects the committee observes for itself, from the diagnostic to the re-measurement.
See the system
A shared measurement of perception gaps across the four dimensions: DIRECTION, COLLECTIVE, CLIENTS, FRAME. The committee looks at how it works, never at its members, since no answer can be traced back to anyone.
Choose together
Three priority actions and the decision principles that make them workable. The committee chooses for itself, the facilitator holds the frame of the choice.
Measure the movement
The same diagnostic six months later, with the same 50 questions. That is what tells you whether practices have moved, and not only intentions.
“And what if the results are bad, in front of everyone?”
Every chief executive asks this before opening up the workings of their committee. Here is exactly how the process handles it.
Who sees what, and when?
The 50 answers are aggregated by the algorithm before any human reads them. Neither you, nor the facilitator, nor the members can trace an individual answer. What appears are perception gaps, not people.
Do you discover the results in the room?
No. You receive the findings beforehand, one to one with the facilitators. You know what will be shared, and how, before your committee hears it. You are supported through that phase and prepared for the debrief.
What if one member does not play along?
The diagnostic measures how dispersed perceptions are. A member who stays back or pushes against the process does not distort the result, it makes them visible. That is working material, not an incident.
What if the committee is already under tension?
That is the main use case. The process makes collective functioning discussable without reducing it to individual responsibilities, which is precisely what allows the team to talk about it and move on.
How it runs, in four steps
Assessment
01
Each member answers 50 systemic questions online across the 4 dimensions: DIRECTION, COLLECTIVE, CLIENTS, FRAME.
15 min per member
Results
02
Aggregation by the COROLLES Maturity Index®. What surfaces are the real gaps between members, not the coach’s impression.
No time required
Debrief
03
The facilitator runs a session with the committee: factual findings, a shared view of what is at play, choice of the 3 actions.
3h, the whole committee
Putting it to work
04
3 priority actions, decided by the committee itself, supported and equipped to last.
3 months
What the re-measurement showed at six months
Same diagnostic, same 50 questions, six months later. The figures below come from the engagement itself, not from a market average.
Average annual salary used in the calculation: €45,000.
3 months to embed the first three actions: clarifying roles, decision principles, follow-up of the key projects. New measurement at 6 months: committee maturity moves from 71% to 82% and the perception gaps between its members narrow. Time lost to friction falls from 6h to 3h per person per week, which is around €36,600 less in hidden costs over the year for a committee of 6 (≈ €6,000 per person).
The actions this committee decided
- Formalising values and purpose
- Defining and launching collective workstreams
- Clarifying the roles of the decision-making bodies and formalising decision principles
- Formalising the continuous improvement process and the follow-up of key projects
Why a re-measurement
At 3 months, the actions are embedded. At 6 months, the same diagnostic is run again: it is the only way to know whether the system has moved, or only the intentions. The re-measurement is offered to every committee we support.
A leadership offsite, or a COROLLES® engagement?
This is the question that comes up as soon as an offsite budget has already been approved.
What an offsite does well
It takes the committee out of the daily routine, rebuilds connection, sometimes unlocks a topic that has been dragging for months. Its raw material is what members agree to say in the room, in front of the others, and what the facilitator picks up over two days. Whatever nobody puts on the table stays outside the offsite, and comes back untouched three weeks later.
What the diagnostic adds
Fifty questions each person answers alone, in fifteen minutes, aggregated before any human reads them. The gaps between members surface without anyone having to take the risk of naming them first. The committee arrives at the offsite with its own findings already on the table.
Our answer: both, in that order
You already have an offsite planned
The diagnostic goes two to three weeks before it. The three hour debrief becomes the first half day of the offsite, and the rest of the work starts from shared findings instead of trying to bring them out in the room.
You have no offsite planned
The engagement stands on its own: fifteen minutes per member, three hours of debrief, three actions followed over three months. An offsite can come later, as a moment to embed the decisions.
When should you bring in an executive committee coach?
When decisions slow down and get replayed, when a transformation is coming (a new chief executive, a merger, a change of shareholder, a three year plan), or when tensions stop the committee from playing its collective role. There is no need to wait for a crisis: a committee that works reasonably well also gains from knowing how dispersed its perceptions are.
Does the whole committee have to take part?
Yes. The diagnostic measures perception gaps, so an absent member removes one perception from the measurement. The scope, on the other hand, stops where you decide: the committee alone, or extending to the layer below, depending on what you want to observe. It is one of the three budget variables.
Ready to look at your committee as a system?
30 minutes are enough to frame your situation, check that the process fits and give you a budget order of magnitude.
Not ready to involve your committee yet? Start with COROLLES ECHO, an estimate of what your friction costs, based on your public signals alone, with nobody to mobilise.