For the better part of two decades, the flow of leadership ideas across the Atlantic ran in one direction. American business schools defined the curriculum. American consulting firms exported the frameworks. American executive coaching, with its credentialing bodies and packaged engagements, set the global template. European boards, for the most part, imported what arrived.
That direction is now reversing. Increasingly, sophisticated American boards — particularly in private equity, family-owned mid-cap businesses, and the more thoughtful end of the venture-backed ecosystem — are studying how European executive coaching actually works. What they are finding is a model that runs almost opposite to the American norm, and produces results that are quietly outperforming.
The American Default: Coaching as Service Delivery
In the United States, executive coaching has scaled as a service-delivery model. The dominant providers operate at volume, with standardised frameworks, defined session counts, and measurable behavioural outcomes. Engagement length is typically six months to a year. The coach is often allocated by an HR function. The work focuses on adjusting specific behaviours — communication style, executive presence, stakeholder management — and the engagement closes when those adjustments are demonstrated.
This model has genuine strengths. It is auditable, scalable, and produces measurable improvement on the dimensions it targets. For mid-level executives moving into senior roles, it works well. The trouble appears at the top, where the variables that actually determine effectiveness are not behavioural in the surface sense. They are psychological in the deeper sense.
The European Alternative: Coaching as Long Relationship
The European centre of gravity has moved in a different direction. The most consequential European practitioners operate as long-term thinking partners to a small number of senior leaders, often over years rather than months. The relationship is not framed as service delivery. It is framed as accountability. Arvid Buit, founder of TRUE Leadership — one of the few European master coaches simultaneously accredited by ICF, NOBCO, EMCC and APECS, and trained in the Marshall Goldsmith methodology — works with chief executives and chairs across Europe in engagements that often run multiple years. The work is not bounded by session count or curriculum. It is bounded by the leader’s continued willingness to look at themselves honestly.
The methodology Buit uses, set out in his book Let’s Talk Leadership, moves a leader through a seven-step process: measuring reality, comparing reality with perspective, designing behaviour through triggers, building communication, fuelling discipline, finding meaning, and ultimately developing the capacity to inspire others. The framework is rigorous, but the engagement itself is relational. The relationship — what Buit calls Critical Friendship — is the actual instrument of change.
Why This Matters for Boards
Why are American boards now studying this approach? The honest answer is that they are watching the limits of the curriculum-based model become visible. Chief executives who completed every recommended programme are still failing in predictable patterns: rigidity under board pressure, inability to hand over, gradual deterioration of senior team trust, slow erosion of decision quality.
The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance research on CEO tenure indicates that the variables most predictive of long-term CEO effectiveness are not technical or strategic. They are psychological: capacity to integrate dissent, ability to remain steady under sustained ambiguity, willingness to change one’s mind without losing authority. These are not curriculum outcomes. They are the outputs of long, honest relationships with people qualified to hold them accountable.
The Three Practices Worth Importing
Three practices from the European model are worth particular attention from American boards considering how they fund senior leadership development.
The first is engagement length. Engagements of three to six months can produce behavioural change. Engagements of three to five years can produce identity change. The latter is what most distinguishes leaders who endure from those who eventually fail. Boards that fund only short engagements are systematically under-investing in their most senior people.
The second is coach selection. The European model typically requires the leader, not the HR function, to choose their coach. The reasoning is straightforward: a relationship in which the leader has been allocated to someone they did not select rarely produces the level of trust required for serious work. Allowing the leader to choose — and to change — is structural to depth.
The third is methodology. Surface-level coaching methodologies produce surface-level results. Boards should ask, directly, what psychological theory underpins the coach’s work. If the answer is vague, the coaching will be vague. The most effective European practitioners can articulate their methodology in detail, draw on attachment theory, depth psychology, and stakeholder-centred change processes, and explain precisely how they expect change to occur.
The Quiet Convergence
The American and European models are not destined to remain separate. The most thoughtful boards in the United States are quietly shifting toward longer engagements, leader-selected coaches, and more rigorous methodological scrutiny. The European centre of gravity, meanwhile, is becoming more accessible to international clients as the leading European practitioners build practices that operate across borders.
What is emerging is a more honest model of executive coaching globally — one that recognises the difference between developing a manager and developing a chief executive, and that funds the latter accordingly. American boards that move early on this convergence will, in retrospect, look as if they made an obvious choice. Boards that move late will discover that the cost of staying with the old model was higher than they realised.
